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Jewish Solidarity and Veiled Agenda: An Ethnographic Content Analysis of the 700 Club
Program’s Broadcasts Following the September 11th Attacks
INTRODUCTION
On September 13th of 2001, the 700 Club’s Pat Robertson was discussing with
the Reverend Jerry Falwell how to understand the events of two days earlier and what the
appropriate Christian response should be. It was at this point that Falwell unleashed his
now infamous shopping list of those Americans who, because of their liberal social
agendas, had angered God and hence shared culpability for the tragedy. Especially
notable was Falwell’s phrasing when he stated that God had “lifted his curtain of
protection” because of America’s sins: the word “apocalypse,” while often translated to
mean “revelation,” originally comes from the Greek word meaning “the lifting of the
veil” (Gibbs, 2002). Although both Falwell and Robertson attempted to mitigate the
damage following the backlash that came from a cross-section of American society
(including the offices of Republican President George W. Bush), this one event served as
a key indicator that there is a particular perspective framing a deeply imbedded set of
subtexts consistently weaving their way through the program, especially in the wake of
the September 11th attacks.
With this in mind, I sought to analyze a sample of programs just following the
attacks to discover what those texts might be, how they were framed, and why.
BACKGROUND ON 700 CLUB & PAT ROBERTSON
The 700 Club began regular programming in 1966 as the flagship program of the
Christian Broadcasting Network (later under the auspices of the Family Channel, which
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