A Tale of Two Media:Tragedy and Images

Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan -- Tuesday morning definitely marked the passage from one time to another. The Information Age is defined by images, not e-mail, and your kids and others will be asking you all of your lives where you were when the plane crashed into the World Trade Center and burst into that orange fireball and the buildings fell down. I can't help but think that this was the day when computer animation became reality. One of the most striking things about this story is the marked evolution of two media -- online and off. Politicians and pundits own the second, individual humans the first. It was odd how cool and natural all of the reporters and anchors were. Everybody said they were shocked, but nobody seemed to be. There was a lot of grave talk about how things will change forever, but most of the coverage was curiously remote and detached. Thanks to some local cops and firemen from my town, I just got to within a couple blocks of what the volunteers call "Ground Zero" -- the shockingly small pile of rubble that is all that is left of two of the biggest buildings on the planet. It's the perfect place to write about how the media -- new and old -- handled this story.(more)

For me, the images down here will be the barges that chugged out of Battery Park carrying corpses bound for vast New Jersey morgues, the smoke and smell and noise, the gaunt and hollow-eyed looks of the cops and firemen digging desperately for their buddies with their bare hands, the relatives on their knees praying all over the place, the video of the couple jumping off one of the towers holding hands, crushed police cars and fire trucks, many with bodies inside, the distant figure on the water everybody said was the U.S.S. George Washington, an aircraft carrier sent to protect New York harbor, and the soldiers with machine guns that are guarding major roadways and airports.

Big stories like this now are covered two ways -- online and off. The former draws millions to websites like CNN's and USA Today's, and new kind of sites like this one. Bloggers and others put up sites so that people could describe what was happening in their own words. People in apartment complexes and news sites posted accounts, and looked for relatives and housing.

As interesting as the Net is -- some of the best and most graphic video of the tragedy was popping up all over the Web -- and as idiosyncratic, the dominant medium when stuff like this happens is still TV, by a wide margin. Hour by hour, TV culls and culls until it finds a handful of quickly familiar images burned into our national and global consciousness. In our time, somebody has a videocam aimed at everything all the time, and within minutes the pictures show up everywhere, on television and the Net. Almost nothing is our culture goes unrecorded or unobserved any longer. The immediacy was as astonishing as the images were unbelievable.

By nightfall, CNN, MSNBC and the networks were moving away from the dramatic video and the indescribable scenes of wreckage and carnage and calling in the policy wonks and propellerheads who hide out in Washington caves until something like this happens. The focal point of all the airtime then shifted from the devastation in New York to the parsing and analyzing of the political, governmental and intelligence communities. For future reference, that may be a good time to turn off the tube and get online, the medium of individual stories, feelings and experiences.

When things like this happen, TV, much more than the Net or the Web, reveals whether leaders rise or fall to the occasion. Mayor Guiliani of New York clearly rose to the tragedy. President Bush, sticking to his cautious sing-song monotone, fled to various bunkers and seemed to shrink throughout the day. Guiliani got bigger by the hour. Defying advice that he hide out until the shooting stopped, he rushed to the scene, was nearly killed, calmed the city down and took charge of the clean-up and rescue. Bush got on his best suit and stuck to the prompter. At least that was the image that TV brought of us of these two very different leaders.

If you love New York, your heart will break when the smoke clears. Something about the city is busted for good, no matter what the mayor says. The damage is not describable, and surely hasn't been captured on TV. There are dead firemen, cops and office workers all over the rubble, everybody is saying, and the dust is so thick even the cadaver dogs are getting sick. Five techs with thermal imaging probes were retreating uptown, their sensitive equipment almost useless in the mud (caused by water poured on the still-burning fires) and smoke and dirt.

The buzz from the cops and reporters standing around is that the death toll will be horrible -- between two and three thousand -- but nowhere near the much higher figures feared yesterday. It seems that many people did get out, calling wives and cops from their cell phones as they went, as did some of the doomed passengers on the hijacked planes. (And a number of the people buried under the towers are still calling for help on their cells. Others got calls from spouses and friends telling them to get out.)

Across the street, a group of structural engineers were reassuring reporters that the towers collapsed of their own structural weakness, the steel melting from the fires, the buildings designed to collapse inward -- rather than fall down -- to save lives.

With their usual hubris, reporters and politicians were promising us that everything was going to change. But if the attacks demonstrate nothing else, it is the folly of that kind of thinking. Terrorists change too, and for all the high-tech equipment pouring into Manhattan, sometimes there isn't a thing we can do to stop them.

