"Fixing the Whole" by Joseph Giovanni, New York Magazine, Nov. 5, 2001.
"The Metamorphosis" by Michael Wolff, New York Magazine, Dec. 17, 2001.
"Patients Zero" by Sarah Bernard, New York Magazine, Feb. 8, 2002.
"Living in the Shadow" by Meryl Gordon, New York Magazine, Mar. 11, 2002.
"Broadway Bomb" by John Homans, New York Magazine, Jun. 3, 2002.
"The Lives Left Behind" by Meryl Gordon, New York Magazine, Sept. 8, 2002.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Journalism after September 11
Journalism after September 11
I found this article to be very similar in regards to all the questions that we have been asking in class. Just like we raised questions about the uncertain future of people’s lives, emotions and progress to move on and change; it talks about all of these things with journalism. Our government and most every other department like fire and police were pretty much disorganized because no one dreamed of something like this happening, the same way the reports of the tragedy from our journalism industry were disorganized. Our Journalism society had to think about something that they were not used to dealing with. How do they report the events and keep their emotions aside, after all they are human beings. It becomes especially hard for them to remain professional when most of them saw it with their own eyes. Another big question explored is how does the media report the events but still comply with the what the government wants them to show. The question being should they comply with the government? The whole question of patriotism of the reporters and the different media channels come up a lot. I think this quote in the introduction from Matthew Cooper pretty much says it all, “ There’s plenty of flag waving going on but our job isn’t to join in,” he wrote. “Our job is to report what’s happened and to ask questions. It’s to explore the war effort, not to be a cheerleader for it; it’s to explain the new national solidarity, not to help forge it. Others can do that.” I think the media by doing their job properly are doing their American duty. The media at the time did what they had to do with the knowledge they had but certainly they could have done things differently.
From this tragedy, the media got a chance to explore and grow and change their ways of doing things but unfortunately we are backing to doing things the same way.
I found this article to be very similar in regards to all the questions that we have been asking in class. Just like we raised questions about the uncertain future of people’s lives, emotions and progress to move on and change; it talks about all of these things with journalism. Our government and most every other department like fire and police were pretty much disorganized because no one dreamed of something like this happening, the same way the reports of the tragedy from our journalism industry were disorganized. Our Journalism society had to think about something that they were not used to dealing with. How do they report the events and keep their emotions aside, after all they are human beings. It becomes especially hard for them to remain professional when most of them saw it with their own eyes. Another big question explored is how does the media report the events but still comply with the what the government wants them to show. The question being should they comply with the government? The whole question of patriotism of the reporters and the different media channels come up a lot. I think this quote in the introduction from Matthew Cooper pretty much says it all, “ There’s plenty of flag waving going on but our job isn’t to join in,” he wrote. “Our job is to report what’s happened and to ask questions. It’s to explore the war effort, not to be a cheerleader for it; it’s to explain the new national solidarity, not to help forge it. Others can do that.” I think the media by doing their job properly are doing their American duty. The media at the time did what they had to do with the knowledge they had but certainly they could have done things differently.
From this tragedy, the media got a chance to explore and grow and change their ways of doing things but unfortunately we are backing to doing things the same way.
