Network news begins 'cleaning up' images of WTC disaster...

Great Debates
1

…if they show it at all.

I’m really having a hard time with this. And since I can’t even resolve it with myself, I assume it’s debatable to others as well.

ABC news, to name one organization, has decided to stop showing footage of the twin towers being hit by the hijacked airplanes, and their eventual collapse, on television.

From reports I saw last night, other news organizations were considering similar restrictions.

The whole point of this, from what Peter Jennings has said himself, was to pacify a segment of society out there that had written or phoned into ABC voicing their objections to these images being shown over and over again.

Fine. I can understand toning it down. The replays don’t need to be played over and over and over… But because of these people, ABC decided to stop showing the replays of the WTC tragedy all together.

I haven’t seen a replay of it since. Any of it.

Wow.

I am so torn by this, I don’t know where to start.

Why is it, if some people have a problem with it, or they believe their kids will have a problem with it, do they need to shield me from it too?

I started taping the running coverage of this event soon after it started. I mostly did it because in other times of televised disaster, caught on tape, I knew the networks would stop showing it at some point. I wanted to be able to go back and see it, for all it’s horror, after I had had time to digest it.

Well, sure enough, they did what I suspected.

But why? Why sanitize what we see? It was horrendous and tragic, I know, but it was real and it’s what happened. Since when has it been networks goal to protect me from the facts?

Now, I don’t have kids, so I can’t begin to argue the effects it has on them, but I’m sure constantly repeating the horror can’t help them. But can’t there be a little of both, for the different audiences? Why the “all of it”, every second over and over, or, “none of it”?

Can’t there be a compromise?

And I’d go off on how the networks bleeped out the real, and emotional, reactions to what people were witnessing as they taped the events of Tuesday. Some of their reactions were stunning in there horror.

For some reason, seeing it raw, for at it was, made it all the more real to me, instead of the cleaned up versions rarely being shown now.

*Sorry about the length of this, and possibly it’s confusing nature, but I put it down as I thought about it.

Is else is struggling with this?

2

I live where the New York sky line is part of my everyday landscape.

We have Tivo and it picked up the 9am-10am coverage. They were sitting there calmly discussing the “accident” that had happened in the first tower, when the second plane came crashing in. Then other reports started coming in.

It is amazing to to see juxtaposition of the old reality and the new reality in that short hour. We are planning on having kids in the next couple of years, and we have taped that hour so that they can see what happened in a short moment that morning.
Having said that, I see the smoke everyday from the towns I work in (NJ), my family works in the city and my father was only 300 yards from WTC when it crashed. Watching the video only brings back the horror of that morning and the uncertainty we had.

If I never see the planes crash into the WTC again, and I never see them fall again, then that would be just fine with me.

There are too many cable channels and video feeds on the net for the images to disapear forever, so I’m happy that the images are being shown less on the mainstream channels.

3

I totally agree with you. I think you should copy that whole post, clean up the stuff dissing the networks, and E-mail it in…

4

Well, as someone who has saw the footage as it developed, and then again every night the following week (in the UK’s televised news), together with blanket photo coverage in every newspaper (including special pullouts) and hastily put together TV documentaries, I personally have seen it enough times. To the point where I won’t watch it if it’s shown again.

That’s not to downplay the horror of it, but by this time I know what happened. It’s not news. I don’t need to see it again every night to be reminded about both it and its ramifications. What is news to me - and what I want information on - is what the western coalition is doing about it.

A question for the OP: at what point would you consider it appropriate not to show it every night?

5

These are all good points. I understand the desire to be rid of this footage, okay, we’ve all seen it, I understand. But part of me is going to want to see that footage every few months, at least, for the rest of my life.

Having watched everything after the first plane crash on live TV, I recall the gutwrenching pain and anguish that I felt while watching the events unfold. To my dismay, that disgust is already starting to fade.

I am torn on this, because I don’t want to see it so many times that it means nothing to me, but I don’t want to see it so few times that I begin to lose sight of how truly horrible it was, and how terrifying it must have been to be in or around that building.

I think that as a country we need to see these images as much as we need to see heroic firefighters and policemen and hear the stories of those who made it. We need to remember the scale and gravity of what has been done. We are a short-attention-span culture with many distractions, and I’m not sure I trust us to remember this fully without frequent reminders.

6

That’s a good question. Offhand, I really don’t know.

Maybe whenever it’s appropriate.

For instance, if they say the so-and-so happened during the collapse of the second tower, then they can show it again.

Times like that.

Or times where new footage has shown up. Show it for what it’s worth.

For example- I saw one angle, I believe it was BBC America that ran it, showing an incredibly wide shot of the second plane coming in to hit tower two. It was incredible to see the flight path the plane was taking. It was flying right below the plume of smoke coming off tower one. You could see how the terrorist was lining the tower up in his sights.

It was stunning.

And stunning to realize I was watching BBC, and not an American news outlet. Stunning because I never saw our guys air it.

But, from what I understand, they won’t do that now. They want to be considerate.

Boy. That’s really tough for me.

I guess I’m looking at this from both sides and seeing strong arguments for both approaches.

I wish I had a strong stance one way or the other, but I don’t right now. I think they should incorporate all, instead of the few, in either direction- that is, those that want to see it a lot, and those that don’t want to see it at all, and come up with a compromise that’s fits in the middle of the two.

