From ‘Violence-complacent’ to ‘Terrorist-ready’

Abstract

This study focuses on emerging discourses of stadium and event security at the US National Football League’s (NFL) annual Super Bowl game. Unlike the championship series in other US sports leagues in which games are located in the cities of the teams that qualify, the NFL’s Super Bowl game is ‘awarded’ to cities after a competitive bidding process. The Super Bowl provides an interesting case study because football stadia are now developed based not only on franchise owners’ demands regarding profit and control, but also on the NFL’s requirements for hosting a Super Bowl. These requirements reach beyond the confines of the stadium itself and into the urban spaces and communities in which stadia are located. In this new geo-political context, ‘Super-Bowl-ready’ means shifting from ‘violence-complacent’ to ‘terrorist-ready’—indeed, since 9/11, the US government has classified the Super Bowl as a ‘national special security event’. Both the host city and the event are, in military parlance, ‘target-rich environments’, offering tantalising opportunities for ‘terrorists’ to strike at the very heart of the ‘American way of life’. This new discourse of security complicates the longstanding and well-documented rhetoric connecting stadium development with urban growth. Rather than replace the pro-growth discourse, post-9/11 frames were effectively incorporated by journalists into the pro-growth discourse—both vulnerability and safety are now presented as contributing to the ‘fact’ that hosting a Super Bowl is good for the city-as-a-whole.

You have walked into a new era in the world of sports and it looks, regrettably, like a bad Bruce Wills movie … This is what terrorism has wrought. Stadiums and arenas are no longer a refuge from the realities of life … (Romano, 2001).

The National Football League … [has] won exemption from lawsuits under a post-9/11 law that prohibits them from being sued if terrorists attack a site they are protecting. The protection extends only to companies’ services and equipment that the Homeland Security Department has approved as being effective in anti-terrorism … and whose products have Homeland Security’s highest reliability rating. (Frank, 2009).

Super Bowl, the National Football League’s (NFL)¹ championship game, is the most-watched single-game sporting event in the US. Played annually since 1967, it has become one of the most highly rated television shows of the year. Super Bowl 2010 played between the New Orleans Saints and the Baltimore Ravens was the most watched television show in US history² and, through 2008, 19 of the top 25 most highly rated—as ranked by average number of households tuned in—television programmes in US history have been Super Bowls (Coakley, 2009, p. 413). Competition related to Super Bowl occurs on at least three levels: franchises (teams) compete to qualify for the game; television networks compete for the rights to broadcast it; and cities compete for the opportunity to host it. Unlike championship games and series in other US professional sports in which the championship game is located in the cities whose teams qualify, the NFL ‘awards’ its championship game to a city with a ‘Super-Bowl-ready’ stadium based upon a competitive bidding process. Specific cities/stadia of upcoming Super Bowls are known years in advance; as of this writing, the next available date for hosting the game is not until 2015.

The Super Bowl is preceded by two weeks of massive media attention that includes not only analysis of players and teams, but also special features about the sport of football more generally and about the city and stadium that will host the event. More spectacle than mere game (see for example, Butterworth, 2008; Falcous and Silk, 2005; Martin and Reeves, 2010; Real, 1974), the Super Bowl build-up involves numerous NFL entertainment venues and a 600 000-square-foot theme park called the ‘NFL Experience’, leading up to the production of ‘Super Bowl Sunday’ with its pre-game and halftime shows created to dramatise the connection between the National Football League and the ‘American’ way of life. Patriotic themes and messages are an established Super Bowl tradition, as is the involvement of the US military in Super Bowl rituals. From fighter jet ‘flyovers’, to the presentation of the US flag by military Color Guard, the marching of military bands, the singing of military choirs and ‘live look-ins’ to US military bases at home and abroad, the NFL and the US military have shared more than 40 years of Super Bowl history. The relationship began in 1968 when US Air Force fighter jets performed a flyover above the city of Miami’s Orange Bowl Stadium at the opening of Super Bowl II, a ritual that has occurred every year subsequently³.