New York Magazine Articles
The Metamorphosis: By Michael Wolff
Published Dec 17, 2001
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/5549/
Patients Zero: By Sarah Bernard
Published Feb 18, 2002
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/5712/
Broadway Bomb: ByJohn Homans
Published Jun 3, 2002
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/6093/
The Lives Left Behind: By Meryl Gordon
Published Sep 8, 2002
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/n_7688/
Published Dec 17, 2001
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/5549/
Patients Zero: By Sarah Bernard
Published Feb 18, 2002
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/5712/
Broadway Bomb: ByJohn Homans
Published Jun 3, 2002
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/6093/
The Lives Left Behind: By Meryl Gordon
Published Sep 8, 2002
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/n_7688/
Journalism, on that day etc
Hey all, The article about journalism after 9/11 discussed very interesting observations on the flow of information and the ideal objectivity that true journalism strives for. Zelizer and allan's point out that inthe aftermath of 9/11 newspapers, radios, television stations was flooded with government dominated messages. The idea of imposed ideologies becomes paramount in the essay that accurately portrays mainstream media as a "center ideology" that seeks to hide the fact that it imposes an ideology. This center ideology as we all know adheres to the ideologies of the right, there is no questioning of authorities, governmental policies and in the midst of 9/11 it geared to provide emotional comfort, to steer attention away from true facts, ideas, political decisions and actions that would later prove detrimental. The minority voices that wanted to broadcast real footage, public opinion were displaced and the minority voices silenced. I cant however agree with the notion that this has only begun to occur after 9/11, the media is a corporate commodity controlled by corporate America, the elite few who thrive in the publics ignorance. Raw Information prior but more noticeably during 9/11 became more elusive and rare, a fact that Zelizer attributes to the Bush presidency, who's official policy is lying, as he states.
The essay also focused on something that i thought was quite interesting, equating the questioning of public policy with disloyalty to our nation. I thought that the incident with Dan Rather was clearly reflective of our inability to reveal our true feelings or thoughts without being called a traitor. I think that this is one of the driving factors in this change in the media, we cannot be allowed to think for ourselves, what we should feel, demonstrate and how we should think is dictated by what we are fed through the mainstream, it seeks our repression and in a way it has gained it. I think that during 9/11 the "patriotism" became linked to meekness, absolute compliance and demonization as "Zelizer calls it of the Islamic world. The emotions and mourning of victims was dishonestly used and manipulated to create a blindfold and carry out the hidden agenda of those in power.
The essay also focused on something that i thought was quite interesting, equating the questioning of public policy with disloyalty to our nation. I thought that the incident with Dan Rather was clearly reflective of our inability to reveal our true feelings or thoughts without being called a traitor. I think that this is one of the driving factors in this change in the media, we cannot be allowed to think for ourselves, what we should feel, demonstrate and how we should think is dictated by what we are fed through the mainstream, it seeks our repression and in a way it has gained it. I think that during 9/11 the "patriotism" became linked to meekness, absolute compliance and demonization as "Zelizer calls it of the Islamic world. The emotions and mourning of victims was dishonestly used and manipulated to create a blindfold and carry out the hidden agenda of those in power.
Group: Eden, Mike, Sherie, John, Jacob
All of our articles are from the New York Times.
Jacob:
"Foreign Affairs; The Real War"
By Thomas L. Friedman
Date: November 27, 2001
&
"In America; The Tourism Crisis"
By Bob Herbert
Date: November 29, 2001
&
"A Nation Challenged: The Site; A Viewing Stand Brings Pilgrims to Ground Zero"
By Michael Cooper
Date: December 31, 2001
Sherie:
"Residential Real Estate; Not Even Terror Attacks Dims Manhatten Market"
By Dennis Hevesi
Date: February 1, 2002
Mike:
"At Ground Zero, Uneasy Agreement on Final Right"
By Dan Barry
Date: May 27, 2002
&
"Poll Finds New York Fearful, But Upbeat Over Future, Too"
By: Adam Nagourney and Marjorie Connelly
Date: June 11, 2002
Eden:
"Threats and Responses: The Firefighters; Its ranks Depleted, a Weary Fire Dept. is Trying to Regroup"
By Allen Feuer and Michael Wilson
Date: September 11, 2002
John:
"The 2002 Campaign: the Ad Campaign"
By Lizette Alvarez
Date: October 24th, 2002
Jacob:
"Foreign Affairs; The Real War"
By Thomas L. Friedman
Date: November 27, 2001
&
"In America; The Tourism Crisis"
By Bob Herbert
Date: November 29, 2001
&
"A Nation Challenged: The Site; A Viewing Stand Brings Pilgrims to Ground Zero"
By Michael Cooper
Date: December 31, 2001
Sherie:
"Residential Real Estate; Not Even Terror Attacks Dims Manhatten Market"
By Dennis Hevesi
Date: February 1, 2002
Mike:
"At Ground Zero, Uneasy Agreement on Final Right"
By Dan Barry
Date: May 27, 2002
&
"Poll Finds New York Fearful, But Upbeat Over Future, Too"
By: Adam Nagourney and Marjorie Connelly
Date: June 11, 2002
Eden:
"Threats and Responses: The Firefighters; Its ranks Depleted, a Weary Fire Dept. is Trying to Regroup"
By Allen Feuer and Michael Wilson
Date: September 11, 2002
John:
"The 2002 Campaign: the Ad Campaign"
By Lizette Alvarez
Date: October 24th, 2002
What a Difference A Year Makes
here is the article that I read...
