179

“The World Changed Today”: Agenda-Setting and

Policy Change in the Wake of the September 11
Terrorist Attacks
Thomas A. Birkland
Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy
University at Albany, SUNY

Abstract
The September 11 terrorist attacks constitute a focusing event that have been said to have “changed
everything” in America. However, the literature on focusing events, policy change, and the policy process
suggests that the “windows of opportunity” opened by focusing events like the September 11 attacks do
not automatically equate to policy change. This paper considers whether and to what extent the agenda
and policies have changed as a result of the attacks. While the events of September 11 provided the
impetus for change, the threat of terrorism was already well established in the policy stream, and Sep-
tember 11 only threw open the window of opportunity for policy change based, in large part, on preex-
isting ideas; many of these ideas were enacted. And in the case of aviation security, some innovation is
evident in the area of cockpit security.

The September 11 terrorist attacks constitute a historical focusing event

(Birkland, 1997; Kingdon, 1995) that is roundly said to have “changed everything”
in America.1 Yet, less than a year after the terrorist attacks, media attention to the
terrorist attacks was joined by the corporate governance scandals, the sharp drop
in stock values, and the president’s and Congress’s reaction to these events. Exten-
sive research on the media and agenda-setting have shown that this effect is pre-
dictable; it is well known that legislative, regulatory, media, and public attention
to issues, no matter how “big” the issues are, will fade over time, as “newer” news
displaces the old issues and as institutions tackle the newly revealed problems of
the day.
This decaying interest in problems and issues that were once very high on the
agenda is seen among the public, the news media, and policymakers as well. As
John Kingdon (1995) notes, the “window of opportunity” for policy change can be
fleeting. In light of the sometimes overheated post-September 11 rhetoric on the
inevitability of change, juxtaposed with our knowledge that policymaking some-
times stalls or falters even after the “alarmed discovery” of problems that we failed
to fully appreciate (Downs, 1972), it is worthwhile to assess whether and to what
extent the September 11 terrorist attacks have had a substantial influence on
agendas and on the substance of post-September 11 policy in the United States.
Birkland (1997) argues that policy process theory, particularly that focusing on
agenda-setting (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Cobb & Elder, 1983; Kingdon, 1995),
suggests that, if the September 11 attacks are similar to other sudden “triggering
events” or “focusing events,” the September 11 attacks will focus attention on a
range of issues related to the September 11 attacks, claims will be made that poli-
cies designed to prevent or mitigate such attacks have failed, and new policies will
emerge to address the problems revealed by the attack. While it is indisputable that
the September 11 attacks were very important—and the data I present will reflect
Review of Policy Research, Volume 21, Number 2 (2004)
© 2004 by The Policy Studies Association. All rights reserved.
180 Thomas A. Birkland

this—the larger question I address is whether the September 11 attacks were so

profound and important that they led to substantive policy change and innovation.
As Kingdon makes clear, windows of opportunity opened by focusing events do not
automatically equate to policy change. Birkland has extended on this work to show
that rather similar events—earthquakes and hurricanes, for example—can trigger
rather different policy decisions.

Agenda-Setting and Focusing Events

A considerable amount of research has been done by social scientists on the
meaning and nature of the various levels of the news media and policy agendas
(Baumgartner & Jones, 1991, 1993; Birkland, 1997, 1998; Cobb, Ross, & Ross,
1976; Cobb & Elder, 1983; Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988; Kim, Shaor-Ghaffari, &
Gustainis, 1990; Light, 1982; O’Toole, 1989; Schattschneider, 1960/1975; Stone,
1989).
An agenda is a collection of the elements of public problems to which at least
some of the public and governmental officials are actively attentive. These elements
can include problems, understandings of causes, interpretations of symbols, sug-
gested solutions to problems, and strategic depictions of problems. An agenda can
be as concrete as a list of bills that are before a legislature, but can also includes a
series of beliefs about the existence and magnitude of problems and how they
should be addressed by government, the private sector, nonprofit organizations, or
through joint action by some or all of these institutions.
Agendas exist at all levels of government and society, and can be categorized
based on the extent to which an institution is prepared to make an ultimate deci-
sion to enact and implement or to reject particular policies. All of these issues and
ideas are contained in the “systemic” agenda, which contains any idea that could
possibly be considered by participants in the policy process, within the limits
created by the constitutional or social order. From there, issues move into the insti-
tutional agenda in official bodies, and a small fraction of those issues and ideas can
move to the decision agenda for enactment and implementation as policy.2
No society or political system has the institutional capacity to address all possi-
ble alternatives to all possible problems (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988) or competing
interpretations of the same problem (Lawrence & Birkland, 2000) that arise at any
one time. Even when an issue gains attention, as through a focusing event, groups
must fight to ensure that their depiction of the issue remains in the forefront, and
that their preferred approaches to the problem are those that are most actively
considered. They do so for the reasons noted by E.E. Schattschneider (1960/1975):
the group that successfully describes a problem will also be the one that defines the
solutions to it, thereby prevailing in policy debate. At the same time, groups will
fight to keep issues off the agenda to avoid having their interests damaged or their
preferred policy initiatives derailed (Cobb & Ross, 1997).
John Kingdon (1995) argues that issues gain agenda status, and alternative solu-
tions are selected, when elements of three “streams” come together. One stream
encompasses the state of politics and public opinion (the political stream). A second
stream contains the potential solutions to a problem (the policy stream). The third,
the problem stream, encompasses the attributes of a problem and whether it is getting
 “The World Changed Today” 181

better or worse, whether it has suddenly sprung into public and elite conscious-
ness through a focusing event, and whether it is solvable with the alternatives avail-
able in the policy stream.
Within any particular problem area, these streams run parallel in a policy area
or domain until something happens to cause one or more of the streams to meet
in a “window of opportunity” that represents a possibility that policy may change.
The opening can result from a change in our understanding of the problem
(through a change in indicators of a problem or through a focusing event), or a
change in the political stream that is favorable to policy change, or a change in our
understanding of the tractability of the problem given current solutions. One way
that issues can gain attention and move up the agenda is through focusing events.

