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The culminating effect of these images provides additional support for the three
themes that emerged to create the dominant frame in CNN’s breaking news coverage.
Seeing Americans coming together to rescue and help each other showed unity. Seeing
the devastation and magnitude of the attacks in such arousing ways would support an
emotional response to the notion that when one is attacked, one retaliates. Finally, on a
different level, seeing the devastation and “horror” of the attacks gave unspoken
justification to the retaliatory response. Perhaps CNN anchor Aaron Brown noted this
most strongly when he said, while looking at a shot of the smoking New York City
skyline in the evening hours, “just take a moment and try and absorb, not with the facts,
not with the pieces of information, but just look at that scene and think about what
happened today. There were 50,000 or so people who came to work on a beautiful, late
summer morning here in New York in those two towers that are now gone. These are
people with families, with children, people who had offices and have them no more,
people whose lives are forever changed.”
Thematic Clusters
Perhaps one of the most striking and significant elements of CNN’s early
coverage of September 11 was its reliance on government sources to try to make sense of
the terrorist attacks. Eyewitnesses, journalists and news producers were the primary
sources used to describe events and add verbal detail to the images. But, CNN relied
almost exclusively on current and former government officials to provide interpretation
of the days events and to effectively frame what had happened and what would happen as
a result. When we combine the keywords, sentences, images and sources from the first
12 hours of CNN’s coverage, several thematically reinforcing clusters of judgments
Convention