Monday, Sep. 09, 2002
What a Difference A Year Makes
By NANCY GIBBS
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003212,00.html
The country is more united, and less; more fearful and more secure, more serious and more devoted to American Idol. It is like looking at your child's baby pictures. You know exactly who it is: every feature is both different and the same, despite new expressions, and furrows and knowledge.
Holding two contradictory ideas in your head was supposed to be a sign of first-rate intelligence. Now it just feels like a vital sign. To say we have changed feels like rewarding the enemy, but to deny it risks losing the knowledge for which we paid a terrible price--knowledge about who we become under pressure, in public and private. People talked about living on a higher plane, with an intensity of fear and faith and gratitude, when it was easy to salute and hard to sleep and nothing was bland or phony or cheap. But we could not live there forever; it was like the day you graduate from high school or your first child is born or your father dies--days of power and insight that grab you for a moment and, when they let you go, leave marks on your skin.
What marks can we see now? President Bush says great good may come from the evil that struck, but you need a long lens to bring that hope into focus. We resist the idea that we have changed because so much of the change of the past year feels like damage. Lives have been lost or broken. Whole sectors of the economy are in intensive care. We talk about the need to balance freedom and security, but both have shriveled in the heat of the threat. There seemed to be a spirit of infectious virtue everywhere we turned a year ago; we have since looked from the pulpit to the boardroom to the baseball diamond and wondered if there was an honest man anywhere in sight.
So, having hardened the soft targets and stored some water and a flashlight, we try to move on as though nothing fundamental has been lost, head down the road in our gas-guzzling cars and not mind if there's a checkpoint along the way. The Fourth of July fireworks in Omaha, Neb., this summer culminated first in a proud, fiery, red-white-and-blue U.S.A., then in rockets that formed smiley faces, then peace symbols. Which mood best fits the moment? Berkeley, Calif., the antiwar town, is busy promulgating laws that would ban coffee that's not environmentally friendly. The most popular TV show for the year was Friends--whose Manhattan-based characters, notes Chicago Tribune TV critic Steve Johnson, "never seemed to realize the skyline had changed." Applications are up for both the Marine Corps and the Peace Corps; does that reflect good hearts or bad job prospects?
For a while last year, we All were One, stunned, numbed, crushed and inflamed. But the road forked somewhere, dividing those most directly affected from everyone else. It is one thing to choke up when we read the "Portraits of Grief" obituaries in the New York Times, another to wake up every morning knowing there's a pair of ski boots in your hall closet that will never be used again and decide whether this is the day you'll finally take off your wedding ring. Many may have had a burst of spiritual fuel, but that's not the same as having your minister suggest that God must have quite a plan for your life or he wouldn't have saved it, as a pastor told Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last survivor pulled from the hellfire. We all may want to be closer to our families, but consider Sergeant Randel Perez, who met his firstborn son on Christmas Eve by borrowing a commando's laptop and grabbing the satellite link from Afghanistan to visit the hospital website. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there," he told the image on the screen softly, over and over. It's one thing to calculate what we've lost; but then there's Victim Compensation Fund arbiter Ken Feinberg, advising a widower who wants to know whether he should fill out one claim form or two, since his wife was eight months pregnant. Most kids had their shock and confusion, but unlike Hilary Strauch, they didn't have a teacher pull them aside in the hall and say, "You're my hero," for how she has handled having her father crushed on TV.