Focusing Events
In After Disaster, Birkland defines a “potential focusing event” as
an event that is sudden, relatively rare, can be reasonably defined as harmful or reveal-
ing the possibility of potentially greater future harms, inflicts harms or suggests potential
harms that are or could be concentrated on a definable geographical area or community
of interest, and that is known to policy makers and the public virtually simultaneously.
(1997, p. 22)

Birkland defines a potential focusing event in this way to avoid post hoc defin-
itions of any particular event as being focal. Rather, these features—rarity, harms,
concentration of harms, whether the event is known to all simultaneously—are
arranged on a continuum, and any event can be measured on these criteria. Thus,
we can define a very large earthquake—say, magnitude 7.0 or greater—as a poten-
tially focusing event, but if we find that the earthquake struck in the Aleutians, far
from populated areas, the event will probably be less “focal” than had it struck in
southern California. Indeed, Birkland (1997) demonstrated this empirically.
Focusing events are important because they are one of the key triggers to
opening the policy window. They can also have a substantial effect on relationships
in a policy community, can attract greater negative attention to current policy, and
can upset a long-run equilibrium in policy (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993). Perhaps
most important from a policy change perspective, a focusing event “opens the
policy window” by dramatically highlighting policy failures and providing oppor-
tunities for policy learning.
Peter May (1992) argues that we can conceptualize policy learning after failure
in three ways. Policy learning involves two kinds of learning: learning about the effi-
cacy of particular types of policy instruments or designs (instrumental learning), and
social learning, which entails learning about apt and effective social constructions of
problems. Political learning involves learning about methods and strategies for
advancing a particular policy idea. A focusing event can provide opportunities for
all these types of learning.
The streams metaphor also implies that it is very hard to trace the genesis of
any policy idea. Rather, instead of sudden, obvious innovation, the opening of a
policy window will encourage policy entrepreneurs to link existing ideas with new
problems or understandings of problems. For example, as we will see, the short-
comings of airport passenger screening and the screeners themselves were well
182 Thomas A. Birkland

known before September 11, but ideas for “solving” these problems were not high
on the agenda until September 11 motivated their proponents to argue that the
attacks could have been foiled had their original ideas been enacted. A focusing
event shifts the presumption away from the status quo and toward the proposition
that policy change is necessary. The “everything has changed” rhetoric that fol-
lowed September 11 suggests an expectation of a range of changes—including policy
changes. But as mentioned before, it is not a given that a large event will lead to
substantive policy change. Kingdon argues that it is even less likely, Kingdon
argues, that we would find policy innovation after a focusing event, rather than a
recombination or reemergence of existing ideas, plans, and group alliances. But
the “change” rhetoric implicitly recognized that September 11 was no ordinary
event. This article therefore serves as a preliminary exploration of whether and to
what extent policy change and policy innovation followed the attacks.

The September 11 Attacks as Focusing Events

The September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and on the World Trade Center are
clearly focusing events. Still, it is hard to say that the scale and organization of this
attack was, to the expert community, “unimaginable.” Counterterrorism experts
had long considered the possibility and impacts of large-scale terrorist attacks, par-
ticularly those involving nuclear, chemical, or biological agents. These themes were
energized after September 11. The importance of the September 11 attacks as a
rationale and trigger for policy change was reflected in several news articles (Fenlon
& Lee-Shanock, 2001; Stephenson, 2001; Woodlief, 2001). These articles rein-
forced the theme expressed in the lead sentence of an article in an Ottawa, Ontario,
paper: “The terrorist attack on the United States is the sort of historic event that
permanently changes the way people think” (Robson, 2001). Furthermore, an ABC
News/Washington Post poll conducted in March 2002, six months after the attacks,
found that “The vast majority of Americans, 86 percent, say the events of Sep-
tember 11 have changed the nation in a lasting way” (Langer, 2002).
In Congress, the theme of change was also voiced, often in ways that would
justify changes in attitudes or policies. For example, Representative Scott McInnis
(R-Colo.) argued in the Congressional Record, “the world changed on September 11.
The days of being absolutely politically correct, the days of Harvard not allowing
the U.S. military, the ROTC on their campus, those days are gone” (McInnis, 2001,
H6899). However, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) noted in the Congressional Record
that

It has been said over and over that ‘the world has changed.’ . . . Our response to this
tragedy is causing changes throughout our society. However, in another sense, it has a lot
more to do with our perceptions of the world than with the world itself. The world was
changing long before September 11, and threats that existed before that infamous day
are no less present today. (Leahy, 2001, p. S11357)

While the events of September 11 provided the impetus for change, the threat
of terrorism was already well established in the policy stream, and September 11
only threw open the window of opportunity for policy change based, in large part,
on preexisting ideas. Senator Leahy is thinking very much along the lines of the
 “The World Changed Today” 183

streams metaphor by saying, in essence, that while the September 11 attacks were
big, we had been talking about the domestic terrorism threat before September 11.
Indeed, Congress’s increase in attention to terrorism was much less pronounced
than the media’s sudden interest in the issue, because Congress had already been
attentive to the issue, as detailed in the next section.

September 11 and the Agendas

While it may be obvious that the September 11 attacks were major agenda-setting
events, it is important to understand how large an influence these events had on
the agenda. I will consider both the media and congressional agendas to under-
stand how these attacks expanded what we might call the “terrorism” agenda in
both these institutions. I start by considering the nature of agenda expansion in
the mass media, by using the New York Times as a measure of the media agenda.
Table 1 shows index scores of stories on the term “terrorism” in the New York
Times by year from 1990 through 2002. These stories are divided by the “desk”
from which the stories originated, which helps us determine whether the Times
treated the story as a metropolitan, national, or world news issue or problem. The
index is set so that the mean number of stories per desk per year from 1990 to
2000 equals 100. This allows comparisons across desks that would be harder to see
with just the raw numbers.3
While there were at least three terrorist or terror-like incidents between 1990
and 2001—the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 Oklahoma City
federal building bombing, and the unsolved Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta
during the 1996 Olympics4—no terrorist event triggers the extent of the Times’
national and local coverage of terrorism than was triggered by September 11.
Clearly, the September 11 attacks “brought home” the issue of terrorism as a
domestic problem rather than primarily an overseas issue, even as foreign news on
terrorism also increased, due to the extensive coverage of foreign reaction to the
September 11 attacks and the escalation of violence in the Middle East.
While Table 1 shows the dramatic effect of the event on the national news
agenda, it also shows that news coverage of the September 11 events follows the
typical trend, in which the news media aggressively cover an issue for a short time,
and then coverage fades as the event recedes into the past and as political institu-
tions decide whether or not to act in substantive or symbolic ways.5 However, one
cannot say that news coverage of terrorism has returned to pre-September 11
levels. Through 2002, there was more coverage of terrorism across all the Times’
various desks than in any year other than 2001. This trend continued in 2002.
Like the news media, Congress has paid a great deal of attention to the attacks,
but, as Table 1 shows, the expansion of the agenda was not as great as the media’s
attention to the issue. This reveals well-established institutional differences between
the news media and Congress. A finer-scale analysis of the data, in Table 2, shows
a significant increase in news coverage of terrorism occurred in the two weeks after
September 11, followed by a substantial drop-off in coverage after that first two-
week period. News coverage of terrorism as a national issue remains high, but
it never returns to the levels reached in the first two weeks after September 11.
Congress, on the other hand, saw its terrorism agenda expand continuously in the
184 Thomas A. Birkland

