Newsworthy Enough To Interrupt "Arthur"

One morning, during my fifth grade art history class, teachers and administrators began to scurry around in the hallway. Two of them ran into my classroom and whispered to the art history teacher, making her jump up and dart to the window. I looked outside myself and noticed a growing cloud of thick smoke in the distance. The teachers eventually decided to tell us that terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center. Several of my classmates cried, knowing that their parents worked in lower Manhattan. I didn’t know what a “terrorist” was or what the Trade Center had been so I feigned concern and hoped that the smoke would stay away from Brooklyn. We could smell it.

My blurry-eyed father brought me home. I turned on my beloved TV so that I could watch Arthur, but most of the channels weren’t working so I decided that I didn’t like terrorists. Finally, my frustration motivated me to switch to a channel that I didn’t regularly watch; it was probably two or four. A live broadcast displayed bloody New Yorkers screaming, crying, and running from smoke and debris. I froze in front of the screen and watched the towers collapse, collapse, collapse, and collapse yet again. Eventually, more channels came back on, but they all continued to show the collapsing towers, the blood-covered New Yorkers, the flying debris, the ambulances, and the masked fire fighters and EMTs.

Photo from "http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/winfield.rose".

I openly admit that I had a very low level of media literacy when I was ten; I turned on, decoded, and believed the news. At the actual time of the attacks, NBC, ABC, and the WB were simply displaying and describing the attack; I had no choice of content, but that was because each channel felt obligated to give its viewers as much information as it could uncover. Audiences were thankful for an opportunity to watch the attacks unfold; I know I was. Without my TV, I would not have understood what was happening in my own city. After the attacks, however, 9/11 heightened criticism of the media. Why hadn’t journalists and newscasters been able to predict the attack? Why hadn’t they been doing the investigative reporting they had been hired to do?

True, the major news networks and newspapers are interested in making a profit; the most recent Tiger Woods scandal grabbed more airtime than any other significant world or national news at the time. Reporters want to go after “popular” and “entertaining” news, and not necessarily “important” news. However, if our country’s intelligence officers weren’t able to prevent an attack on US soil, the WB should not have been expected to do so.

Retrospectively, the media created a post-9/11 “bounded culture” (Baran, 2005). Every New Yorker can recall what he was doing on September 11^th and roughly what information was passed to him via a medium. Most New Yorkers can also connect their mediated 9/11 experiences with their physical 9/11 experiences; I can still smell the smoke.