The television moments that can even begin tocompareare few: On November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in front of 20million television viewers--more than 20 percent of the United States populationat the time. On January 28, 1986, millions of viewers--many of themchildren--witnessed the loss of American lives in real time as the space shuttleChallenger hurtled skyward and exploded. On March 6, 1975, Geraldo Rivera (yes, him) first aired Abraham Zapruder's famous amateur movie--which showed President Kennedy's head erupt in a spray of blood as the presidential motorcade made its way through Dealey Plaza in Dallas--on ABC's Good Night America.
None of those earlier images, however, was as shocking, horrific, or tragicas the live video broadcast of United Airlines flight 175 crashing into the southtower of the World Trade Center. Consider, for perspective, the Zapruder film.President Kennedy was as powerful a symbol of American vitality in his way as NewYork City's twin towers were to become--and his death stoked fears, much liketoday's, about an enemy among us, one we could not see and fight conventionally.But the horror captured by the Zapruder film was not seen by the American publicuntil more than a decade after the event, when its immediacy had faded.
Or consider the Challenger disaster, which loomed enormously large in the symbolic landscape of the late 1980s and was replayed endlessly through the winter of 1986. The explosion 73 seconds after takeoff with a non-astronaut civilian on board--the schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe--was a terrible tragedy and delivered a jarring blow to the American psyche (were we being punished for our technological hubris?). But the death toll was "only" seven--the size of a bad car wreck's. The death toll in the September 11 catastrophe, in contrast, will approach 7,000.
The object of a terrorist attack, as opposed to a conventional militaryassault, is seldom to gain territory, capture resources, or defeat an armythrough superior killing capacity; rather, it is to sow instability and fearthrough its dramatic effects. In fact, there is a long-established thematicconnection between terrorism and theater. Each strives to make an ideologicalpoint through dramatic impact; each seeks to amplify this impact (and thereforeits ideological point) by reaching the broadest possible audience. And at leastsince the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany--when Palestinian terrorists tookIsraeli athletes hostage, killing 11 of them, as a worldwide TV audienceestimated as high as 900 million followed the ordeal--terrorists have known thatthe surest route to a broad audience is through television.
It was therefore no accident that the September 11 strikes had such a fearsomevisual power. The terrorists surely calculated that in the minutes after AmericanAirlines flight 11 struck One World Trade Center the national media wouldconverge on the southern tip of Manhattan to train their television cameras onthe burning building. Regular programming would be pre-empted; the big-timeanchors and reporters would be summoned; phone calls and e-mails would circulate,urging friends and relatives to the television set. In short, by the time UnitedAirlines flight 175 struck Two World Trade Center, the whole world would bewatching.
From the terrorists' perspective, the most important targets were thesecondary ones: everyone in the country who wasn't killed by the attacks. That is, while the assaults were clearly designed to take massive numbers of human lives and to destroy symbolically important buildings, the ultimate goal was not necessarily the buildings or lives themselves but the minds of the American people.
For this reason, television almost inevitably plays a complicit role interrorist acts. It is the ideal delivery vehicle for the dramatic visual imagesterrorists create; indeed, it may be that in many cases television is the sinequa non for a terrorist attack. By serving the public interest, which requiresbroadcasting terrorist actions (and the effects of terrorist actions), televisionis also serving the terrorists' interests: transmitting horrifying images tomassive numbers of people, thereby engendering mass anxiety and instability.
Television itself does not take lives, destroy buildings, or commit evil acts.The shocking termination of United Airlines flight 175 would have been no lesstragic had it not been captured on live television. And yet it should be obviousthat the priorities of television and those of terrorism are somewhat aligned.Television relies on the potent visual image to attract viewers, boost ratings,and keep advertiser revenue flowing. (Why else but in pursuit of such an imagedid all the networks break away from their regular programming to follow O.J.Simpson along the freeways of Los Angeles in his white Bronco?) And terrorism,which traffics in potent visual images, relies on television as a transmissionmechanism. The relationship between terrorism and television is thereforeundeniably symbiotic.