Since the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, however, military representation at—and involvement in—the Super Bowl has taken on new dimensions (see also Silk and Falcous, 2005). New relationships are emerging, and established relationships are intensifying, between the US’s premier sport event, the NFL who controls it and the various forces employed to keep it safe. Reflecting back on ‘shifting safety concerns’ over the years, NFL officials report that during Super Bowl I, ‘security problems had more to do with counterfeit tickets’ than violence of any kind.⁴ However, the first Super Bowl in the post-9/11 era reportedly used ‘every effective security method known to man’⁵ and, as discussed later, those methods escalate yearly. Super Bowl stadia, as well as symbolising a city’s urban status and late-capitalist generation ‘successes’, are now also positioned as ‘terrorist targets’ in need of protection. Stadia, such as Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, host of the 2012 Super Bowl, and Meadowland Stadium in New Jersey, host in 2014, are thus developed based not only on franchise owners’ demands for profit and control, but also on the NFL’s increasingly security-focused requirements for hosting a Super Bowl. In fact, despite hosting more Super Bowls (10) than any other city, NFL officials have warned Miami that they may never host another unless a $300 million (estimated) roof is added to Dolphins Stadium.⁶ The NFL’s requirements do not stop with the physical structure that houses the game. The requirements reach beyond the confines of the stadium into the urban spaces and communities in which the stadia are located,⁷ which are increasingly viewed as terrain in which military tactics and weaponry are necessary to controls crowds and prevent and respond to terrorists attacks (Graham, 2004; Schimmel, 2006; Warren, 2004).

‘Super Bowl security’ has included the installation of (permanent) surveillance cameras that extend from stadia into downtown communities, the (unannounced) use of biometric face-matching technology on fans attending the game, (covert) federal immigration dragnets arresting undocumented workers and game-day volunteers, and expanded powers for urban police forces. Planning for security now begins at least two years prior to game day. As many as 40 Event Operations Committees and sub-committees, comprising law enforcement officials from host cities together with representatives from federal agencies and arms of US military, private defence contractors and security technology firms, co-ordinate their efforts with league management consistent with its ‘NFL Guidelines for Stadium Security’. In the post-9/11 era, military flyovers are still a part of game-day tradition, but are now joined by active fighter jets from the Continental US North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, Black Hawk helicopters, Citation jets, Midnight Express interceptor boats, Northrop Grunnman HD-1 robots and tactical weapons and SWAT teams.⁸

The Present Study

In this paper, I examine the ways in which US news media (print and on-line) present these new dimensions of hosting a Super Bowl to the public. This project builds on my prior work (Schimmel, 2006) linking sport-related infrastructure development with US urban growth ideology and the militarisation of urban society. My examination is informed by the sociological literature on framing, which emerged from Goffman’s early (1974) writing on how frames produce meaning and organise experience. Tuchman (1978) and Gitlin (1980) expanded this focus to consider larger ideological and structural forces shaping journalists, their sources and the news organisations for which they work. I follow van Gorp’s constructionist approach that frames manifest themselves through ‘word choice, metaphors, exemplars, descriptions, arguments and visual images’ (van Gorp, 2007, p. 64). I am mindful of Carragee and Roefs’ (2004) argument that framing is both a ‘process and a practical accomplishment’ (p. 225) and that ‘framing processes need to be examined within the contexts of the distribution of political and social power’ (p. 214). Specifically, Garragee and Roefs emphasise the relationship between the meanings constructed through frames and the ideological interests served by those meanings. Thus, by extension, they suggest that one can examine the articulation of a hegemonic ideology through an analysis of news frames. They argue that the fact that certain frames are able to dominate news discourse is greatly due to the resources available to, and employed by, the frame’s sponsors. Citing Entman (1993, p. 53), they stress that frames in news stories reveal the ‘imprint of power’ because they register ‘the identity of actors or interests that competed to dominate the text’ (Carragee and Roefs, 2004, p. 220).

