[Nettime-bold] The Media: As an Attack Unfolds, a Struggle to Provide Vivid Imag es to Homes

[John Armitage <john.armitage@unn.ac.uk>]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
SEP 12, 2001

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/national/12MEDI.html?pagewanted=print

The Media: As an Attack Unfolds, a Struggle to Provide Vivid Images to
Homes

By FELICITY BARRINGER and GERALDINE FABRIKANT

Television's broadcast networks and many of its cable channels - both news
and entertainment -
scrapped their regular schedules yesterday. Radio stations took live
television news feeds. Two
dozen newspapers published special editions and Web sites threw out their
advertising and in some cases
stripped down to basic text and still images to help their overtaxed
computers handle a demand for news
unlike any they had experienced.

Between the moment when perplexed morning news broadcasters began fielding
calls from Greenwich
Village residents who saw a low- flying plane crash into One World Trade
Center and the moment more
than an hour later when New York's twin towers crumbled into Roman candles
of smoky debris, the
country's media outlets geared up to become the public stage of a national
emergency.

By noon, all four major television networks had agreed to share video
images. By midafternoon, almost all
of AOL Time Warner's cable channels, like TBS and TNT, were carrying CNN;
Viacom's CBS News
feed was being carried by Viacom's music channels, VH1 and MTV; and Peter
Jennings of ABC News
was appearing not just on his network, but on Disney's ESPN channel and all
ABC radio stations.

Most of the networks used variations of the title adopted by CNN: America
Under Attack.

Images of billowing smoke from lower Manhattan and the low, smoldering
profile of the Pentagon, hit, like
the Trade Center towers, by a hijacked commercial jetliner, were dominant on
all networks. Referring to
the unusual agreement to share images among the bitterly competitive news
divisions of the networks and
CNN, the Fox News president, Roger Ailes, said: "All the networks decided
that this is a national
emergency. We're not keeping score today."
Nor were they making much money, as they largely scrapped commercial
advertising.

In Washington, where the downtown had become a ghost town after the federal
government was shut
down, delivery trucks for The Washington Post headed for suburban 7- Eleven
stores carrying a special
edition dominated by a two-inch headline, "Terror Hits Pentagon, World Trade
Center," with a lead
editorial headlined "War." Special editions were also published by The Los
Angeles Times, The Chicago
Tribune, The Newark Star-Ledger, The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina,
The Austin
American-Statesman in Texas, not to mention small dailies like The LaCrosse
Tribune in Wisconsin.

Traffic at news Web sites soared, with 10 times or more the usual number of
users trying to log on,
clogging the Internet and slowing response time.

Because New York was not just ground zero of the opening attack but also the
heartland of the media
industry, some of the most dramatic early accounts were from correspondents
working at or near their
homes. Don Dahler, an ABC News correspondent who covered recent civil wars
in Africa, was getting
dressed for work in his third-floor apartment in Tribeca, perhaps half a
mile from the World Trade Center,
when he heard the first plane hit.

"I heard what is a very familiar sound anywhere else in the world, in war
zones," Mr. Dahler said. "It
sounded to me like a missile, a high- pitched scream and a roar followed by
an explosion, my mind was
telling me it's a missile. Then I saw this gaping wound in the World Trade
Center. I called into `Good
Morning' immediately and started reporting," standing on his sixth-floor
rooftop with a cellular telephone.

Mr. Dahler, just one of the network's sources, was not on the air when he
felt the first of the two towers
collapse. "When it collapsed I could feel a rumble, and I tried to interrupt
to say that something was
happening right before my eyes," he said. "The building collapsed. I was
telling them it looks like its coming
down, it looks like it's coming down. They switched to me right after it had
fallen."

If there were a few stutter-steps like that, it was not surprising. It was
one of the rare instances when
television brought disaster into American homes in real time.

The radical changes in the technology of news delivery, however, along with
the quality of video imagery
gave most of the day's news broadcasts the feeling of an epic disaster
movie.

The only genuinely grainy imagery came from the most advanced and portable
equipment: CNN's satellite
video phones, which allowed that network alone to televise a news conference
with the spiritual leader of
the Taliban government in Afghanistan, the country that harbors the
headquarters of the accused terrorist,
Osama Bin Laden. By evening, the same equipment was showing tracer fire and
explosions in Kabul.

Beyond the vivid pictures, the reporting included a number of mistakes borne
of rumors that sprang up
throughout the day. CNN reported that another plane was headed for the
Pentagon. Fox News reported
that the State Department was on fire. CBS News reported that a second
airplane tried to attack the
Pentagon. All the reports were later corrected.

The closest major news organization to the scene was The Wall Street
Journal, whose main offices nearby
were evacuated at 9:15 a.m. Reporters and editors worked from home or other
Dow Jones offices from
New Jersey to Hong Kong to prepare a Wednesday issue.

Talk radio shows, which sometimes feed on inflammatory commentary, were
unusually low key yesterday,
with hosts sympathizing or eliciting information from eyewitnesses rather
than goading.

On the New York radio dial, reporters at news stations struggled to describe
the breadth of the
destruction. And talk radio hosts - sometimes after ominous music played in
the background - covered
subjects from airport security to retaliation.

The radio reports played a larger role than usual in bringing news to the
city, since the antennas that
broadcast the signals of WABC and WNBC were destroyed along with the twin
towers. New Yorkers
without cable television - about 30 percent to 35 percent of the city's
viewers - could only get WCBS,
whose antenna is on the Empire State Building.

The radio journalists reverted to the techniques of Edward R. Murrow's
wartime broadcasts from London
to make the story visual. On WCBS-AM, the journalist Peter Haskell reported
that ambulances were lined
up "as far as the eye can see on both sides of the West Side Highway." On
WINS, the reporter Steve
Kastenbaum said: "It looks like the entire city is just walking home. The
Brooklyn Bridge is a sea of people
coming off the F.D.R. Drive, walking down from Midtown, walking across the
East River to their
destinations."

Elsewhere in the country, some stations used the event to set up a dialogue
with listeners. A Christian radio
station in Los Angeles, KFSG- FM, canceled commercial advertising yesterday
until 6 p.m. and used its
afternoon hours to take calls from listeners who wanted to talk about the
attacks.


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