A sham renaissance?: 9/11 and the authority of newspaper journalism

The terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001, have been seen by many as restoring journalism s authority as a global civic information mechanism, rolling back encroaching forms of so-called trivialisation. Testing this hypothesis against the ways in which national and metropolitan newspapers in Australia framed their initial reports of 9/11 on the front pages of September 12, 2001, issues, it becomes apparent that no such change occurred. While Australian newspapers have different social bases from those in the United Kingdom, and a less pronounced dichotomy between tabloid and broadsheet titles, their responses to the "what-a-stary" of 9/11 demonstrated a similar, if more conservative, adherence to the lexical and visual forms of contemporary media. In their presentation of 9/11, newspapers in Australia, no less than in Britain, relied on practices which have characterised journalism for the past two decades, drawing predominantly on contemporary constucts of "the popular" rather than a mythic "goodjournalism "; privileging visual impact and decentreing traditional forms afjournalistic craft