Make any sense?

7

And let me add, since I didn’t see the post while I was typing up my last response, that I concur with stolichnaya’s thoughts completely.

I ran the tape back again -the one I taped when all of it was happening- and was amazed at how I felt after seeing it again.

It was like stoli said, it was as if I was trying to forget it so well, I actually started forgetting about it.

Now I don’t want to see it constantly- my God I’d get depressed- but to see it periodically, somehow seems important to me, if nothing but to feel something strong towards this whole thing again… instead of an apathy type feeling I think I was headed towards.

8

I only needed to see the Challenger explode once, and that was enough.

And my children never need to see it explode at all.

There is some visual information that is just “not necessary”.

9

You know DDG, I agree about the challenger explosion. I’m not sure why I feel differently about this, but I think it is this: The Challenger explosion, while terrible indeed, was an accident. It was a non-repeating phenomenon, and it didn’t represent a potential threat to me and my loved ones.

The WTC images were the result of an intentional act, and one that may very well be repeated in some fashion. I don’t think that many would disagree that our complacency about the terrorist threat helped to bring this situation about. Anything that serves to remind us of the ruthlessness of the people we’re up against is a good thing IMO.

Your point about your child is well taken. Having no children or young siblings myself, it is something I rarely consider, but probably should more often. These images must have been terrible for children, I am not so sure that it is healthy for relatively well-adjusted adults to see them over and over and over. I just think that to whitewash these events entirely, even after some time has passed, will lead back to that same old complacency again.

10

CnoteChris,

You pretty much summed it up. This is the single biggest news story in our lifetimes, maybe ever for the United States. To not show it to “protect the children” is yet another example of the tissue paper softness of the American people.

“No, no bad thoughts, hand me my Zanex and Prozac.”

I personally think they should show it when appropriate as you said. Not on a loop where you see the plane crash over and over while someone speaks as they did the first day. But, again, as you said there is a medium, albeit not “happy.”

11

I don’t know of way of saying this without it sounding critical, but…

Why not show your kids?

If they’re at an age where they can understand what happens, say between eight and ten years old, why not show them.

Like stoli said, it’s not an accident- it doesn’t need to be seen over and over again- it’s an act of war. An act of war against our citizens- it has a different meaning entirely.

Now, obviously, I’m not saying you should show it over and over again to them, but why not show them what happened at all?

Unless, of course, their too young to understand.

*Again, I hope you don’t take that wrong. I believe if you were sitting here, you’d understand I mean no harm when asking that part of the main question. As a matter of fact, the question could be asked of all parents who feel that way.

And besides, if your kid doesn’t need to see it, for whatever reasons you might have, why then restrict the rest of us from seeing it?

12

The more frequently these clips are shown, the more likely we are to become desensitized to them. Once that happens, the events become background noise.

As an example, I’ve seen the footage from the Arizona exploding during the attack on Pearl Harbor countless times. I do not experience any horror upon seeing it - I note it as a historical event, and little more.

I fear the same could easily happen if we are further saturated with the footage of the WTC attacks. The day of the attack, I was horrified to see the footage. If the footage became commonplace, the events would soon be relegated to “historical event”, and the emotion that I experienced at first would eventually be lost. Once that happens, it seems complacency would soon follow.

13

Um, I might be mistaken, but I think this is the same poster who was concerned that her teenage daughter was ‘experimenting with atheism’. Very protective sort.

14

I have no plans on showing this video to my 8 year old. By the time my kids get into high school, I’ll start looking for an appropriate time to show it to them. It’s even possible that I might not feel it’s ever apporpriate. If I do show it to them, it would be accompianed by talking to their grandfather (who was there) and put in context by talking to them about the world before and after 9/11.

15

Could you maybe have said this without the gratuitous insult to people who actually are on antidepressants for medical reasons? Maybe?

16

I don’t think children under the age of about high school need to see the brutal murder of even one person, let alone the horrifying deaths of thousands of people simultaneously, in a particularly gruesome and terrifying manner. The reason they’re not finding any survivors is because the human body is basically just a bag full of jelly, and when you drop a skyscraper on it, there’s nothing left but bloody smears between the pieces of debris. Nobody ever needs to see something like that happen to other people. Not to mention the instant fiery deaths of everybody in the second plane and the people who were working on those floors.

The Better Half is a forty-something, full-grown, mature adult, and we were watching the clip of the second plane at lunchtime, over and over again, and I said, “You know, it’s just like a movie special effect, kind of,” and he turned to me with an absolutely revolted look on his face and said, “Yeah, but that’s a picture of hundreds of people burning to death.”

And he was right.

Sorry, Chris, but an 8 to 10 year old is just not mentally capable of grasping something like this. La Principessa is 11, and I had trouble making her understand. “But why?” she asked. “Why would they want to do this?”

All I could tell her was, “Because they hate us.”
And of course the next question was, “But why do they hate us?”
And I didn’t have an answer for that.

Timothy McVeigh was easier to explain. “He was a psycho.” End of story. Little kids understand craziness, but they don’t understand hatred, bigotry, prejudice. “How can they hate us if they don’t even know us?”

And, heartbreakingly, “Maybe if they got to know us, they wouldn’t hate us so much.”

I wish, baby. :frowning: