Media Events

Media events are incidents or processes with high news value and strong public resonance that have been turned into spectacles by the media and have a sustained effect on public communications. The first manned moon landing in 1969, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the death of Pope John Paul II in 2006, and the Olympic Games in any year are examples of media events that are offered to the public as outstanding incidents of general interest. On the basis of this conceptual understanding, originally developed largely by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, media events may be characterized in the object, time, and social dimensions as follows:

In the object dimension, the media event is presented as ...