Slashdot Mirror
A Tale of Two Media:Tragedy and Images
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.
The Middle East Wire is very interesting read. I've especially enjoyed their Commentary and Interviews. For example, here is one very good article...
Jordanian Perspective about Attacks on America
Middle East News Online
By Edna Yaghi for Middle East News Online
Posted Wednesday September 12, 2001 - 06:00:52 PM EDT
While Israeli bulldozers continue to destroy Palestinian homes in the Beit Hanina district of Arab East Jerusalem and while 2 Palestinians in Nablus were killed and 20 injured as Israeli tanks shelled a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin, Tuesday, September 11, 2 hijacked planes cut through the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and a third plane dove done into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
These attacks, the worst ever on the U.S. mainland in modern history, struck at the heart of the American people and paralyzed the entire nation.
Thousands of innocent people may have lost their lives in a most tragic way. Surely, no peace loving person can condone the killing of civilian people regardless of what race, nationality or creed they possess.
Yet, America's blind and unconditional support for Israeli atrocities and crimes against the Palestinian people, plus the ongoing American assault against the Iraqis was bound to boomerang sooner or later. It is, after all, American made weapons that demolish, bomb, cut down and shoot Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. American planes are the ones that also randomly bomb Iraqi civilian targets.
One people are no more human than any other. As Americans grieve for the loss of their loved ones, so do Palestinians grieve for the senseless deaths of their people and the same goes for the Iraqis as well.
For nearly a year, the Palestinian people have been under Israeli siege. Every day Palestinians die in their homes, going to school, going to work, trying to get through an Israeli checkpoint or on the streets where they are open targets for Israeli tanks and snipers.
Every day Iraqi babies die because of the sanctions. Every month the death toll of Iraqi children surpasses 5,000. And George Jr. has taken over the job of bombarding Iraqis by air to make sure that their misery continues.
For the first time in a long time, the American people experienced how it feels to be attacked. People ran in desperate fear through the streets of New York City. Some hid behind cars. Others could not escape death.
America will never be the same again. The attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon have proved that the greatest and only super power in the world is not invincible. No mater who is responsible for the attacks on America and not matter how viciously the Americans choose to retaliate, American foreign policy is what brought this all on. Perhaps this is the beginning of the decline of the great American Empire.
All good and bad things eventually come to an end. Americans should become aware of just how detrimental their foreign policy is and for a change, stand on the side of justice instead of supporting injustice all over the world.
That would be "victim".
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Not me. Speak the truth, Jon - the Pretender in Chief looked like what he is, a scared little man all out of his depth. Guiliani, on the other hand, impressed even me - and before this I wouldn't have pissed on him if he was on fire.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Show no mercy! Drop Magick card decks on them!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I can see it now.
Harry Potter and The Prophet's Stone.
I'm not trying to make this grim situation humorous, I'm just mocking the idea of converting fundamentalist whackos to the religion of Capitalism.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yeah, he should have taken a page from the US's book and bombed hospitals and schools. Done wonders for us.
I call your bluff, name one time that the US targeted a civilian education or medicinal establishments.
But running and hiding from airliners is just bizarre behaviour, there's no other word for it. Was he expecting a stealth 767? "OK, George, you can come out from under your desk now, somebody's here to see you."
When he did get brave enough to stick his nose out, he toured the pentagon where 200 hundred soldiers died, not New York where thousands died.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Some friendly advice - read a comment before you insult its poster, ok?
I didn't criticize the Pretender in Chief for not being available to the media. I'm saying that when he did appear, when he spoke to the public, he looked like the overwhelmed doofus he is.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Kill em ALL!
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani