ABSTRACT
Desperate for news on the morning of September 11, I twiddled my radio dial and hit upon a station that was relaying accounts from the BBC. They reported events as an attack upon the main symbols of global U.S. financial and military power. This was such an obvious interpretation that I scarcely remarked upon it. But when I tuned in to the U.S. media, I noticed that no one took that line. In New York, understandably enough, September 11 was represented as a local disaster of horrific magnitude with unfathomable causes and unthinkably tragic personal and local implications. Nationally, the media immediately followed President Bush in construing it as an attack upon “freedom,” “American values,” and the “American way of life.” An amazing consensus was quickly forged throughout the nation on that point to the exclusion of almost anything else. But when I switched back to the international media, the BBC’s phrasing was far from aberrant or unusual. There were, clearly, different local, national, and international ways of understanding events.