Table 1. Coverage of Terrorism in Key “Desks” of the New York Times, 1990–2002

Index: Mean Yearly Coverage Of “Terrorism,” 1990–2000 = 100

Year Editorial Foreign Metropolitan National

1990 52.8 71.5 24.2 25.1

1991 85.4 88.1 32.5 59.1
1992 44.7 78.9 20.8 16.1
1993 (First WTC attack) 78.0 91.9 222.1 33.1
1994 64.2 88.3 97.5 21.5
1995 (Oklahoma City Bombing) 136.6 110.7 166.0 366.4
1996 208.1 124.8 166.7 158.6
1997 135.8 123.4 84.4 199.8
1998 135.0 134.7 91.3 77.0
1999 95.1 84.2 93.4 95.0
2000 64.2 103.5 101.0 48.4
2001 (Sept. 11 attacks) 1,266.7 509.8 1,304.1 1,567.6
2002 1,357.7 633.5 1,264.7 1,201.2
Source: Search on Lexis-Nexis for the term “terrorism” in the New York Times, by desk. Items in bold relate to key
terrorist events.

six weeks following September 11, and the prominence of the issue actually peaked
on the agenda in March 2001, about six months after the event. Congress, being
a decision-making body, cannot simply take note of an issue and then, in the
manner of the news media, tackle the “next big thing.” Congress is a deliberative
body by design, and will move slower than the media, but in many ways will be
more purposive in its actions than the media.
While terrorism continued to expand on the agenda, a key issue related to the
attacks—aviation security—peaked on Congress’s agenda in the first two weeks
after September 11. This is in part a result of the relatively low agenda status of
aviation security before September 11. In the late 1990s and especially in 2000,
Congress’s attention to aviation was more focused on consumer complaints about
flight delays rather than security issues per se. September 11 rapidly elevated
aviation security as an issue—and indeed, displaced flight delays as a major con-
gressional concern (see Table 3)—because commercial aviation was among the
targets of the terrorists, and provided some of the most dramatic imagery of the
attacks.
It is also possible that Congress suddenly became attentive to the September 11
hijackings because many constituents are frequent fliers who have voiced their com-
plaints about poor airline service; indeed, most members of Congress are frequent
fliers (Associated Press, 2002). They were particularly interested in the issue
because the attacks closed Reagan National Airport near Washington from Sep-
tember 11 to October 8; Reagan National is the most convenient airport for
members of Congress and other influential policy actors in Washington. Had the
terrorists been thwarted by better security, runs a common causal story, the WTC
and Pentagon would not have been attacked the way they were, and the shocks to
the aviation and airways system—including the unprecedented shut-down of civil
aviation from 9:45 a.m. Eastern Time on September 11 to 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time
on September 13 (Stengel, 2002)—never would have occurred. The use of airlin-
ers as weapons of mass destruction was a rather novel and shocking development
to most people; Congress was very committed to preventing a recurrence of this
style of attack.
 “The World Changed Today” 185

Table 2. Expansion of the Media and Congressional “Terrorism” Agendas, by Year and Quarter,
1990 to Second Quarter, 2002
Index: Mean Coverage per Quarter, 1990–2000 = 100

New York Times

Quarter NYT: All Desk NYT: National Desk Congressional Testimony

1990–1 45.1 24.2 17.8

1990–2 60.1 13.9 23.7
1990–3 50.2 27.7 17.1
1990–4 31.5 31.2 18.5
1991–1 136.6 107.4 23.1
1991–2 57.8 27.7 19.1
1991–3 55.9 52.0 18.5
1991–4 84.1 41.6 16.5
1992–1 64.8 17.3 11.9
1992–2 50.2 10.4 12.5
1992–3 38.0 3.5 5.9
1992–4 59.6 31.2 2.0
1993–1 87.8 31.2 15.2
1993–2 98.1 34.6 11.2
1993–3 121.2 38.1 23.1
1993–4 102.8 24.2 16.5
1994–1 93.9 13.9 67.9
1994–2 56.3 13.9 61.3
1994–3 72.8 27.7 34.3
1994–4 69.0 27.7 12.5
1995–1 113.6 3.5 132.6
1995–2 287.9 1,021.8 182.0
1995–3 115.5 245.9 148.4
1995–4 98.1 145.5 105.5
1996–1 162.0 97.0 187.3
1996–2 135.7 173.2 183.3
1996–3 195.8 239.0 173.4
1996–4 93.9 103.9 19.8
1997–1 116.5 152.4 193.2
1997–2 130.5 304.8 228.2
1997–3 130.5 131.6 124.0
1997–4 108.5 183.6 120.7
1998–1 79.4 97.0 244.0
1998–2 87.3 86.6 164.2
1998–3 195.8 52.0 110.8
1998–4 118.3 62.3 49.5
1999–1 83.1 34.6 296.1
1999–2 62.9 103.9 223.6
1999–3 97.2 131.6 117.4
1999–4 122.6 166.3 131.9
2000–1 95.3 48.5 353.5
2000–2 57.8 55.4 217.6
2000–3 62.0 27.7 109.5
2000–4 128.7 55.4 32.3
2001–1 105.2 65.8 83.1
2001–2 179.8 211.3 239.4
2001–3 1,023.7 1,984.8 243.4
2001–4 3,239.2 3,869.1 658.2
2002–1 1,289.5 1,368.2 656.9
2002–2 782.3 1,202.0 596.2
2002–3 1,054.7 1,198.5 347.6
2002–4 653.7 616.6 145.1
Quarters encompassing or following important terrorist attacks are highlighted in bold italics.
186 Thomas A. Birkland

Table 3. Number of Mentions of Terms “Aviation Security” and

“Flight Delays,” in the Congressional Record, by Quarter, 1999–2002

Quarter Flight Delay Aviation Security

1999–1 4 4
1999–2 5 4
1999–3 2 2
1999–4 6 4
2000–1 4 7
2000–2 2 8
2000–3 3 3
2000–4 1 5
2001–1 11 0
2001–2 18 0
2001–3 1 4
2001–4 0 46
2002–1 0 0
2002–2 1 0
2002–3 4 27
2002–4 2 17
Source: THOMAS Congressional Record databases, http://thomas.loc.gov.

We can say with confidence that the September 11 attacks clearly had a pro-
found impact on the media and Congress’s agendas, although we can also say that
the problem of terrorism was not new to Congress. While the news media’s agenda
expanded rapidly after the attacks, Congress’s expansion was less profound, in
large part due to its ongoing attention to terrorism as a threat to national security.