Comments

World Trade Center attack - an absurd Liberal myth

[Anonymous Coward]

It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have allowed themselves to be so swiftly deluded by a fraudulent fabrication of such ridiculous proportions. The very idea that not one, but two jumbo jets would crash themselves into a famous New York skyscraper -- in broad daylight with vigilant air-traffic controllers and tight airport security watching every move of every craft in the air -- is laughable. Furthermore, it is a horrendous affront to the world-renowned intellect and common sense of the American people. The fact that anyone could actually believe this is evidence that the Liberals -- after decades of waging war against intellectual integrity and honesty -- have finally ripped the few remaining, tenuous strands of control of our educational system from full-blooded, hard-working, God-fearing Americans.

As such wonderful documentaries as The Siege have so articulately exposed, the Liberal masterminds in Berkeley and their toadies throughout the nation have been silently waging war against the American people and their God-given rights to protect themselves, their worship, their family values, and their hard work. Much of this has been conducted under the guise of preventing "terrorism", a meaningless word engineered by radical left-wingers specifically to bring fear into the heart of honest Americans. Think about it -- can you remember any reference to so-called "terrorism" that occurred before Liberals invaded our government offices in the last decade? Of course you can't, because despite whatever the revisionist histories may tell you, there is no mention of any "terrorism" in classic literature before 1980. Only then did the neo-Marxists invent such absurd figures as Timothy McVeigh and Osama Bin Laden in order to legitimize their anti-freedom agenda, drowning the spirit of the American people in a blatantly-engineered machine of fear and mourning for "victims" of these "terrorist attacks".

In fact, it should be incredibly obvious that the concept of a 110-story building even being built, much less two, is a clear and obvious fraud. No documentation of these "twin towers" existed before a "terrorist attack" occured on the previously-nonexistent pair of skyscrapers on September the 11th. Due to this hoax being perpetrated by the Liberal-controlled media, suddenly people all over the world mourned the loss of thousands of people who had not existed before. Innocent men and women, brainwashed by the left-wing education institutions, gave firsthand accounts of losing relatives they never had until the "attack" happened.

But the most outrageous aspect of this hoax is the "Pentagon" -- a government office fabricated especially for this purpose. Liberal media claims this imaginary building to be "the center of America's defense system", although obviously an organization as proud and God-fearing as the United States Military would never think to station themselves in a building of five sides, so obviously close to the pentagram, mark of Lucifer himself. It is insulting to the nation's intelligence that eight hundred members of the world's proudest institution would be made to meet their Lord by something as graceful, efficient, and secure as our country's fine aviation system.

Don't let the devious tricks of the Liberals allow you, a citizen of the greatest nation this Earth has ever or will ever know, to surrender your freedoms. Any lesser nation would have succumbed to their wills long ago, and indeed the socialist states in Europe already have. It is only the superior resilience, pride, and intellect of America that has allowed it to withstand the constant threat of Liberal control.

Is this Katz?

[Anthony Boyd]

My God, Katz, is this you? This is a well-done article, I think. You made good sense, you made good points, you even sounded reasonable. I guess something has changed.

Re:Bush's response

[ethereal]

Some people just don't get the fact that some information HAS to be kept private until such a time that it can be discussed without endangering the lives of people in the field.

Oh, come on. When are you people going to realize that security through obscurity doesn't work?

:)

And Katz is STILL smoking plastic flakes

[jafac]

or something containing noxious, harmful, dangerous, brain-damaging chemicals.

I mean, what the FUCK is a sing-song monotone?

Re:Terrible News Reporters

[pipeb0mb]

someone asked the ceo of american airlines:

"HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS BEFORE?"

fuck..what an idiot.

wordplay

[Anonymous Coward]

the following are anagrams of "osama bin laden":

a damn alien S.O.B.
a lesbian nomad
bean sad oilman
blonde asia man
a salami nob end
a salad bin omen
a slain abdomen
animal bed son
be a oil sandman
abandon a slime
a salina mob den
a asia blond men
a annal bid me so
i'm on a nasal bed
a bad menial son
a bad man lesion
bad man is alone
a blade man is on
a bald man is one
a bland sea i'm on
a able man do sin
a lebanon midas
almond is a bean
a damn bean silo
i'm on a land base
lend mao a basin
a bias man led on
a lamb inane sod
a slab made in on
a bam lead in son
a ideal man snob
a denial man sob
a inland sea mob
a mad insane lob
a sand alien mob
be a sand oilman
mean salon bid
a slain man bode
a main salon bed
a man an bed soil
banana model is
baa sand oilmen
baa snail demon
amoeba land sin
so die banal man
madonna is able
bad seaman loin
bad animal nose
bad alien mason
bad insane loam
bland sea amino
lesbian and mao
bemoan sad nail
nab idea salmon
nab damn sea oil
ban domain sale