Yet what is TV to do? Refuse to cover terrorist activity, as at least oneantiterrorism expert has suggested, on the logic that if a terrorist act happensand no one's there to cover it, the act never really happened? As a philosophicalexercise, that might make sense; in practice, it's absurd. News divisions andall-news cable networks, despite their corporate parents' financial demands, doaspire to serve the public interest. And it is a public-interest requirement thatterrorist activity be covered; it's a matter not just of political and socialimportance but of basic public safety. We need to know if the water supply hasbeen poisoned, or when to evacuate a business district, or simply when to beespecially wary--even if this heightened wariness plays right into theterrorists' hands.
At some level, there is no way out of this symbioticcycle: Aslong as television exists (and it always will), terrorists will capitalize on itsamplifying power; and as long as people commit acts of terror, television willcover them. But there are ways to minimize how damaging this cycle is and waysfor television to help keep a society both open and strong. Happily, amidst allthe carnage, American television performed well in the wake of September 11.
Terrorists hope that television will foster panic beyond what is warrantedby the terrorist acts themselves. The simplest check on this phenomenon is topractice careful and responsible reporting. And for the most part--especially incomparison to last November's election--the broadcast and cable news networkshave in fact been very careful and responsible.
Inevitably, there were some mistakes and premature judgments. With so manyconsecutive days of continuous, round-the-clock, commercial-free coverage, howcould there not be? There was the false hope generated when several newsorganizations, led by Fox News (as seems so often to be the case when a report isinaccurate), falsely told viewers that five firefighters trapped for nearly twodays in an SUV had been rescued alive from beneath the rubble. Several times,late at night, when ABC's Peter Jennings had been on the air for too long and wasvisibly losing his grip, he began constructing elaborate plots out of thin reedsof evidence. "Now I don't want to panic anyone," he would say--which of coursemeant he was about to say something panic-inducing.
All of the Big Three anchors--Jennings, CBS's Dan Rather, and NBC's TomBrokaw--did multiple 15-hour shifts, and all three appeared, at times, to besleepy, rambling, confused. Some of the cable-network anchors seemeddisconcertingly out of their depth. After the murder of a Sikh in Arizona, CNNinterviewed a Sikh religious leader and didn't seem to grasp any more clearlythan the Arizona murderer the difference between Sikhs and Muslims. In a pressconference the Friday after the attacks, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was drivento implore that the news networks be careful about what they report, lest theycause false alarms or false hopes, or send rescue workers scurrying after redherrings. All things considered, however, the first week's coverage was carefuland restrained. CBS's éminence grise, 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, told USA Today that the week had been "TV's most shining moment since the Kennedy assassination--when America came to the TV set and held hands--and it may be TV's finest moment ever."
Hewitt, along with other network executives who praised the first week'scoverage, pointed especially to the spirit of cooperation that prevailed amongthe usually bitterly competitive news divisions. Aside from Afghanistan coverageby CNN, which proudly claimed the only broadcast correspondent in Kabul (NicRobertson, who happened to be there covering a trial), the networks shared videofootage. Also, many non-news cable networks gave themselves over to othernetworks' news coverage for several days: ESPN broadcast ABC News; VH1 and MTVbroadcast CBS News; TBS and TNS broadcast CNN; Court TV broadcast CNN after 10:00P.M.; and the Learning Channel broadcast the BBC. Of course, at some level thisis just what the terrorists wanted--a newscast multiplier effect such that even ateenager seeking solace in an MTV soap opera instead found Dan Rather talkingover yet another replay of United Airlines flight 175. But this collectivenews-gathering and news-broadcasting enterprise lent television a spirit ofnational community rarely seen since the advent of cable. "The nationalcampfire," Jennings called it, with some justification, as we all huddled aroundit.
The networks also put aside commercial considerations for an extended period,at a cost estimated between tens and hundreds of millions of dollars per day. Notthat they had much choice in the matter; no advertiser in its right mind wantsits products hawked in the midst of a tragedy. Still, the absence of commercialsduring this time helped reinforce the impression that the networks' prioritieswere in the right place. (At least for the most part. A catfight did eruptbetween CNN and Fox News. CNN, who had stolen hotshot anchorwoman Paula Zahn fromFox just prior to the calamity, put out a press release trumpeting its highratings in the top 51 "metered" markets for the day of the attack. Fox Newsdislikes these metered market ratings--it prefers the full national numbersbecause it has poor penetration in selected markets--and responded with a pressrelease saying that "CNN has a reputation for distorting numbers, a despicablepractice made more disappointing during a national tragedy such as this."Responding to the memo, a CNN executive told Variety, "[Fox News head] Roger Ailes should be thanking us because Fox News used so much of our footage throughout the day. Instead, he follows his usual pattern of going on the offensive and using vile language against us.")