Focusing Events, Policy Failure, Learning, and Change

The rhetoric of policy failure was prominent in Congress after September 11.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, noted in his discussion of a proposed Aviation Secu-
rity Act, “The truth is, the horrific attacks of September 11 do reflect broad intel-
ligence and other failures “ (Rockefeller, 2001, S10270). Other comments on failure
(directly quoted) include:

• “Simply put, the private contractors who currently have the responsibility
for screening passengers and baggage failed on September 11, and for
that matter, they have failed for the past three decades” (Rep. Millender-
McDonald, D-CA, Congressional Record, November 15, 2001, H8231).
• “Mr. Speaker, evidence continues to mount that we suffered a major, major
failure of intelligence prior to September 11” (Representative George Miller,
D-Calif., Congressional Record, May 22, 2002, H2926).
• “Mr. Chairman, the great failure of September 11 was our failure to method-
ically analyze and share among our Federal and local authorities critical intel-
ligence information” (Rep. Bishop (D-Ga.), Congressional Record, June 26,
2002, p. H3940).

Because there were so many subjective and objective manifestations of policy

failure after the attacks—apparent intelligence and information-sharing failures,
aviation security screening failures, even the structural failure of the World Trade
 “The World Changed Today” 187

towers—and due to the very magnitude of the attacks, it is not surprising that a
great deal of legislation would be introduced after the event. Table 4 is a summary,
by policy category, of legislation introduced and enacted in the 107th Congress.6
The September 11 attacks appears to have triggered substantive change in, at a
minimum, law enforcement powers, bioterrorism, and aviation security. Increases
in military spending are also noted, although the connection between the attacks
and spending to address terrorism is often tenuous, as I describe in the conclu-
sion. Airline security is important when we consider the extent to which the airline
industry, an often-favored interest in Congress (Stephenson, 2002), had, before the
attacks, consistently resisted change in the aviation security regime. Proposed
changes included federalized (or at least trained and certified) passenger screen-
ers, more thorough passenger and baggage screening, and baggage matching with
each actually boarded passenger. The September 11 attacks opened the window of
opportunity by changing the nature of “terrorism” from a low-salience matter to
a very real and visible problem. The attacks therefore changed the behavior of
political actors because they, and virtually all Americans, could now comprehend
the seriousness of the terrorism problem. Indeed, the airlines experienced the
problem and saw the effect of lax security on their profitability. In the end, focus-
ing events often change the presumption that policy change is unnecessary to a pre-
sumption that something must be done about a recently dramatized problem.
But as impressive as the relatively rapid pace of policy change may be, there is
little evidence of policy innovation triggered by September 11 thus far. Reponses
to the attacks have relied on the usual organizational fixes and incremental changes
to policy and implementation strategy.7 For example, the Patriot Act encompassed
much of the conservative law enforcement community’s preexisting desires for
more aggressive law enforcement tools, such as new rules for wiretapping in the
face of the profusion of new communications methods, and new rules for seizing
the property of suspected criminals:
The sense that the administration is using the war on terrorism to accomplish long-held
policy goals is not limited to liberals. “They are taking language off the shelf that’s been
ready to go into any vehicle,” said Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs at the Cato
Institute, the libertarian research group. He was particularly critical of a provision the
administration inserted into the U.S.A. Patriot Act that enhanced the government’s ability
to seize assets through forfeiture (Greenhouse, 2002, p. 9)

Another remarkable feature of the September 11 bills is their responsiveness to

particular interests. Aside from the airlines, members of Congress introduced leg-
islation and resolutions related to disaster victims and their families, small business,
ethnic minorities, immigrants, and other groups. This activity suggests that in the
broadest sense politics as usual continued to play a role in the life of Congress, and
particular interests’ pleadings were not ignored, but were in fact promoted after
September 11.
The so-called “Patriot II” proposal that leaked from the Department of Justice
in early 2003 continues this trend (Hill, 2003). This is consistent with Kingdon’s
argument that existing ideas are combined with new problems or appreciations of
problems when windows of opportunity are open. And this is also consistent with
May’s (1992) conception of “political learning,” in which political actors learn which
social constructions and rhetorical tools are most likely to win acceptance of a policy
188 Thomas A. Birkland

Table 4. Bills and Resolutions Introduced Responding to the September 11 Attack, 107th Congress

N N Resolutions
Topic Total Percent enacted Passed Examples

Memorials/honors 83 17.8% 1 19 Patriot Day Bill, HJR 71, PL

107–89, December 18, 2001
Relief—general 54 11.6% 6 Expedited Benefits bill; “Public
Safety Officer Benefits bill”, HR
2882, PL 107–37, September
18, 2001;
Aviation: all 54 11.6% 2
Aviation safety & 33 7.1% 1 Aviation and Transportation
security Security Act, S 1447, PL 107–71,
November 19, 2001
Aviation industry- 21 4.5% 1 Air Transportation Safety and
general, relief System Stabilization Act;
September 11th Victim
Compensation Fund of 2001,
HR2926, PL 107–42,
September 22, 2001
Homeland Security 27 5.8% 1 Homeland Security Act of 2002,
HR 5005, PL 107–296,
November 25, 2002.
Weapons of Mass 26 5.6% 1 Public Health Security and
Destruction/Bioterror Bioterrorism Response Act of
2001, HR 3448, PL 107–188,
June 12, 2002.
Foreign relations/ 19 4.1% 1 1 A bill to authorize the president
foreign policy to exercise waivers of foreign
assistance restrictions with respect
to Pakistan through September30,
30, 2003, and for other purposes,
S 1465, 10/27/2001 PL 107–57,
October 27, 2001
Terrorism—general 16 3.4% 1 A joint resolution expressing the
sense of the Senate and House of
Representatives regarding the
terrorist attacks launched against
the United States on September
11, 2001, S.J.Res. 22, P l107–39,
September 18, 2001.
Taxes—individual 16 3.4%
Appropriations 18 3.9% 3 Intelligence Authorization Act for
Fiscal Year 2002, HR2883, PL
107–108, December 28, 200; 2001
Emergency Supplemental
Appropriations Act for Recovery
from and Response to Terrorist
Attacks on the United States
107-HR2888 Public Law No:
107–38, September 18, 2001;
National Defense Authorization
Act for Fiscal Year 2002; Rocky
Flats National Wildlife Refuge Act
of 2001; Military Construction
Authorization Act for Fiscal
Year 2002, S1438, PL 107–107,
December 28, 2001.
Relief—industry 12 2.6% 2
Technical/rule change 14 3.0% 1
 “The World Changed Today” 189

