Teaching Tragedy: Media History Courses and 9/11

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, media historians have grappled with how to teach the memory and continuing legacy of 9/11 through the journalism produced on that tragic day. Not unlike previous generations of teacherscholars, journalism history professors face the unique challenge of framing conversations about 9/11 in both respectful and complicating terms, challenging media narratives while also centering the value of journalism during national tragedies. And yet a typical media-history course ends at some point around or just after Watergate, a generation before 9/11. The ambitious among us may push on into the 1980s and 1990s. But most stop before the events of September 11, 2001, during which even our seniors and first-year graduate students were young children, toddlers, or, in some cases, infants. Starting last year, many of our first-year students will have been born long afterward. But there is so much to cover in a media-history class, especially if you start “at the beginning” with the American War for Independence (presuming that your course is about American media history). For some time, I have resigned myself to not getting there—after all, in history departments, surveys of U.S. history are routinely broken up into two or even three courses. But whether you teach an advanced group of students, first-year students, those in a dedicated media-history class, or in some other kind of class with a media history unit, including 9/11 is not just a wise investment of time, but critical for understanding the rest of this century.