ABSTRACT

The ‘9-11’ attacks of 2001 on the World Trade Towers in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington, and the ensuing ‘war on terrorism’, at least as construed by the United States, constituted a significant opportunity for media scholarship to reconsider certain pre-existing frames of thought or paradigms of its discipline. I shall consider five principal outcomes of this opportunity, namely the implications for (1) the ‘propaganda model’ as a tool for explaining the behaviour of news media in Western democracies; (2) ‘objectivity as strategic ritual’ and whether standard journalistic methodologies provide tolerably good service; (3) discourses of globalization, glocalization and hybridity for understanding the media in a global context, as opposed to earlier discourses of imperialism; (4) presumptions as to the benign intent of modern government; and (5) the prospects for media analysis as a lone discipline.