Table 4. Continued

N N Resolutions
Topic Total Percent enacted Passed Examples

Immigration 19 4.1% 1 A bill to amend the Immigration

and Nationality Act to provide
permanent authority for the
admission of “S” visa non-
immigrants, S 1424, PL 107–45,
October 1, 2001
Subtotal 358 76.8% 17
All other topics 108 23.2% 3 2
Total 466 100.0% 20

position; these arguments usually have little to do with the policy instruments or
the objective causes of problems.
These windows of opportunity also provide the Congress the opportunity to
provide largesse to favored constituencies, such as those perceived as victims of a
disaster. Indeed, “deserving” victims (Schneider & Ingram, 1993) are often the
most popular recipients of federal largesse after a crisis or catastrophe, and the
federal government is very familiar with the distribution of postdisaster aid as a
form of distributive politics (Platt, 1999). In effect, the September 11 attacks were
an unnatural disaster to which Congress responded much like it would a natural
disaster, with substantial amounts of federal money. The difference, of course, is
that the cause of the attacks and the destruction of the WTC and, in part, the Pen-
tagon was terrorism, to which a number of causal stories could be attached (they
hate us, they hate our way of life, they lashed back at us, and the like)8 rather
than simply dismissing the cause as an act of God (Stone, 1989). It was the fact that
the attacks were intentional and horribly successful that helped drive post-
September 11 policy change.
Notwithstanding all the “change” rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of the
attacks, it is difficult to find much evidence of instrumental learning (that is, learn-
ing about superior policy instruments) in Congress in the year after September 11.
Rather, existing organized interests were accommodated, and preexisting calls for
more stringent policies relating to aviation security, intelligence gathering and
sharing, and immigration control were voiced, with rather greater force in the
aftermath of the event but without any evidence of new ideas emerging that directly
stemmed from the attacks. This is entirely consistent with Kingdon’s notion of ideas
bubbling up and being recycled through the “primordial soup” of policy ideas.
There is, however, reason to believe that social or political learning has followed
the attacks—that the attacks educated all of us about the nature of the terrorism
problem, and made us better advocates for new solutions. But the volume and
urgency of post-September 11 law-making were a more a function of the fact of
the event itself than of any evidence that the event led to lessons about policy instru-
ments. Political actors are reacting to the event using the same political and policy
templates they use for similar events, such as military attacks on America, relief
after natural disasters, and so on. The need for rapid reaction makes learning, in
any systematic or ad hoc way, difficult to find.
190 Thomas A. Birkland

A timeline assembled by Claire Rubin, William R. Cumming, and Irmak R.

Tanali9 helps illustrate a possible reason why there is so little evidence of post-
September 11 policy learning thus far. Rubin and her associates track key terror-
ist and other events, reports that followed those events, plans, legislation, and the
like. Their timeline shows that after most events, there are a few or several reports
that describe the event and recommend or describe possible policy responses to
the event. There is a striking lack of such post-event analysis and reporting after
September 11; yet, September 11 also triggered a remarkable period of policy-
making. This is obviously due to the seriousness of the attacks—members of Con-
gress hardly needed a report to tell them that September 11 was a serious
event—and due to real or perceived pressure to “do something” after the event.
Much of what was done was largely symbolic, such as reflected in the “memorials
and honors” category in Table 4.
The description I have provided thus far paints a fairly broad picture of post
September 11 policymaking. The policymaking that followed September 11 is fairly
complex, and many ideas are folded into legislation and regulation in any partic-
ular domain. Since aviation security was one of the most prominent areas under
review in the aftermath of the attacks, it is useful to understand whether this broad
portrait I paint of agenda-setting and subsequent policy change holds true in a
particular policy domain. The domain I use to illustrate policy change is the avia-
tion security domain.

Case Study: Aviation Security in the Wake of the Attacks

Windows of opportunity for policy change opened in aviation security after the
destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and after the
loss of TWA flight 800 off Long Island, New York, in 1996. While the TWA crash
was ultimately laid to an explosion of fuel vapors in the fuel tank of the Boeing
747 airliner,10 a terrorist bomb had been widely believed to have caused the plane
to disintegrate off Long Island, New York (Acohido, 1996; Laccetti, 1996;
McCarthy & Carey, 1996); this belief triggered greater efforts to detect bombs on
planes, even as the final cause of the TWA crash was unknown (Spielman, 1996;
Washington Post, 1996). And aviation security also was stiffened, to some extent,
during the Gulf War, when fears arose of Iraqi retaliation for American interven-
tion in its invasion of Kuwait. Of course, aviation security issues date to the spate
of hijackings of airliners in the 1960s and 1970s; the accumulation of all these expe-
riences has contributed to the security system we have today. Features of this system
include the familiar passenger check points where passengers and carry-on
baggage are searched, the screening questions asked of passengers at the check-in
counter (a practice that has been discontinued due to its lack of effectiveness), the
use of passenger screening techniques sometimes called “profiling,” and the limited
use of explosives detection devices (TWA 800 notwithstanding).
Aviation security issues are therefore hardly new to the policy agenda or to the
mass public. These are issues of particular interest to Congress, due in part to the
large number of jobs involved in aviation, the concentration of airline headquar-
ters and aviation manufacturers in particular districts, and, in some measure, to
members’ own interest in being able to reach their destinations rapidly and cheaply.
 “The World Changed Today” 191

