ABSTRACT
The horrors of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon left indelible images in the minds of everyone who observed them on television. While the impact of the visual and verbal framing of the events in televised coverage has received significant scholarly attention, thus far researchers have largely ignored the music used to accompany those images. 1 To a certain extent, this exclusion is not surprising. The very invisibility (unhearability?) of music in media contexts, to consumers as well as researchers, is a significant part of its power to subliminally shape public opinion. The question then arises, how might television news music have had an impact upon viewers of network coverage of 9/11? And, perhaps more significantly, how did that music and its impact differ from network to network, from country to country?
