Casual
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Casual THEIR SHINING MOMENT "Some idiot just flew his plane into the World ^^ Trade Center," a friend V^/ told me over the phone, so I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane go into the...
...also of body parts flung across the rubble...
...The car bomb outside the State Department was a rumor that got too far...
...No gesture could seem exaggerated...
...Most networks, both broadcast and cable, declined to air the footage as it came in...
...I expend a large amount of professional energy snobbing television news, making fun of the people who practice it and the people who consume it, its bathos and hyperbole and its monstrous capacity to trivialize the essential and aggrandize the trivial...
...other errors tainted the information flow throughout the day...
...Diane Sawyer went back to biting her lip, and Katie pushed the hair from her eyes and looked as if she might cry...
...The evening news broadcasts succumbed and aired much of the ghastly footage...
...The exaggerated gesture is its mode of speech...
...As the days wore on much of the news dried up...
...Ordinarily television news specializes in excess...
...All that TV news could do, faced with such a story, was tell it...
...This was genuine horror, unutterable sadness...
...Of course some things were done wrong...
...the gasbags that normally steam up Hardball and Crossfire must have been locked in the green room...
...As I went to bed Tuesday night I puzzled over why the medium at last had managed to rise to the occasion...
...There were very few of those sadistic interviews with surviving relatives desperate for word of the loved and lost...
...ANDREW FERGUSON...
...But last Tuesday's events made a story that was impossible to hype...
...It is a place where Charlie Rose is considered the house intellectual...
...But these are just quibbles against what must have been television journalism's finest hour...
...And so the artifices were put back in place...
...you might even say invariably dumb, were it not for a few sylvan glades of intelligence like the Food Channel and live coverage of professional bowling...
...The only deterrent to mocking it in print, in my experience, is that you have to watch some of it to do so...
...We now know, for example, that news organizations had in their possession film of terrified human beings jumping to their deaths...
...Television is a sub-verbal medium for the most part, so it wasn't much of a surprise when guests and anchors alike referred to the catastrophe as a "tragedy"—a useful word whose peculiar meaning has by now been blurred beyond rescue...
...From the first morning moments when the screen filled with nightmare, the country's TV journalists handled the story with sobriety, professionalism, and taste...
...It squeezes torrents of tears from stories that barely rate a sniffle, it tries to hype the workaday into roller-coaster drama...
...New information was offered as methodically as possible, with appropriate cautions about its reliability...
...Non-fiction TV is boundlessly dumb...
...The shining moment couldn't last, and didn't...
...TV news personalities are the surest figures of fun that American culture offers up...
...But last Tuesday I took it all back...
...The people called on to analyze events seemed, even on cable, to have at least the slightest idea what they were talking about...
...The gap between reality and the artifices of TV news is what gives those pretty anchors and breathless reporters their unavoidably buffoonish air...
...By the end of the week the morning shows filled the slackening minutes with the sadistic interviews, a parade of tortured souls ventilating their private grief for our pleasure...
...Can you tell us how you feel . . .") Exhibitionism and emotional manipulation were at a minimum, all day long...
...The answer, I suppose, is that it had no choice...
...The gasbags of Hardball returned...
...We became habituated to the horror...
...Perky Katie and lovable Matt, Bryant of the furrowed brow and Diane Sawyer biting her lip, not to mention your local twinkie anchors—television news is a fat target...
...Casual THEIR SHINING MOMENT "Some idiot just flew his plane into the World ^^ Trade Center," a friend V^/ told me over the phone, so I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane go into the south tower, and I watched the TV more or less constantly until late in the afternoon, when I took a break for a couple of hours before resuming my seat in front of the screen, and I stayed there, glassy-eyed, past one in the morning, much moved of course but also unexpectedly, deeply impressed...
Vol. 7 • September 2001 • No. 2