But attention to this issue, like many issues, is sporadic, often crisis- or disaster-
driven, and we can therefore say, in terms that Baumgartner and Jones (1993) use,
that the aviation security policy agenda experiences periods of punctuation in a
fairly steady equilibrium.
But the September 11 incident is so profound and shocking that these attacks
may be more important in the aviation policy domain than in any other domain.
If this is true, it should be possible to find evidence that these attacks have so shaken
the aviation security domain that a period of policy innovation would follow.
Because the planes were turned into weapons by seizing control of the flight
deck, perhaps using weapons that passed security somehow and somewhere, a con-
siderable amount of attention has been paid to two aspects of aviation security: the
ability of screening personnel to keep people with potential weapons off planes,
and the in-flight security of the cockpit. A third and related issue, although not
directly related to the “causal story” (Stone, 1989) of September 11, also reached
the agenda: the question of explosives or other materials being brought on board
aircraft in future terror attacks, and the concomitant need for tougher baggage
screening; this issue is in some ways a carryover from the aftermath of TWA flight
800.
Rather than simply examine congressional response to security issues, it is useful
to look at a somewhat broader set of agendas, as measured by the popular and
trade press. To compare the relative positions of screening, explosives detection,
and cockpit security on these agendas, I searched for articles in the New York Times,
the Washington Post, and in the aviation trade press in the Lexis-Nexis Academic
Universe database product, for the period beginning on January 1, 1997, and
ending on June 30, 2002. I searched the Lexis-Nexis general news and trade and
industry databases using three sets of search terms: “explosive detection,” “cockpit
door OR cockpit security,” and “passenger w/10 screen or screeners,” (depending
on the database). From this we can discern the relative position of these issues, as
shown in Figures 1, 2, and 3. All the data are indexed and then plotted on charts
to allow for ready comparisons between the sources. The index base number is the
average number of articles published in a given source per quarter in the period
before September 11. In many quarters, particularly in the mass media, the index
number is zero, since the mass media cover such issues sporadically, and often only
in reaction to crisis.
The popular press covers explosive detectors a great deal more avidly than does
the trade press in the wake of 9/11, as shown in Figure 1. This may be due in part
to two factors: the transformation by the hijackers of the planes into, in effect, large
bombs, and by the media’s search for meaning and answers after the event. Ter-
rorist bombings of airliners are relatively rare, and thus have become historic mile-
stones to which journalists and the public can refer when trying to make sense of
a crisis. Policymakers also turn to these incidents when trying to learn about what
has been done about a problem and what remains to be done. Explosives detec-
tion on airliners became a substantive policy issue in the wake of the 1985 bombing
of an Air India 747 over the Atlantic, and the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over
Scotland in December 1988. Interest was renewed immediately upon the crash of
TWA 800 in 1996. Technical and policy innovations and responses since the late
1980s have included explosion-resistant cargo and baggage containers, baggage
192 Thomas A. Birkland

2500

Times

2000
Post

1500 Trade
Journals
Index

1000

500

0
1997-1 1998-1 1999-1 2000-1 2001-1 2002-1
Year and Quarter

Figure 1. Attention to explosives detection, New York Times, Washington Post, and Aviation trade press, 1997–2002
Index: Mean number of stories in each quarter from the first quarter 1997 to the second quarter of 2001 = 100

14000
Times
12000

Post
10000

Trade
8000 Journals

6000

4000

2000

0
1997-1 1998-1 1999-1 2000-1 2001-1 2002-1

Figure 2. Attention to screeners and screening, New York Times, Washington Post, and Aviation trade press,
1997–second quarter 2002
Index: Mean number of stories in each quarter from the first quarter 1997 to the second quarter of 2001 = 100
 “The World Changed Today” 193

3500
Times
3000
Post
2500
Trade Journals
2000
Index

1500

1000

500

0
1997-1 1998-1 1999-1 2000-1 2001-1 2002-1
Year and Quarter

Figure 3. Attention to cockpit/cockpit security, New York Times, Washington Post, and Aviation trade press, 1997–2002
Index: Mean number of stories in each quarter from the first quarter 1997 to the second quarter of 2001 = 100

matching with passengers (used in the United States only on international flights),
and more aggressive (but not yet comprehensive) development and deployment of
explosives detection equipment at airports.
The comparatively less dramatic increase in attention to explosives detection on
the professional agenda is a result of the issue being relatively well known to pro-
fessionals. This is not to say that the professional press failed to show an interest
in the issue, as its coverage of the issue grew and in fact increased from the event
through the second quarter of 2002. Rather, the increase in interest was relatively
less dramatic because discussion had already long since been activated in this policy
community.

Screeners and Screening Systems

Figure 2 shows a similarly low level of attention among both professionals and the
daily press before September 11, whereupon the popular press’s agenda grows and
then rapidly decreases. The professional press shows a slower expansion of this
issue on the agenda, with an upward trend in coverage of this issue similar to that
of its coverage of explosives detection, as professionals continued to address both
the new revelations about screening failures and their implications for airport and
airline management. The popular press covered the screening issue from the “what
went wrong?” angle as well as the “how will this affect travelers?” angle, and once
the aviation safety bill was on its way to passage, and the issue became less novel,
the popular media’s interest in the issue fell. The professional press, on the other
hand, focuses both on the problem and on the implementation of the new screen-
ing systems as mandated by law and as required business and professional neces-
194 Thomas A. Birkland

sity. The issue therefore expands on the agenda well after mass media attention
has faded.
Cockpit security, however, emerges as a novel problem that is addressed with a
search for novel solutions (Figure 3). While the problem of cockpit security—
related, of course, to the terrorists’ ability to seize control of the flight deck and
take control of the plane—triggered a great deal of attention in the Washington Post,
the New York Times did not cover this issue as avidly. But the most striking result is
the extent to which cockpit or flight deck security became very important in the
trade press. Coverage of this issue also dropped off considerably, largely because,
as in the popular press, coverage of how the terrorists may have entered the cockpit
and discussions of the weaknesses of existing doors ran their course. But, as would
be expected, the issue still was higher on the agenda after September 11 than
before, owing to the obvious understanding that something would need to be done
on a continuing basis about flight deck security.
The data clearly show that the September 11 attacks were unprecedented on
both the popular media and professional agendas. And the huge response to the
cockpit security issue in the trade press—a 140-fold increase in attention to the
issue—suggests that the cockpit security issue is a novel one for which novel solu-
tions might be devised. The explosives and screener issues, on the other hand,
were already reasonably well known before September 11 and showed the usual
pattern of intense media attention triggered by an event, followed by a rather steep
fall off in interest. The pattern in the professional press looks much more like what
we would expect to see in Congress, as the key actors in the policy domain—
airlines, airframe manufacturers, regulators, and airport operators—develop
public and private solutions to the problems revealed by the event. The next section
considers whether and to what extent legislative and regulatory responses reflect
the stimulus for change provided by the September 11 attacks.

Legislative and Regulatory Reponses in Aviation Security

How much attention did Congress and the appropriate regulators—in this case,
the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—pay to the key aviation security issues
that followed September 11? This question can be considered in two ways: in terms
of attention to the issues, and in terms of actual policy change that results from this
increased attention.
A review of all FAA rulemaking (final rules and notices of proposed rulemak-
ing, or NPRMs) for 2000 through 200211 reveals that the September 11 attacks did
not significantly change the FAA’s overall regulatory agenda, as reflected in the
publications of rules, proposed rules, or announcements in the Federal Register. The
FAA issued, during this period, thousands of rules on the use of airways and air-
space, and, in particular, airworthiness directives (ADs) that regulate the mainte-
nance and operation of a wide range of general aviation and commercial aircraft.
The FAA was thus continuing to do its primary job, and while it was certainly inter-
ested in security issues, it was not obviously greatly detracted from its regulatory
mission by the attacks.
However, FAA certainly addressed security issues, and the FAA issued 20 rules,
announcements, or NPRMs relating to security, of which 5 predate the September
11 attacks. Three of those rules were attempts to certify and strengthen airport
 “The World Changed Today” 195