As I will illustrate, following the 9/11 attacks, Super Bowl news reports began routinely including details of security operations alongside the long-familiar reports about football players and teams as a ‘normal’ part of pre-game media publicity. Local newspapers published information regarding safety-related alterations to urban traffic patterns, sections of the city designated as ‘no go’ and restrictions of movement imposed by fencing and barricading structures. This discourse complicates the long standing and well-documented rhetoric that hosting the Super Bowl is good for the ‘city-as-a-whole’.

In the next sections, I examine: the emergence and maintenance of two co-existing frames (vulnerability and security/safety) in post-9/11 Super Bowl news media coverage; and, the implications of these frames in light of the still-extant pro-growth discourse surrounding the Super Bowl and other mega events, as well as in light of the larger issue of how media frames help to construct and maintain hegemonic ideology. Journalists’ employment of discourses of vulnerability and safety is unsurprising given the shocking events of 9/11 and the national mourning and reflection that ensued—but my interest here is the sustenance of these dual frames over time (i.e. the Super Bowl is an annual event) and, ultimately, their role in maintaining hegemonic ideology.

Method

Data Collection

Data collection and analysis for this project extended over an eight-month period between September 2009 and April 2010. Data were drawn from Internet posts and newspaper articles from US news media sources published between 2000 and 2010. There were two strategies for identifying information.

First, the search for articles, including editorials and op-ed pieces, from US newspapers was conducted utilising the LexisNexis database. This database includes articles that are published in local and state newspapers (for example, The St Petersburg Times), articles that are published by national-level newspapers (for example, USAToday) and articles that are picked up by local newspaper affiliates via wire services. For example, the LexisNexis database includes articles distributed by the Associated Press (AP), a wire service for local, state, national and international news. Local newspaper affiliates submit stories to AP’s wire service. Newspaper members within the state will only see a story that is submitted to a state wire; but a story that ‘moves’ nationally will be seen by AP’s 1700 newspaper members.⁹ Editors decide whether or not to publish an article received through the AP wire, evaluating each AP story relative to their subscribers’ interests. Many articles about the Super Bowl originate in the host city, but may appear in hundreds of newspapers across the US. Thus, LexisNexis is an invaluable database for studying local- to national-level discourse (see Muschert et al., 2009, on this point). Newspaper articles in the LexisNexis database were identified through a keyword search linking ‘Super Bowl’ with ‘security’, ‘9/11’, ‘terrorism’, ‘economic impact’, ‘urban development’ and ‘city image’. Only articles originating in the US and published in the US were selected. There were a total of 1090 articles that met these parameters.

Secondly, a Google search identified articles and posts that fell outside the LexisNexis database. National news and sports media such as MSNBC, CNN, Sports Illustrated and ESPN post Super Bowl articles, editorials and op-ed pieces on their websites. At the local level, articles about the Super Bowl are often posted on the websites of local (i.e. host cities) television affiliates. The Google search utilised the same keywords as the LexisNexis search but, in addition, the Google search was further refined by combining those keywords with the name of each city that hosted a Super Bowl from 2000 to 2010.¹⁰ There were a total of 44 articles that met these parameters.

Data Analysis

This research examined both how Super Bowl security is framed by the media and the sustenance of those media frames over time. Thus, data were arranged chronologically by year/host city, with one additional ‘general’ category. Two readers performed content analysis of each article. The two coders (myself and a graduate student whom I trained) met several times during the initial coding period to ensure a common coding strategy. Articles were first assigned to three categories: ‘security-related’, ‘economic or development-related’ or ‘both’. Secondly, articles were coded to determine if they were critical of the strategies used either to provide Super Bowl security or with the urban-development-related efforts used to justify hosting a Super Bowl. Thirdly, articles were further examined to identify content themes and the descriptive frames evoked by those themes. Identification of frames was non-discrete and one article may include multiple frames. Last, content themes and frames were compared across the years 2000–10.

