But television has never shown us anything like an airliner slamming into the tallest building in New York City-at the instant it happens. And then, almost before we could comprehend what we’re seeing, images that were almost as terrifying: the Pentagon smashed and smoldering like a fallen souffle, terrified employees sprinting out of the White House, one building of the World Trade Center collapsing onto itself, followed by the second.
Television doesn’t always get tragedy right. A slow-speed chase will preoccupy it for hours, and it will morbidly linger over almost any murder scene. But the media’s work on the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington did something we’d come to think was nearly impossible after the disastrous coverage of the presidential election, the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy case and the like. It showed that television can indeed provide a public service to the country.
Sure, the media got some things wrong. Early reports of eight hijacked planes, including four that had been unaccounted for, certainly frayed nerves unnecessarily. A bulletin about an airliner that crashed into Camp David also proved false. But by and large, television got the story right, in content, tone and quantity. In large part, that may have been because so many journalists found themselves in the middle of the story as it unfolded. ABC’s John McWethey was at work in the Pentagon when the plane crashed there, and he filed the most comprehensive reports from there. Ron Insana, CNBC’s financial-news anchor, showed up at the NBC studios with the dust of the explosion still on his shoulders and head and told Matt, Katie and Tom about life in the Wall Street area.
Some of the day’s most powerful reporting came from MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield, who apparently lives in downtown New York. She told a dramatic tale of being engulfed in a cloud of debris so thick that she had to kick in two glass doors to an apartment building just to escape from the street and keep from suffocating. On some days, stories like that might seem like reportorial muscle-flexing. But Banfield, her trademark eyeglasses nowhere in sight, left the safety of that building and proceeded to spend the entire day on the street, talking to fleeing New Yorkers, reporting on fires still burning, running as more buildings collapsed. More than anyone else, she was the eyes and ears of tragedy in what is ominously now called “ground zero.”
Like the images of planes flying into buildings, it was a day filled with familiar sights in unfamiliar places. The broadcast networks made valuable use of their cable empires. Viacom ran CBS on VH1 and, later, MTV. Disney took the news from ABC, which it owns, and put it on sister station ESPN. AOL Time Warner piped its CNN feed into TNT. We’ve been hearing for years how corporate “synergy”-a euphemism for a few conglomerates buying up all the news outlets in the world-would be good for us. Finally, we’ve seen some evidence. To their enormous credit, some cable networks-including QVC and the Food Network-pulled their programming entirely and simply ran a statement expressing their concern over the days events.
For once, television in general erred on the side of caution, of showing less rather than too much. Despite what must be hundreds and hundreds of corpses in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania, the networks rightfully kept their grisly images from a shellshocked public. One exception: CBS, which appeared to be the only network to air video of someone plunging from the top of the World Trade Center. “Some people gave way to desperation,” the reporter told us. We could have done without that feeble insight.
Not surprisingly, the networks did seem to run out of steam at times. At about 2 p.m. EDT, after the towers had collapsed and the immediate threat appeared to have dissipated, TV began to turn to in-studio talking heads. It was a necessary shift, as viewers sought to put the day’s unimaginable events into perspective. But the networks sometimes seemed to forget that the tragedy continued to develop. It wasn’t until Fox News reported at 4:30 that other buildings in the World Trade Center were still burning and threatened to collapse did we realize that the aftermath of the tragedy was far from over.
CNN, on the other hand, reminded us what it means to be a full-service news network. Though he sometimes seemed trapped on a patio, it was a smart move to put somber anchor Aaron Brown on the network’s terrace somewhere over New York with Manhattan, looking like a giant lit cigar, spread out below. The rest of the TV anchors, who did a generally excellent job of staying calm yet informative, remained inside. CNN was also the only network to report on the ground from Afghanistan, where explosions broke out at around 6 p.m. EDT, as well as the first network to bring us coverage of Ariel Sharon in Israel and a Taliban spokesman. And Paula Zahn, the high-profile, high-gloss refugee from Fox, fit seamlessly into CNN’s comprehensive, workmanlike coverage.
On the other hand, ABC’s Diane Sawyer looked entirely too coifed and cool to be doing man-on-the-street work in the late afternoon. With reporters on every network covered in soot and debris, Sawyer seemed like she’d just dropped in after leaving the hairdresser. Still, it seems churlish to keep a scorecard about who beat whom in the network news scramble. Sept. 11, 2001, was quite possibly biggest news day since the advent of television. For the first time in a while, we were happy it was there.