screening that were issued in 2000, and track closely with Congress’s interest in
this subject in the same year. Two of these actions related to airport security writ
broadly. After September 11, twelve regulatory actions were taken on aviation secu-
rity, of which ten related to the security of the flight deck, two of the actions related
to transferring security functions from the FAA to the new Transportation Security
Agency (TSA) (the creation of which represented a significant instrumental policy
change), and the remainder focused on the operation of aircraft or airspace in sen-
sitive areas.
The regulation of screeners is conspicuously absent from FAA’s post-September
11 regulatory agenda, as are regulations relating to explosives detection. Congress
acted so quickly on these issues after September 11 that the FAA found it had little
role to play in this new policy; indeed, after the founding of the Transportation
Security Agency (TSA), the FAA’s responsibilities in this area were largely re-
moved, in no small part because of the FAA’s real or perceived failure to promote
security. There was thus little reason for the FAA to quickly address these issues in
regulation.
However, the FAA did respond quickly to what is emerging as the novel issue
on its agenda: cockpit security. Congress lacked the technical expertise to address
this issue, airlines and pilots were pressing for some sort of guidance on this issue,
and matters relating to the operation of aircraft were clearly well within FAA’s
expertise. We can conclude, then, that some policy change and, indeed, innova-
tion did occur after September 11, with the FAA issuing regulations on the con-
struction and performance of cockpit doors (which turned out to be a remarkably
technical problem) and taking steps to address the duties of pilots during hijack-
ing incidents. While Congress did address the problem of flight deck security in
the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (PL 107-71), the bulk of the discus-
sion of this issue was explicitly delegated to the FAA (Federal Aviation Adminis-
tration, 2002).
Congress paid greater attention to the problems of screeners and explosives than
to cockpit security. This might be explained by two factors. First, as noted, cockpit
security is a more esoteric issue to the Congress (and the traveling public) than the
problems of baggage-checking for explosives, and screening before boarding the
plane. Screening failures and security breaches were well known before Septem-
ber 11, and it was well known to Congress, if not the broader public, that explo-
sives detection was not being implemented at a satisfactory pace. The September
11 attacks thus elevated Congress’s preexisting complaints with the FAA higher on
the agenda, while not garnering much attention to the novel issue of cockpit secu-
rity. It is interesting to note that the FAA and Congress appeared to divide the labor
on the two problems most closely linked to the ability of the hijackers to comman-
deer the planes: lax screening, and, more to the point, nearly nonexistent cockpit
security. Explosives were not an issue on September 11 at all, but became impor-
tant because they are a real threat to aviation, and perhaps because the imagery of
September 11 suggested explosives.

Conclusions
While the September 11 attacks are clearly focal events, and the responses to them
are what we might expect after a focusing event, the attacks, like other large events,
196 Thomas A. Birkland

have both expected and unique features. The usual response to the event—sudden
mass and elite interest in the issues revealed by the event, and the opening of a
policy window for change—are typical of many events.
But there are substantial differences between the “normal” focusing events
studied in Birkland’s 1997 study and the September 11 event. First, it is likely that
the window of opportunity for policy change will be open rather wide for a long
time. Anthony Downs argued that a problem “leaps into prominence [on the
agenda], remains there for a short time, and then, though still largely unresolved,
gradually fades from the center of public attention” (1972, p. 38). Downs applied
what he calls the “issue attention cycle” to environmental issues, and while the envi-
ronmental issue has waxed and waned, it has remained more important as a polit-
ical and policy matter than it was before the early 1970s. There appears to be early
evidence that the September 11 attacks triggered what Downs calls the “alarmed
discovery” of the domestic terrorism problem, and that the issue, much like the
environment, will fade on the agenda, but not to pre-September 11 levels.
While the conclusion I draw from this analysis—that there is thus far mixed evi-
dence of instrumental policy learning from the September 11 attacks—this analy-
sis is by its very nature early and perhaps premature. But we have enough evidence
to draw several conclusions.
As Paul Sabatier has noted, and many students of the policy process have taken
to heart, policy domains deserve at least 10 years of study before one can discern
patterns in policymaking. While I intimate that there is policymaking in the ter-
rorism or counterterrorism policy domain before September 11, 2001, I do not
subject this policymaking to a detailed analysis. And the data that follow Septem-
ber 11 capture only that activity that occurred in the 15-and-a-half months fol-
lowing the attacks.
We can conclude from this research that the September 11 attacks were a sub-
stantial focusing event that continues to reverberate through American politics
today, and will likely do so for some time. For example, at the time this is written,
in early 2003, the United States and the world stand on the brink of war with Iraq,
a war that would have been less likely had the September 11 attacks not created
the rationale—or pretext, depending on one’s tastes—for war to disarm the Iraqi
regime. Of course, the issue with Iraq itself is embedded in a much longer-term
set of policies that include American support for the Iraqi regime during the
Iran–Iraq war, and the American-led expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the
Gulf War. At the same time, many commentators have noted that government poli-
cies, ranging from the detention of “enemy combatants” (Hill, 2003; Weinstein,
2003) to the (now apparently defunct) Total Information Awareness program (New
York Times, 2003) represent the decaying of cherished civil liberties and the erosion
of American and constitutional values. The influence of the attacks thus continues
to reverberate.
Second, we can find evidence that in the aviation case the key regulatory agency
has taken actions directly triggered by the event that are well within its organiza-
tional mission. It is fair to postulate that the FAA, even without the requirement to
do so in the Transportation Security Act, would have taken action to strengthen
airport security and, in particular, to address the cockpit door issue. This is borne
out by experience, as when the FAA sought to improve security during the Gulf
 “The World Changed Today” 197