Everything Changed on 11 September

Now it is America the Vulnerable.¹¹

When the first post-9/11 Super Bowl was played in New Orleans … people found themselves wondering if the next—and last—sound they would hear would be the Superdome blowing up.¹²

Following 9/11, a number of public spaces, arenas and events were deemed ‘target-worthy’ by both the news press and the US government, with the Super Bowl receiving notable emphasis. The first Super Bowl held after 9/11 was the first sporting event and only the 12th event overall to be designated by the White House as a ‘National Special Security Event’ (NSSE).¹³ Previous NSSE’s included presidential inaugurations, Democratic and Republican national conventions and United Nations Assemblies. Once designated, the Secret Service (the federal agency responsible for protecting US presidents) assumes a mandated role as the lead agency in providing protection during the NSSE and in ‘strengthening existing partnerships with federal, state, and local law enforcement and public safety officials’ (US Department of Homeland Security, 2003). Held in New Orleans, the 2002 Super Bowl featured 12 public agencies, 2000 security personnel including M16 rifle-carrying National Guard soldiers, bomb-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, an 8-foot high security fence around the stadium and a no-fly zone over the city.¹⁴

Beginning in 2002, journalists covering the Super Bowl duly noted distinctions between pre- and post-9/11 Super Bowl security procedures and fan experiences. For example, local safety officials were quoted as remembering that all Super Bowls before 9/11 ‘necessitated and generated a less sophisticated response’ as those were ‘simpler times for law enforcement’.¹⁵ As Warren (2002, 2004) points out, it would be misleading to assume that military and paramilitary operations did not take place in US cities prior to 9/11. Many changes in the US urban milieu were a continuation of trends already underway before 11 September but reinforced and aggravated by the new focus on terrorism (see also Graham, 2004; Marcuse, 2004). Some of the security procedures employed at post-9/11 Super Bowls, for example, were utilised a full decade prior in the 1991 Super Bowl, which took place in Tampa, Florida, during ‘Operation Desert Storm’ in the Persian Gulf. With images of war on US television screens and ‘worries about stadiums with capacity crowds being blown up’, Ira Berkow of the New York Times, reported that (then) NFL Commissioner Paul Taliabue consulted with government officials, who then went to the ‘highest levels of the defense Department, and possibly even to the President’, before deciding that since ‘we can’t be paralysed as a nation’, the Super Bowl should be played.¹⁶

Nine years after 11 September, the lurking danger of another attack remains and stadia are still seen as prime targets. The 2009 Associated Press report regarding ‘terrorism warning’ for stadia uses Baltimore resident James Orash to make this point. In reference to Baltimore’s Camden Yards Stadium, Orash is quoted as saying

If they’re going to hit us, there, that’s where they are going to hit us. They already took two buildings down once. Eventually, that’s what’s going to happen. If they hit us next time, it’s going to be big.¹⁷

The same story quotes an Indianapolis resident explaining why she still attends events in Conseco Fieldhouse: ‘Where are you going to go? What are you going to do? You just can’t go hide out in Canada for a month’. The massive security build-up that accompanies the Super Bowl is thus presented as the ‘new normal’

It is a little unnerving to see army trucks at a football game, but that’s what we have to do now to protect our country after 9/11. It’s going to be a way of life. Get used to it.¹⁸

The new normal is accomplished in journalistic accounts through reporters’ reliance on two dominant (and seemingly contradictory) frames: Super Bowl vulnerability and Super Bowl safety. These two frames are completely intertwined in media news coverage. For example, MSNBC news quotes Julie Torres, chief of the ATF’s Miami office and designated federal co-ordinator for Super Bowl security

