The fall of the Berlin wall.
How about the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that hit during the pre-game telecast of the third game of the World Series? Not as widely viewed on TV as Janet Jackson’s nipple, but if you count everyone in the Bay area…
Does anyone know if the Anwar Sadat or Begnino Aquino rallies which ended in their assasinations, as well as the attempted assasination of John Paul II, were telecast live?
I have to disagree majorly here in regards to the second WTC plane.
You people must be remembering wrong, because nobody, and I mean NOBODY, was expecting that. No one even thought the first plane was a jetliner at that point. All the newscasts and even eyewitnesses thought it was a small private plane that had accidentally hit the first tower.
And given that, plus the proliferation of live electronic media by that time, I would say with certainty that the second plane hit was probably seen live as it happened by more people around the world than any other event.
Hands down.
How about Chief Justice John Roberts flubbing the inaugural oath?
I’ll admit it’s a nebulous point. But I figure that people didn’t just happen to be seeing the WTC when the second plane struck. The networks were broadcasting live coverage and people were watching because something had already happened. But when people were watching Oswald being taken out of the Dallas Jail they were just expecting to get a look at the guy who shot the President. Nobody expected they were going to see a murder occur.
WRT 9/11, I’d say the initial tower collapse was unexpected, too.
I’d also nominate the 2004 tsunami.
Benigno Aquino was shot after being escorted off a commercial flight by military personnel. He was hustled off the jetway onto the airport tarmac where the assassination took place. While there were cameras on the plane, there were none focused on the tarmac and, regardless, none of it was broadcast live. Aside from the shooter(s), the only person to have witnessed the actual event was Rebecca Quijano (a.k.a. The Crying Lady). While subsequent events involved far more people, Aquino’s assassination was witnessed by very few.
I’m going to say the Boxing Day Tsunami. It struck some the most populated areas of the world — the coastline of the Indian Ocean. Now the question is, does this count as an expected event? Generally when there is an undersea quake, you expect a tsunami.
For the same reason we should probably discuss Hiroshima: was it truly unexpected? The bomb didn’t make itself.
And how does “the guy who shot the president” not qualify as “something had already happened”? I see these as directly analogous, not contrasting.
I think there might have been a handful or two of people outside the Bay Area (6 million people) watching.
9.11 wins hands down in terms of people who saw the first plane strike in person also.
It’s also unfair to isolate parts of 9.11 into discrete events. 9.11 itself was the event, the whole thing, all the attacks, and it was seen by more people than any other event in history.
I can’t see how this is true. New York City has a population of about 18 million people, some large portion of which were assuredly not watching the Tower, live and in person, when the first plane hit. I’m sure a vast number of people in the Northeast saw the columns of smoke, the dust, and so on, but let’s generously assume that 10% of them were looking in the right direction when the first plane hit.
By contrast, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has a population of 66 million. Even if we assume only 5% of those people were directly affected by the tsunami, that’s still 3.3 million people in that state of India alone.
Exactly. I mean, by the time I first looked out the window and saw it both planes had already hit, but I still consider myself a witness to the event. After all, I saw them fall.
That’s what they want you to think.
I’m going to say the Spanish Inquisition.
By that argument, this would include as witnesses anybody who saw the flooding from the tsunami’s wavefront — they saw the watery aftermath, even if they didn’t directly witness the wave itself.
Very well. I did not witness the event of the planes hitting the tower; however, I did witness the seperate event of the towers falling.
And don’t say that the fact that the towers fell was not unexpected. *I *sure as hell didn’t expect it to happen.
I dunno about people watching on TV, but it was pretty unexpected to those of us who were at the WTC.
I guess I am technically a witness, but I didn’t actually see either plane strike or either building fall.
Unfortunately, there are senses other than sight.
I don’t see how that excludes the tsunami aftermath as a separate event of its own.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting that the collapse of the World Trade Center is insignificant, or unimportant, or obscure. The people who saw in person the events of that day must surely be outnumbered by the people who saw in person the ocean-spanning flood that displaced 1.5 million people from their homes. It’s just a matter of geographical span. The number of people who live along the coastline of the Indian Ocean is tremendously larger than the population of New York City.
If we include the number of people who watched it on TV, then we’ll have to have the discussion about “what is a witness?” What did the television watchers actually observe?