The Selling of 9/11 argues that the marketing and commodification of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reveal the contradictory processes by which consumers in the United States (and around the world) use, communicate, and construct national identity and their sense of national belonging through cultural and symbolic goods. Contributors illuminate these processes and make important connections between myths of nation, practices of mourning, theories of trauma, and the politics of post-9/11 consumer culture. Their essays take critical stock of the role that consumer goods, media and press outlets, commercial advertising, marketers and corporate public relations have played in shaping cultural memory of a national tragedy.
“Better and more comprehensive than any prior account. . . . Those of us who lived through those days will find the book cathartic; those rising generations who were too young to remember 9/11, or who weren’t yet born, will find it revelatory.” — John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and author of The Ground Truth “With his rigorous research and moral clarity, Mitchell Zuckoff has provided us with an invaluable service. He has deepened our understanding of what happened on 9/11 and recorded the voices of the victims and the survivors. What’s more, he has ensured that we never forget.” —David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon Years in the making, this spellbinding, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting narrative is an unforgettable portrait of 9/11. This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerizing, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day. In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about the attacks, the victims, and their families. After further years of meticulous reporting, Zuckoff has filled Fall and Rise with voices of the lost and the saved. The result is an utterly gripping book, filled with intimate stories of people most affected by the events of that sunny Tuesday in September: an out-of-work actor stuck in an elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center; the heroes aboard Flight 93 deciding to take action; a veteran trapped in the inferno in the Pentagon; the fire chief among the first on the scene in sleepy Shanksville; a team of firefighters racing to save an injured woman and themselves; and the men, women, and children flying across country to see loved ones or for work who suddenly faced terrorists bent on murder. Fall and Rise will open new avenues of understanding for everyone who thinks they know the story of 9/11, bringing to life—and in some cases, bringing back to life—the extraordinary ordinary people who experienced the worst day in modern American history. Destined to be a classic, Fall and Rise will move, shock, inspire, and fill hearts with love and admiration for the human spirit as it triumphs in the face of horrifying events.
Jhally and Earp (both of the Media Education Foundation) originally conducted the 25 interviews collected here for an eponymous documentary on the use of the fear caused by the September 11th attacks to launch longstanding neoconservative plans to solidify and extend American global hegemony through military force.
For a principled refutation of the 9/11 propaganda myth in all its parts, Tarpley's work is indispensable. This new, fifth edition adds a significant new dimension. Tarpley's documentation of a comprehensive array of 9/11 drills may prove as revolutionary as the thesis of controlled demolition - perhaps even more so. Many people have been unable to see that 9/11 was a false flag. They may seem immune to physical facts like the free-fall speed of the towers, as they take refuge in a lack of engineering qualifications. No math skills are needed to grasp the more familiar, common-sense fact that an act that is rehearsed is also staged. Moreover, when we learn how drills are essential to conduit such operations, we can recognize many types of false flags, such as the London bombings, and not only building collapses. Finally, wider public awareness of the dangerous workings of drills could help prevent terror operations, by making them too difficult to carry out with impunity. The authoritative work on 9/11 and state-sponsored false-flag terrorism. 9/11 Synthetic Terror is the only book to present a working model for the event - a network of moles, patsies, paramilitary pros, privatized intelligence assets and corrupt media corporations. We see how this enormous provocation was successfully executed and exploited as war propaganda. This new, fifth edition reveals a whole new dimension of explosive facts for the first time: the enormous array of drills in which the US defense apparatus rehearsed every aspect of the 9/11 operation. Author Webster Tarpley presents the corpus of 9/11 research - such as the controlled demolition of the three WTC towers - from the perspective of a veteran intelligence expert and historian. The exploit is placed in the geopolitical context of oligarchy and imperialism - in the tradition of precedents such as the Gunpowder Plot, the USS Maine, the Strategy of Tension, and other historically decisive state-sponsored terror subterfuges.
This volume investigates the perception of threat, with particular regard to the roles, functions, and agencies of various types of media. With a focus on the profound impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 on the US-American political, social, and cultural order, the chapters reach from the early days after the attacks up to the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump. An international team of contributors analyze how the perceived threats and their subsequent representations changed during this period and what part different forms of media - media institutions, media technologies, and media formats - played within these transformations. Media theoretical perspectives are thus combined with historical approaches to examine the "re-ordering" of the nation, the state, and society proposed in an increasingly converging, multimodal, and networked media environment. This book’s focus on the interrelation between Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and American Studies makes it an indispensable landmark for fields such as Historical Research, Media Theory, Narratology, and Popular Culture Studies.
This book analyzes the narratives and news coverage of 9/11 across ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News, arguing that television coverage shaped the cultural meaning, collective memory, and language of 9/11 in ways that continue to resonate throughout American culture.