It is the biggest event in the nation as far as a sporting event. It is vulnerable as far as any terrorist activity. We have to plan excessively so we can provide proper security.¹⁹

Post-9/11 Super Bowl reporting inevitably includes details of the ‘ultra-security’ procedures, episodic in the past, that have now become standard operating procedure in host cites. In a report prior to the 2008 Super Bowl, a Tampa reporter writes

Back in January 2001, the last time Tampa hosted a Super Bowl, ticket holders got through the stadium gates after a simple bag check and ticket scan. When Super Bowl returns to Tampa in 2009, fans will face those measures plus metal detectors and random pat downs before passing through a fence surrounding the stadium before even making it to the stadium gates. That’s one of the differences in Super Bowl security in the post-Sept. 11 world. ‘It’s a completely different ballgame,’ said Tampa Fire Chief Dennis Jones who assisted with security during Tampa’s 2001 Super Bowl.²⁰

A particular journalistic focus is the escalation of security measures over time. News reports describe the security build-up at each successive Super Bowl since 2001 as the ‘largest’ or ‘biggest’ or ‘most technologically advanced yet’. Although the NFL does not release complete security details to the public, the list of public agencies, private security vendors, equipment and security forces reported in the newspapers gets longer each year. For example, in 2002 New Orleans used ‘2000 law enforcement personnel’ and imposed an ‘8-mile no fly zone above the stadium’. For the Super Bowl 2006, Detroit was under a ‘30-mile no fly zone’ (which extended into Canada) and ‘include[ed] private security guards … upwards of 10 000 people [were] involved in security’. In 2010, planning for Super Bowl security involved 33 federal agencies, ‘eight more than the previous Super Bowl’. In almost every year, a ‘new technology’, often ‘used for the first time at a Super Bowl’, is discussed by reporters, whose accounts provide numerous examples of the hardware and machinery; robots and cameras; and equipment and technology that is employed in the spaces under (submarines, divers, sealed manhole covers), on (metal detectors, wireless video links, x-ray machines) and over (federal helicopters fitted with crowd-surveillance cameras) stadia and cities.

Framing the Super Bowl as a safe space during uncertain and dangerous times began at the first post-9/11 game and has continued ever since. For example

The NFL promised to make Super Bowl the safest spot on the planet … Michael James, the New Orleans U.S. secret-service chief who co-ordinated the massive effort, said ‘We’re looking in 360 degrees. We’re not protecting against a threat; we’re protecting against all potential threats, whether it’s Genghis Khan and his horde, Islamic terrorists or Bill Jim Bob’.²¹

Arizona Department of Public Safety Commander Michael Orose, the security team’s liaison with the NFL predicted that on game day the University of Phoenix Stadium would be the ‘most secure facility in the United States’.²²

It’s not hyperbole when Mitch Ahlerich, the NFL’s vice president for security, says that if you’re in the stadium watching the Super Bowl, you are in ‘one of the safest locations you can possibly be on Super Bowl Sunday in the United States of America’.²³

The established links made by news media between sports entrepreneurs and security entrepreneurs, and the increasing militarisation of the civil urban spaces around stadia, are routinely presented as welcomed by both stadium employees and by fans. As reporter Edward Iwata writes in the opening lines of a USA Today article

Imagine thousands of panicky sports fans or business people trapped in a stadium or convention hall, bloodied and dying from explosions, gunfire or a bioterrorist attack. The horrific scenario haunts facilities managers. But instead of cowering, they’re doing all they can to tilt the odds in their favor … sports facilities and convention centers are beefing up their security big time.²⁴

All week, police were visible everywhere, from fan-filled downtown streets to the coastal resort hideaways north of the city … .Safety concerns ‘have drifted through my head a couple of times’, said Gary Mezo of Tampa, in the Qualcomm stands with his wife, Nancy. ‘But now it’s warm and fuzzy. The police are all over the place. I like it’ … ‘I know the cameras are on us all the time. I think we’re safe’, said Brown, an airline customer agent used to post-9/11 scrutiny.²⁵

