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On September 10-11, 2006, ABC/Disney aired a two-part movie titled The Path to 9/11 to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The film won an Emmy award in 2007 for editing and was nominated for six others. While drawing its emotional underpinning from the attacks themselves, most of the film is devoted to what are presented as key events leading up to the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and in particular to the activities of an antiterrorism task force that included FBI agent and terrorism expert John O'Neill (whom the docudrama casts as its central heroic character, although it has multiple heroes). Earlier events explored inconsiderable detail include the bomb ing of the WTC in 1993, the pursuit and arrest of alleged terrorists in various parts of the world, the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the struggle of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban, the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, and unsuccessful attempts to kill Osama Bin Laden prior to the 9/11 attacks. The production devotes considerable attention to conflicts among U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic officials in the time period between the first WTC bombing and the collapse of the towers in September, 2001.
A CONVERGENCE OF THEORIES
A number of complementary theories help to explain the profound appeal of The Path to 9/11. The first is what James W. Carey calls the "ritual" view of communication, which "is directed. . .toward the maintenance of society in time, not [toward] the act of imparting informati on but [to ward] the rep re s en ta tion of shared beliefs"; communication is "the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action" (18-19).
The second is John Fiske and John Hartley's treatment of television as "bardic." In the bardic view, television does not merely recount events (be they factual or fictional) but (in the tradition of bards) offers meaning that is derived at least in part from "a process which offers myths with which we are already familiar and seeks to convince us that these myths are appropriate to their context" (112). Because it "constantly strives...