What we saw: The story television told about the events of September 11.
O'Rourke, William
MEDIA William O'Rourke WHAT WE SAW How September 11 looked on TV I usually avoid the vice of early morning TV. I listen to the radio, which has become, by default, the generally...
...The attacks were over quickly and accomplished by mysterious forces, faceless men, without clear rhyme or reason...
...But for the last few weeks the country has learned where the "-stans" are on the map of the world, and more about Islam and its subsets than 99 percent of us ever knew before...
...A memorial Mass was hastily scheduled for the afternoon...
...The tape of the second plane coming at the tower was run again and again...
...Images, except for traumatic ones, are water off a duck's back...
...He is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and a weekly political columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times...
...Recently, we had been staring mindlessly at the front door of Congressman Gary Condit's building and, in the not so distant past, at O.J.'s white Bronco, and Monica Lewinsky's black beret...
...He was in Florida, at one of his many visits to a primary school, confirming what viewers knew...
...The precedent for the TV coverage of September 11 was not the Gulf War, or even Oklahoma City...
...At the University of Notre Dame, where I teach, classes were canceled...
...The World Trade Center/Pentagon attack is creating one even larger, but the media's response remains the same...
...Then it was reported that there was some sort of fire or explosion in Washington...
...And though what is merely told trails fitfully behind, more of that will catch up, in time...
...But television has performed a service during the first dreadful days...
...it is the great scavenger, evolutionarily equipped to absorb whatever passes by...
...It had been no small plane...
...At times, they have been raw and uncensored...
...Commonweal 21 October 26,2001 Passengers using their cell phones aboard the doomed airliners were providing most of the news to the country...
...Two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack...
...But, it is no longer the lone gunman, it is a gang...
...Television is a passive medium and it often points its cameras as single-mindedly as Andy Warhol did decades ago, staring mindlessly at the Empire State Building...
...Everything was, in the way our media amplifies, speeding up...
...It is clear, regardless of whatever intellectual failings Bush may have, he has learned how to read a TelePrompTer...
...The paradox of our oral-visual age is that, as more is made visible to a wide audience, what is kept from view becomes all the more controlled...
...And George W. Bush, like Rudy Giuliani in New York, finally recast himself as a national leader, delivering a wellcrafted speech to Congress during the week after the attack, declaring a new war on terrorism unlike any other...
...On September 11, shortly after 8 a.m...
...Kennedy's assassination created a deep psychological shift in America...
...I presumed everyone would be evacuating them...
...That has been the media's underlying narrative...
...There is no reason that Bush II won't do as well as Bush I did during the Gulf War in hobbling the press...
...Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With...
...The inclination of the nation as a whole is to take gut courses, the arts and entertainment curriculum, preferably with heavy doses of sex and death...
...I listen to the radio, which has become, by default, the generally preferred intellectual medium, providing more information per minute more densely, stripped as it is of the crutch of visual images...
...The kamikaze hijackers have been called many things, but foremost they were assassins...
...Now that military strikes in Afghanistan have begun, the flow of information will be severely checked...
...The mourning had begun, even before events had sorted themselves out...
...Amateurs and professionals are often equal in this new age of media...
...But, unfortunately, some visual images are the story...
...I stood watching and then saw a large jet curving toward the second tower and heard, not really hearing, since the sight was so stunning, a Fox News male voice say something like, "Here comes another one...
...It was unthinkable that the towers' structural supports wouldn't have been cut or damaged beyond their tolerances...
...Shortly thereafter, President George W. Bush was shown, obviously shaken, standing on a school's stage, the backdrop's childish decorations adding to the unease...
...I heard that the first tower had collapsed...
...Following that trail, we have been left to investigate murky underworlds, caves in Afghanistan...
...The towers falling on live TV were like Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald on live television, a coda so final and devastating that it elevated the event even further into the realm of the fantastic and mythical...
...then I saw the second tower fall, a dark flower blooming in reverse, sinking back into the earth...
...There was no film of what had occurred, just the smoky aftermath...
...Commonweal 22 October 26,2001...
...There it was, on the screen, Tower One burning like a cheap candle, smoke billowing upwards...
...Two weeks after September 11, the satirical paper The Onion produced this headline: "U.S...
...The Bush administration is calling it war and has begun to fight it that way, but it is not so much war as a search for killers and what created them...
...What changes is what we are currently studying...
...Both towers were now aflame and I said to myself that those towers would be coming down soon...
...But the planes hitting the towers (of course, more film was eventually found, more views provided) are embedded in our collective memories...
...What was murdered was the self-image of America that we had cherished...
...When TV, largely thanks to cable, went to a twenty-four-hour, sevendays-a-week existence (not, strange as it seems, that many years ago), it just needed to stare longer...
...It was assassination on a scale never before seen...
...News is now a nationwide cram session, all-nighters for the general public...
...The FAA had grounded all the planes in the country...
...Safe, inviolate, strong...
...Television doesn't invent anything...
...Television did what it does best—it shows...
...It was older, more resonant, than that—the assassination of John F. Kennedy...
...Some of the women removed their high heels to run more quickly...
...The parallels are everywhere, including the fact that the networks and cable news went commercial-free for four days, just as television broadcasting did when JFK was killed...
...The two towers being struck, along with the Pentagon, had the emotional force of Kennedy being shot...
...There were reports of more hijackings and of a plane crash in Pennsylvania...
...I pictured many things at once, but I put down my razor and walked into the living room and turned on the television...
...In its headlong pursuit of images, it has given us unforgettable mental pictures...
...Like Lee Harvey Oswald, apocalyptic motives may be discerned, full of hatred and grandiosity...
...William O'Rourke's most recent book is Campaign America 2000: The View from the Couch (Preview Port Editions...
...It has had a story as large as its appetites...
...The TV coverage these past weeks has been not necessarily cathartic, but absolutely necessary...
...That sight was galvanizing, because in their uniforms the event, at least, looked military...
...Then we saw the White House itself being evacuated...
...It was now more than clear this was no accident...
...And the nation's and media's response have all the earmarks of postassassination behavior...
...We saw uniformed personnel running across a bridge...
...in the Midwest, a sonorous male voice during NPR's "Morning Edition" said, rather hesitantly, "It's been reported a plane has struck the World Trade Center...
Vol. 128 • October 2001 • No. 18