Welcome to the run-up for Super Bowl XXXIX, a potential target for terrorism that no longer seems consigned to the stuff of Tom Clancy novels and disaster-movie fiction. For some Jacksonville residents, the precautions are an eye-opening introduction to the post-9/11 world. The range of agencies contributing to security shows a who’s who of law enforcement … The mood in the city seemed unworried yesterday. Smiles were plentiful, the party apparatus was shifting into higher gear, and security guards at the stadium and media center had relaxed body language … ‘It just seems like everything is going to plan’, said Cathy Chambers, spokeswoman for the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce. ‘Everyone feels secure’.²⁶

As I will argue in the next section, however, journalists’ twin focus on vulnerability and safety obscures the larger implications of these enhanced security measures—the larger implications, one might say, of being ‘secure targets’. Without question, local government and police have leveraged the extra security demands of hosting Super Bowl to expand their capabilities of tracking and surveillance. In an example I have discussed elsewhere (Schimmel, 2006, p. 170), Jacksonville city officials contracted private security firm GTSI and its InteGuard Alliance partners, who had previously worked with the Pentagon, to install approximately 100 VPN encrypted video cameras throughout the city. This convergence between state and commercial surveillance echoes the trend described by Lyon (2001, 2003). As reported by Christa McEachern for varbusiness.com, initially deployed for Super-Bowl-related events, Jacksonville’s new system was designed to ‘expand’, ‘stay for decades’ and ‘go beyond the Super Bowl for other needs’²⁷ In post-9/11 era, the Super Bowl is both ‘vulnerable’ and ‘the safest place on earth’. And we are ‘privileged’ host communities and football fans, even as we are surveilled, digitally scanned, corralled, barricaded and patted-down.

Maintaining Legitimacy: Super Bowl Discourse and the ‘Imprint of Power’

Carragee and Roefs (2004, p. 222) instruct that the framing concept provides a way for us to examine ‘how the news media construct ideological meanings largely consistent with the interests of powerful elites’. Readers of Urban Studies will be well familiar with the growth discourse that accompanies the US model of urban development, where a fragmented and pluralistic urban system, market-oriented politics and a deep commitment to localism are, in fact, the national urban policy. Here, in the ‘capital of capitalism’ (see Kantor, 2010), fierce competition for capital investment and jobs produces winner and loser cities (and sections of cities) and glaring social inequalities. It has been well documented by urban studies scholars that an emphasis on ‘growth’ in public discourse about urban development routinely overshadows other potentially relevant public concerns (see for example, Elkin, 1987; Jonas and Wilson, 1999; Molotch, 1976). This does not mean that growth is necessarily the only local issue or that it is inherently the most important one, but rather that

Its privileged status should be understood as an accomplishment for those groups whose mobilization into politics is grounded in their place-based interests (Logan, et al., 1999, p. 89).

Sport studies scholars have elaborated on these points in a variety of ways and have provided empirical support that demonstrates the ways in which sport-related actors have become key members of urban growth coalitions (see for example, Bélanger, 2000; Friedman et al., 2004; Sage, 1993; Scherer, 2001; Schimmel, 2009; Smith and Ingham, 2003). One of the most significant contributions the sports studies literature has made to understanding US urban development has been in conceptualising the ways in which sport as a dominant cultural form is mobilised by pro-growth coalitions in their attempts to construct and maintain the hegemony of a pro-growth ideology.²⁸

