'On September 11th, the first anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, ABC television in the US will re-show the unforgettable video of the planes crashing into the twin towers.
Nothing remarkable about this, you might think - and yet, astonishing as it may seem, this will be the first time the network has screened these images for almost a full year, because ABC news management imposed a blanket ban on re-use of the footage a couple of days after the attack, and is lifting its ban this month only for one day.
This, of course, was only one among countless thousands of editorial decisions made in the minutes, hours and days after the attack, but its dramatic simplicity is only skin-deep: the news events themselves, and the way in which they were covered, were of a complexity that has still to be fully explored.
These two books, from quite different perspectives, offer rich material for study and discussion. Sandra Silberstein is a linguist, and she takes a scalpel to the utterances of actors great and small in this huge drama - and also uses it to expose the grammar of television, a medium which came into its own most powerfully in the immediate aftermath of the onslaught (radio doesn't feature at all, oddly, which is a powerful reminder of the fascination that the goggle-box has for academics and pundits alike).
Some of the themes she addresses are already well-known: the symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the media; the ideological battle for the control of language in order to shape public perceptions of "reality" (and, in this case, to justify military action); and the stereotyping of intellectual dissent as unpatriotic. Her case histories in each of these areas are deftly chosen, and should be required reading for anyone still naïve enough to think that the media always tells it as it is.
Her two most fascinating chapters, however, deal with presidential utterances and what she describes as "the commercialisation of 9/11". Her analysis of the twists and turns of George W. Bush's speechifying reminds us of the extraordinary attention that goes into the production of these critically important discourses by teams of highly intelligent wordsmiths. The only thing that would be more fascinating would be to have access to the successive drafts of one of these key speeches so that the final product could be more systematically dissected: it was one of these very speech-writers, it is rumoured, who persuaded the president to drop the word "revenge" and substitute "justice".
Her chapter on the commercialisation of 9/11 is, however, even more chilling. She dissects, sympathetically but firmly, the well-meaning but morally confused campaign of the American Ad Council to heal the hurt within American society and promote inter-racial harmony, and points out that it was followed by an orgy of patriotism sponsored by the manufacturers of consumer goods. "The Ad Council's campaign had begun with the premise that Americans needed each other. The calendar year ended with another kind of campaign, one designed to once again persuade Americans that they needed things."
This is also one of the key points in Zelizer and Allan's compilation, which has the added bonus of giving us studies of UK as well as US media.
Many of the chapters, each fascinating in its own way, point to the same conclusion: the mass media, and television in particular, are being suborned by market forces to the point where the frequently superb initial coverage of 9/11 served more to remind devotees of good journalism about past and fading glories rather than to instil hope that this would be the pattern for the future.
Jay Rosen, in particular, zeroes in mercilessly on the hypocrisy of one network boss, a man renowned for his total hostility to his own news organisation and for his skill at cutting journalistic budgets, who re-discovered (and adopted as his own) Ted Koppel's virtues in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, having unsuccessfully attempted to fire him a few weeks earlier.
Even where things are ostensibly better - as in the BBC - the phenomenon aptly described by Simon Cottle as "producer agoraphobia" comes into play to exclude or marginalise commentary that strays outside the consensus. After one edition of Questions and Answers, he points out, Greg Dyke felt obliged to apologise publicly for articulate, and entirely arguable, anti-American sentiments expressed by an anonymous member of the audience, in spite of the fact that she had been skilfully choked off by David Dimbleby.
Some of these essays are better than others at exploring, not only the way in which some news organisations behaved, but also the often under-stated differences between print and electronic media on the one hand, and between tabloid and broadsheet media on the other. This is not to tar all tabloids with the same brush: some of them - the Daily Mirror in Britain, for example - redeemed the honour of the genre with some powerful, incisive and courageous coverage. But even among those newspapers which excelled, there was also the tendency, as Michael Schudson put it, for journalism to turn towards "a prose of solidarity rather than a prose of information . . . "
In one way or another, however, many of these essays underline the central dilemma of the news media in today's world, and the near-impossibility of finding an answer to it. How can serious journalism make enough money to survive, without in the process ceasing to be serious? Will journalism be swallowed up in "media"?
Here is Schudson again, in words which underline (although he does not draw the moral) an important argument for public service broadcasting: "The reform of journalism will only occur when news organisations are disengaged from the global entertainment and information industries that increasingly contain them . . . The creation of an independent press will require both judicial and legislative action so that journalism can earn enough profit to make it attractive but release it as well from slavish dependence on the laws of the market."
Pie in the sky? Either way, 9/11 and its aftermath is an unmistakeable milestone on the road towards whatever new world of journalism, brave or otherwise, lies ahead.
The overall message, however, is still bleak. It is significant that public service radio and television in the US doesn't even get a look-in, so all-powerful are the commercial networks. And while 9/11 showed in relation to these networks that - in Rosen's words - "news is instantly cured of entertainment values when there is something extremely serious afoot", it is also depressingly clear that the threshold above which serious news will find airtime worthy of its significance is being daily raised.
War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11. By Sandra Silberstein. Routledge, 172 pp. £16.99 sterling
Journalism after September 11. Edited by Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan. Routledge, 268 pp. £14.99 sterling
John Horgan is professor of journalism at Dublin City University, and author of Irish Media: A Critical History since 1922