War and after the loss of TWA 800. And it is clear that the industry and the FAA,
working together, devised a technically sound and functional solution in short
order; this solution, it is worth noting, is closely related to an actual “cause” of the
loss of the four planes on September 11: the unauthorized entry into the flight
deck.
Third, we are now beginning to amass evidence that some sort of instrumental
policy learning has resulted from the September 11 attacks. First, after consider-
able reluctance, the Bush Administration has appointed a commission, headed by
former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, to investigate the reasons why the
attacks were so successful. Investigating commissions are a staple of large events,
and in some cases are institutionalized in bodies like the National Transportation
Safety Board.
Fourth, there is evidence of organizational change that could be evidence of
instrumental learning, such as the combination of the FBI’s and CIA’s counterter-
ror functions (Lichtblau, 2003), the creation of the Transportation Security Agency,
and perhaps the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In this
latter case, however, it is by no means clear that the mission and function of the
DHS was well thought out in advance, or that the component agencies in the DHS
will all hew toward a uniform mission. This is particularly true when we consider
the manifold tasks already undertaken by units of the department, ranging from
the Coast Guard to the Customs Service.
These agencies remain, in most ways, the same agencies they were before
September 11, albeit with altered missions. The Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA), for example, has begun to substantially deemphasize its role in
natural disasters. Future research will need to determine whether and to what
extent this department will serve as a sound change in policy instruments, whether
the agency will simply serve as a rearranging of organizations for political reasons,
or whether, in the press to “do something,” the department endures a prolonged
period of “bureaucratic chaos” (Gugliotta, 2002). For example, FEMA may well be
distracted from its disaster relief and response role as it addresses homeland secu-
rity, even as natural disasters pose greater and more consistent risks than does ter-
rorism. Dysfunctional learning may therefore be apparent if the plans for this
agency fail to work or create unintended consequences. These are testable hypothe-
ses that will deserve attention in coming years.
Future studies of the effect of September 11 will need to wrestle with a difficult
question: How much policy change was caused by September 11, and how much
did the attacks facilitate?12 For example, as noted previously, the Patriot Act
included much of the conservatives’ wish list for more stringent criminal justice
policy. The Bush increase in military spending—over $40 billion—can as a matter
of rhetoric or politics be laid to the needs revealed by the September 11 attack,
but are the attacks merely a convenient justification for this increase? Put another
way, does the increase include money that responds to the terrorist threat—
asymmetric conflict in the argot—or does this increase buy the same sorts of hard-
ware and capabilities that we already have, and that we are just buying more of?
Mounting evidence suggests the latter.
Post-September 11 legislation will create institutional forces that will keep this
issue on the agenda, much as the Environmental Protection Agency, state agencies,
198 Thomas A. Birkland

and interest groups keep the environment on the agenda. Public interest, however,
in the issue may fade as the issue recedes into memory, only to be retriggered by
another attack, scandal, or policy failure. For example, USA Today reported “Amer-
icans are increasingly pessimistic about the war against terrorism after weeks of
revelations about missed clues and warnings of likely future attacks” (Hall, 2002,
1A). In general, the trend in media coverage (and, in a rough way, public atten-
tion) to terrorism as a domestic policy topic has been steadily downward even in
the weeks after the event, but at still a higher level than before September 11. Of
course, public interest in the issue will likely remain higher than it was before, and
we will not return to “normal,” if normal is understood as the pre-2001 political
and policy environment. In sum, it is very likely that this attack will not soon be
followed by a “return to normalcy,” as the memory of the event—and, in particu-
lar, of its imagery—will remain an important element of public opinion and an
important motivator for attention to this emerging national policy problem.
Indeed, the near saturation coverage of the first anniversary of the attacks suggests
that homeland security in broadest terms will remain a more highly salient issue
than it was before the attacks.
In the years to come, there will be considerable opportunity for students of pol-
itics and the policy process to study and understand the political and policy
meaning of the September 11 attacks and potential future attacks. More time will
be needed to fully assess the extent to which domestic terrorism alters existing
advocacy communities, or creates new ones (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993), and
how that affects attention to the issue of terrorism. Clearly, more time is needed to
assess the success of policies newly and yet to be enacted. The implementation of
such policies will also invite considerable scrutiny. These are important and useful
research questions to consider, but in the short time since the attacks we can see
evidence of policy change in response to this important focusing event.

Notes
1 Some examples of this change rhetoric include news coverage from the US and overseas: “When the
smoke cleared from the collapsed World Trade Center towers, everything had changed” (Ryan,
2001); “Everything changed. America’s sense of security, its confidence as the most powerful nation,
its faith in its intelligence gathering, its certainty about who its enemies are, collapsed as surely as
the World Trade Centre and burned like the Pentagon” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2001); “The Day
Everything Changed” (headline, letter to the editor) (Loftus, 2001).
2 A much fuller description of the agenda is provided by Cobb and Elder (1983).
3 Because I am seeking to establish the September 11 attacks as a key policy issue, I focus only on the
national, metro, editorial, and foreign desks here. I also calculated these data for the sports, arts
and leisure, financial, and Sunday Week in Review desks. These data are available from the author,
and track very closely with the national desk index, except for the finance desk, which had an index
score of 7,686 for 2001, reflecting the great importance of the WTC and the affected area to world
and national financial markets.
4 This is particularly true in the sports pages, where the coverage index was 360.7.
5 One must not neglect, however, the diffusion of the ideas and changes in national and local poli-
cies, culture, and psyches that followed the September 11 attacks, ranging from the different tone
and title sequence of HBO’s Sex and the City, to the tentative efforts of some wits to find some humor-
ous aspects of what happened, such as with the satirical newspaper The Onion’s post-September 11
issue (http://www.theonion.com). These phenomena and, in particular, their influences on thinking
and action across society are much more difficult to track on the agenda.
6 These data are derived from the Library of Congress’s THOMAS system, which includes a
compendium of “Legislation Related To The Attack Of September 11, 2001,” at
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/terrorleg.htm.
 “The World Changed Today” 199

7 This is not to say that such change is unnecessary or fruitless. For example, the FBI’s and CIA’s
plans to combine their counterterror functions may be both an organizational change and a sub-
stantive change in the way business is done by these two agencies. See Lichtblau (2003).
8 Of course, these are examples of the preferred causal stories in Congress and in much of the news
media in the United States. Other stories told elsewhere include the idea that the United States
somehow invited or at least was partially responsible for the attach as an inevitable result of its foreign
policy. An International Herald Tribune poll two months after the attacks found that over half of the
“ ‘opinion leaders’ outside the US . . . agreed to the idea that many or most people believed that
‘American policies or actions in the world were a major cause of the September 11 attacks’ ” ( Jack,
2002, p. 9).
9 The chart is available as a large PDF file at http://www.disaster-timeline.com/TTL-ver175.pdf.
10 Details are available at http://www.ntsb.gov/events/twa800/default.htm.
11 These data were derived from a search on the Community of Science (www.cos.org) Federal Register
search tool, searching by agency for “Federal Aviation Administration.” The data are available from
the author on request.
12 See, for example, (O’Hanlon, 2003; Shanker & Stevenson, 2002; Wood, 2002). For a counterpoint,
see (Gingrich, 2003).

About the Author

Thomas A. Birkland is an associate professor of political science and of public administra-
tion and policy in the Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the Uni-
versity at Albany, State University of New York. He is also the director of the College’s Center
for Policy Research. Professor Birkland studies the political and policy outcomes of extreme
events, including natural disasters and industrial accidents. His book Learning from Disaster
will be published by Georgetown University Press in 2004.

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