Hosting a Super Bowl requires massive infrastructure development, massive funding and massive ideological support, especially if the public is called upon to provide the majority of the funding, which is almost always the case. Securing consensus for these efforts, and thus also for the pro-growth ideology in which they are embedded, is achieved in part through a discourse of ‘civic pride’, stadia as ‘job generators’, elevated ‘major league city’ status and ‘enhanced quality of life’. Over two decades of social science research refutes these claims about the supposed benefits to the ‘city-as-a-whole’ of sport infrastructure development.²⁹ Nevertheless, despite the fact that current levels of public finance in sport mega projects are fundamentally economically irrational, growth discourse remains dominant and public investment in major sport facility construction continues apace. Between 1990 and 2009, over $22 billion of US public money was spent to build sports stadia and arenas and to subsidise real estate developments in the immediate areas surrounding the facilities (Brown et al., 2004; Coakely, 2009, p. 580; Crompton, 2004; Delaney and Eckstein, 2003, 2007a).

In recent years there has been some opposition to the use of public money for stadium development: for example, in Minneapolis, San Francisco, San Jose and New York for new NFL stadia. We should be cautious, however, predicting that we have entered a new era of public resistance to such investments. In fact, in a multi-city analysis of urban power and stadium politics, Delaney and Eckstein (2007b) conclude that even in cities where it does exist, ‘grassroots opposition’ has little to do with slowing down stadium initiatives in most cities. Oppositional voices remain the exception rather than a new rule. During the same time-period as opposition occurred in the cities mentioned earlier, plans for increased taxes and public investments in sports stadia were announced in other cities such as Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Columbus. Urban élites, professional sports franchise owners and media professionals have tremendous power to shape the ways stadium initiatives and their justifications are presented to the public, which they often support with ‘economic impact studies’ commissioned by team owners (see Coakley, 2009, pp. 375–376 for an extended discussion of this point and a list of independent studies that counter these claims). In my examination of media reports of the Super Bowl between 2000 and 2010, I could not locate enough media sources that problematised either the military build-up or the economic investment associated with the game enough to produce an ‘oppositional frame’.³⁰ However, the escalating cost of purchasing a ticket to attend the game did receive some attention.³¹

Yet, as Gramsci (1971) originally theorised and Williams (1977) further elaborated, hegemony can never rest. Establishing ideological hegemony is always a process, always a struggle; resistance occurs, challenges are waged and, thus, hegemonic ideologies evolve over time as they incorporate and defuse opposition. Among the many changes wrought by 9/11 was the potential threat posed to this hegemonic pro-growth/pro-sport ideology by both real and perceived safety concerns surrounding major public events, especially those so closely associated with America and American patriotism. As noted, the incorporation of these two new journalistic frames (vulnerability and safety) in post-9/11 Super Bowl reporting is in some ways unsurprising. However, the potential threat of these new frames to the hegemonic ‘storyline’ of mega events was effectively defused. Rather than re-place the pro-growth discourse, these frames were effectively incorporated by journalists into the pro-growth discourse—both vulnerability and safety are now presented as contributing to the ‘fact’ that hosting a Super Bowl is good for the city-as-a-whole. Since ‘everything changed on September 11’ and since the deployment of state and corporate power is the ‘necessary’ (and thus uncontestable) response to protecting our ‘freedom’, there are few public outcries to the fact that massive military build-up now accompanies the Super Bowl and that it is an extraordinary incursion into urban civic life—it alters traffic patterns, restricts movement throughout the city and commerce in NFL ‘clean zones’ and subjects citizens to military operational and security procedures that they do not encounter anywhere else, including at US airports (the NFL even prohibits ‘running’ in NFL zones).

