Our investigation of media coverage of the commemoration of 9/11 is focused on the content analysis of 293 online items from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, The New York Post and The New York Times. We coded all the items covered from September 9 through September 15, 2011, when all five newspapers published 9/11-related articles. The entire class participated in coding every published item from those dates, which include both written journalism and a very small percentage of videos (22 out of 322 items, or 6.8%, for The Wall Street Journal, and 6 out of 104 items, or 5.8%, for The New York Post). Although videos provide us with a curious look at a possible future for newspapers, the convergence of media, and the increasing competition from TV, cable and web, we have made no further differentiation from print media. In addition, our focused on online versions of these newspapers indicates the increasing role of the Internet as the medium of choice for newsreaders.

While collecting news items, our class discussed the issues whose prevalence became apparent, proposing hypotheses and shaping them as our coding process advanced. Our research makes use of Grounded theory principles, a pragmatic approach that allows us to adjust our ideas on collective memory and the representation of 9/11 as we developed a coding system.  Grounded theory is a most useful methodology that allows us to generate theory from the data, ensuring that our hypotheses and final results are, so to speak, grounded in our observations of actual data.

Our initial survey covered the entire month of September 2011, thus providing us with a comprehensive view of the media increasing focus on the issue as the anniversary approached, and its decline after the commemorative events. While the following graph only shows the Wall Street Journal coverage during September 2011, it is representative of the coverage of the other newspapers, with a rather sharp buildup that reached its peak on September 11 and September 12, 2011, followed by a sharp decline in the following days and weeks.

Our research then focused on the collected items from September 9 through September 15, which were the common dates for all the newspapers; our coding would only cover those dates, a decision made to avoid disparities that could arise from uneven coverage in the outer dates. The full dates of coverage and the coded articles follow:

Next, our discussion moved to the categories that define the prevalent themes in the coverage. Our coding online form, developed with the help of Google Docs, would help us place the items in its context within the newspapers themselves and compare it with similar data from the others.

Some of the categories may be more relevant to current news-reading habits than others: for example, while newspapers classify articles as “national” or “local” news, reading online is quite a different experience from splitting sections of a printed newspaper at breakfast time.

The “Media Bias” category is the most overt question on the issue of political preferences, but it isn’t the only one. It can be argued that, by choosing to focus on some Themes and ignoring others, media is selling context and defining which approach is relevant to the analysis of a story. This is the basis for the next two questions, “Themes” and “Keywords.” On the other hand, “Media Bias” will give us an assessment of the politicization of the media and whether it can address 9/11-related issues in a non-partisan way.

Our selection of keywords to analyze was assisted by the use of Google’s Wordle, an online tool that reveals keyword metadata by simply entering text (in this case, from one article of our choosing) into an online box. The results are non-scientific, but nonetheless revealing.

Source: 9/11: Did the U.S. Overreact? Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2011.

The core of evidence to prove my hypothesis is actually found in the Themes and Keywords questions. The prevailing Theme of “National Politics” and “Economics and Finance” would indicate that the media addresses geopolitical issues; in a similar way, keywords “Foreign Policy” and “Democrats, Republicans” are also indicators of media coverage focused on the causes and consequences of 9/11. Conversely, the themes “Commemoration Ceremony,” “Hero” and “Victims” are more closely associated with civil religion and the canonization of the casualties; keywords “Anniversary, Remembrance, Honor” indicate issues related to civil religion, and “Jewish, Christian, Islam, Mosque, Temple, Synagogue, Church, Other Religion” suggest a prevalence of religious issues. It is important to note that the answers to these two central questions were not mutually exclusive.

The last two questions answer questions associated with journalism analysis: “Appeal” focuses on the evidence offered to the readers, while “Orientation” refers to the overall outlook of the stories. Commemorative journalism is usually ripe with expressions of emotions that may reflect feelings of loss and grievance of both writers and the public, and a lack of quantitative evidence is to be expected. It is also improbable that emotionally laden journalism may have a “neutral” orientation, but “logically-appealing” journalism isn’t the exclusive domain of remembrance stories, so these categories are less likely to answer questions related to the prevailing Themes.