Finally, what is normally one of television's great weaknesses--its tendencytoward manipulative sentimental exploitation--may prove to be an aid towardrecovering from this national trauma. In many cases, as after theChallenger explosion and the Oklahoma City bombing, the media pries voyeuristically into the private reactions of victims' families, seeking mawkish drama on the cheap. But in the week after the attacks, my initial revulsion at what looked to be yet another instance of emotional pornography gave way to the recognition that in this instance, perhaps uniquely, the heart-wrenching stories of people looking (in vain, alas) for their missing loved ones in lower-Manhattan hospitals were actually providing a useful social function. As painful as these segments are to watch, and as uncomfortable as it makes me to see TV reporters serving as psychoanalysts and grief counselors (many of them sincerely overcome with emotion themselves), broadcasting these stories does seem to be helping the victims' families to deal with the loss of hope and to begin to grieve. Hearing these stories also helps lend a flesh-and-blood reality to a tragedy otherwise so unfathomably horrible as to be merely abstract.
One important thing to bear in mind--a point I've made in these pagesbefore--is that often when television goes into continuous-coverage mode, whatyou're watching is not news but the news-gathering process. Sometimes this can berevealing: You watch reporters trying to get government officials or electedpoliticians to say things they don't want to or aren't allowed to reveal. (At onepoint, Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, who chairs the Senate Foreign RelationsCommittee, simultaneously tantalized and frustrated Peter Jennings, in effecttelling him: "I can't answer that question because if I do, then you'll ask thelogical follow-up question, and I definitely can't answer that one withoutjeopardizing national security"--a response that left Jennings apologetic andmillions of viewers trying to puzzle out what the follow-up question would havebeen.) Other times, you see anchors and their field reporters in delicate pas dedeux: The anchor tries to get the reporter to go deeper, or to reveal more, or tounveil who has provided a particular piece of information; in response, thereporter somewhat chippily conveys that, in effect, "I can't go there withoutburning a source," and the anchor has to backtrack and apologize for putting thereporter on the spot.
Television is good at some things and bad at others. It can be good atdelivering unadulterated images that make powerful statements; again, this is abig reason why TV is so important to terrorists. It is generally notgood--particularly when in continuous-coverage mode--at placing things in theirproper context. Television in the era of 24-hours-a-day coverage is news as aprocess. Print, even the daily paper, is almost always a better place to getinformation in its proper perspective; it is news as a set of fixed points in anunderstandable constellation. (In the newspaper, for example, you don't have todecipher the interplay between editor and reporter; it's all been worked out inadvance.) Television, on the other hand, is news as shooting stars flashingacross the sky in all directions--and sometimes those stars turn out to have beennot stars but a satellite or a trick of the eye. The late Philip Graham,publisher of The Washington Post, famously described journalism as the first rough draft of history. In that sense, TV's coverage of an unfolding story is the first rough draft of journalism. Still, during a national crisis, television becomes the default source for the vast majority of Americans. At one point on the day of the attacks, Google.com, which is one of the best and most heavily trafficked of the Internet search engines, posted a message telling people to turn off their computers and turn on their television sets.
It is a hideous irony that in some ghastly sense the terrorists achieved whatnetwork executives had been seeking since Survivor debuted on CBS two years ago: ratings-busting "reality TV." (And in the context of current events, could there be a more unfortunately titled--or more unfortunately premised--program than that one?) That's what makes us so susceptible to the psychological effects of terror: We're all watching TV, and the terrorists know that. It is a further weird irony that the only sentient adults in America who may have been immune to the short-term psychological effects of the September 11 terror tactics were the three final contestants on Big Brother 2, another so-called reality-TV show on CBS, in which competitors are sequestered in a hermetically sealed house, trying to outlast one another in a Survivor-style fight to the finish under the constant eye of TV cameras. According to the New York Daily News, the last houseguests--Monica Bailey, Nicole Nilson, and Will Kirby--knew only "sketchy details" in the days after the attacks rocked the world; and they knew those only because Bailey's family pressured network executives to inform them after Bailey's cousin was discovered to be among the World Trade Center missing. But the three participants saw no television images or even newspaper photos of the devastation.
They don't know how fortunate they are.