Using the Super Bowl as one example, Hale (2005) argues that in post-9/11 America, public discussion of freedom and the measures necessary to protect it has been ‘flipped on its head’. Whereas it once was common to hear warnings that ‘overzealous government surveillance would cripple freedom’, now the notion that ‘government surveillance will enable freedom’ by preventing citizens from living in fear of terrorism is commonly argued (Hale, 2005, p. 152; original emphasis; see also Lyon, 2001, 2003; Woodward, 2001). Hale discusses the deployment of FaceTrac™ technology in January 2001 in Tampa, Florida, at which the faces of all fans attending the game were—without their knowledge—digitally scanned and matched against a database, shifting them according to their criminal histories. When this became public knowledge, the America Civil Liberties Union immediately protested against the ‘Snooper Bowl’ technology as a possible violation of the US Constitutional right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Post-9/11, Super Bowl ‘advanced security technology’ has become a recurring major theme of news reports (a point not made by Hale) and yet there have been very few challenges to the use of such technologies. Elisabeth Anker discusses this point in her analysis of the ‘melodramatic’ televised news coverage of the 11 September attacks, arguing that America was defined by ‘freedom’ and that subsequent state actions to ‘protect the America people’ therefore seemed an ‘inescapable part of American identity’ (Anker, 2005, p. 23). Effective hegemony, as Gramsci explained, is not the wielding of power but rather the winning of consensus. Hegemony naturalises a social order in ‘common sense’ ways that discount the possibility for social transformation.

The on-going claim that ‘everything changed’ on 9/11 reminds us constantly of the violence of the attacks and of our continued vulnerability. Fear and uncertainty regarding when ‘they’ are going to ‘hit us next’ becomes the new normal. The annual Super Bowl event, the cities and stadia that host it and we, as football fans and residents of urban communities, are portrayed as being under constant threat. In this discourse, both the city and the event are, in the military parlance, ‘target-rich environments’, offering tantalising opportunities for ‘terrorists’ to strike at the very heart of the ‘American way of life’. The familiar and certain imagery of football and patriotism are thus combined with the new imagery of strange foreign enemies and the uncertainty of post-9/11 America. As Gray and Wyly summarise, numerous capital, political and legal resources ‘were invested in the ideological construction of a suddenly vulnerable American Homeland’ (Gray and Wyly, 2007, p. 329). In US cities, they argue, increasing aspects of ‘everyday life and death now take place in the certainty of uncertainty in an endless American war on terror’ (p. 330). The massive security build-up attached to the Super Bowl is thus presented as ‘good’ for us. (In fact, both the escalating economic expenditures devoted to major sports infrastructure and the intensifying militarisation of urban space justified by the need for ‘security’ have led to measures that contribute to downgrading the quality of life for urban residents; see Marcuse, 2004; Schimmel, 2006). Yet by effectively incorporating new vulnerability and security frames into extant pro-growth ideologies, the status of host cities is enhanced—the Super Bowl confirms our city’s importance; the ‘eyes of the world’ are on us and we have the military protection to prove it.

In their discussion of political power and news reports, Carragee and Roefs (2004) remind us of the potential for ‘frame sponsors’ to direct the perception and the frame selection of journalists as they report events. The NFL has enormous economic and cultural resources to promote specific ways that news stories about its operations are framed. Without question, the NFL has a large stake in the security—both in reality and in public perception—of the Super Bowl. It has an interest in security ‘on the ground’ that protects investments. It has an interest in the security/safety frame ‘in the news’ that portrays the League’s security deployments as welcomed. That its security guidelines have been awarded highest certification status (a status it shares with aviation giant Boeing among other corporations) by the US government is an obvious financial benefit to the League for, as NFL’s chief of security states ‘An attack from a terrorist organisation could put us out of business’.³² Yet in addition, public perception that its stadia are ‘terrorist-ready’ protects the NFL from the possibility that consumers will stay home, too fearful to attend games, or that urban élites will de-escalate Super Bowl bidding wars out of fear of public opposition. Journalists write the news, they frame the issues, but their ‘interpretations are shaped, in part, by discourses external to news organizations’ (Carragee and Roefs, 2004, p. 219). Ultimately, incorporating the post-9/11 frames of vulnerability and safety/security into the dominant discourse of pro-growth/pro-sport maintains capitalist hegemony.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Special appreciation is expressed to Madeline B. Davis for research assistance and to C. Lee Harrington for comments made on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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