The Medium is the Message
It's a new noun; September 11th. Everyone knows what you mean without modification or embellishment.
A year on from the World Trade Center's destruction and in the midst of its continuing global ramifications, September saw the media gearing up to tackle the anniversary, and perhaps for once, we saw mighty entertainment networks puzzled, confused and to an extent in awe of their responsibility.
The complexities of investigating, commemorating, and even reconstructing the events of 9 /11 /01 cannot be overstated. The proximity of war in the Middle East, with consequences we can only guess at, and the effect of the event on the media itself both at the time and in terms of shrinking budgets and scuppered deals all over the world, gave even the mightiest networks the sense than for once events were larger than they were.
We had already seen the excellent BBC drama, Smallpox 2002, in which the fallout of the WTC tragedy and the possibility of biological terrorism was mooted for the first time in a docudrama, which almost uniquely for the genre, was serious, well written and had a depth beyond hysteria. Other documentaries examined the life of Osama Bin Laden, the construction of the World Trade Center, and the evolution of Islamic terrorism. On the day itself, however, the tone was not as you might've expected - ie hysterical.
The main televisual events were the lengthy, in-depth reconstruction of the day's terrifying timeline, and the incredibly powerful 9/11, following the NYC firemen as they went from a rookie training day to the most frightening shift of their lives. Watching the events unfold, we saw how the city, its emergency services and the media responded at the time; we saw decisions being made at the moment, with no chance to prepare or even think, about what the documentary-maker considered too harrowing to film.
Making TV about September 11th has been complicated by the fact that the shockwaves of the event are still spreading, embroiling the economy of production as well as the world at large. The reporting of news in Afghanistan and around the Middle East has strained the ability of news networks to protect their employees, as events spiral. This has underlined the difficulties of safety that have been the concern of large news networks - AP, BBC, CNN, Reuters, etc - as the speed of news-making has increased and smaller crews have been using better technology to get into more and more dangerous places. It's now possible to do interviews, send out packages and then find that your unflattering portrayal of X maniac warlord or Y dictator is being watched via satellite by the subject themselves - before you're out of their reach.
Protecting those who bring the news to our screens has never been more difficult or complex an operation. As war looms ever closer on the horizon, the conflicting moral and intellectual arguments raging across the globe have made it difficult for large distributed news organisations to maintain a party line that isn't obvious even to the most casual observer to be inaccurate. The experience of on-the-ground journalists has become more chaotic than ever, not just in obvious trouble spots but emergent areas of 'terrorist activity' such as Indonesia, and thus the tension between their experience and the sometimes-at-variance editorial position of newsrooms is thrown into light.
This is a particular problem for the BBC and other European networks trying to at least hint at a global position slightly more complex than "get terrorism" - the US networks are freed from this irksome constraint by a unilateral argument and ferocious editorial control. The Beeb has, however, found it extremely complex attempting to present balanced viewpoints Like this. In fact, observing all UK networks' coverage of the situation in the Middle East, there's a notable dissonance between the language of the correspondents and that of the anchors, with bombast and moral judgement being more heavily injected into almost every mouth - with the exception, perhaps, of the extraordinary John Snow.
Balanced news, however, is a luxury, something that countries in a time of peace indulge in. Since September 11th, 2001, the industrialised Western world has been - to take onboard the rhetoric - at war with terrorism; despite the dangers of going to war with abstract nouns and the horrors this led to when it was Communism, and not Terrorism, it is a war culture we see on the news today. And in a war, balanced arguments can very rarely win.