TIME has tracked 11 people, 11 lives, men and women and children who are trailblazers in a new century, a new world, and they had no choice in the matter. A President elected in times of Peace and Prosperity finds he has to preside over War and Retrenchment. A military designed to sweep a continent is hunting shadows in caves. A progressive Pakistani girl sees her classmates reach for a burqa and wonders about progress and peace. We may dread the anniversary because we don't want to go back there, but these people have never really left. Sept. 11 might as well have been yesterday. So what do we owe them--and what can we learn from them?
On Sept. 10, we were living in a country with 19 terrorists poised to kill as many of us as possible, but we thought we were safe. From the next day forward, we thought otherwise. We bought gas masks and burned our mail, and flight attendants called in bomb threats to their airlines because they were scared to fly. People in Spencer, Iowa, began locking their doors, taking their keys out of their cars. Wal-Mart, which can race blankets, batteries and bottled water to any region hit by a hurricane or fire, ran out of the one thing everyone suddenly needed: a flag. Soon it was selling Little Patriots diapers. Spangle your baby's fanny with stars.
But at some point it was time to get on a subway or a plane. And that first ride, that first flight, was the first step back to Now. The blood banks had so much blood in the fall, they were throwing it out, but by Christmas some were putting out emergency calls because donations were lower than a year before. There was no baby boom nine months later. The markets survived the attacks, but not the crooks. The diabetics who craved the comfort of sundaes have gone back to watching their diets. The survivors are bickering over the payouts. The city is arguing over memorials. The doors are unlocked again in Spencer, but "nothing is ever going to be the same," says a local car dealer. Have we changed? Or just moved on?
The debate now has a natural geography. Washington is on a war footing, unless you call machine-gun squads near the Mall normal. Lower Manhattan has become hallowed ground, like Omaha Beach or Gettysburg. But elsewhere most people say the fear has largely passed or congealed into superstitions. A Chicago mom still won't take her kids to visit Dad in his Sears Tower office. People stay awake when they fly. Some Florida school districts have lifted the ban on cell phones, under pressure from parents who want to be able to reach their kids at any time. We have banned coolers from stadiums. Look around any city when a plane flies low, and you can see people pivot to the landmarks. The Empire State, the Golden Gate--is it still there?
The Washington Post reports that government experts know that lots of lives might be saved in the next terrorist attack if people had certain basic information: how to seal a room with duct tape or avoid radiation from a dirty bomb. But they don't trust people with the information, the paper quotes an official as saying, because "we're not in the business of terrifying the public." So members of Congress have evacuation routes, but the general population does not, despite the fact that a year ago the premise that people panic in a crisis was put to the ultimate test, and people passed, with honors. The states, soaked in red ink, can't do much without Washington's help. Texas put its land commissioner in charge of state security and gave him $50,000 to do the job. Last month President Bush decided not to release $5.1 billion for homeland security to show he's serious about controlling the budget.
There are the pragmatic reactions of a deeply pragmatic people determined to change as little as possible because we are so invested in our way of life. In Washington the government is installing 200 cameras around the city to safeguard the monuments to people who safeguarded our freedom. The D.C. hazardous-materials team, which used to be a part-time unit, now has more money than it knows what to do with. The fire chiefs have stormed the attics of the capital's municipal firehouses, dug the cold war-era Geiger counters out of their green canvas bags--some still bearing the old Civil Defense logo--and shipped them off to New Jersey for recalibration. Some of the counters' handbooks are dated 1963. All that's missing is a solemn voice intoning, "Everyone, remain calm."
That's a little harder to do when the headlines report that the FBI's computers still can't talk to one another, its top managers are fleeing the force, the Customs Service can't find more than a thousand credentials that let people into the most sensitive areas of airports and harbors, and the Justice Department has lost 775 weapons and 400 laptops over the past three years. Al-Qaeda appears to be alive and well, or at least well funded. Pilots keep pushing for guns because, they say, the plan to put air marshals in planes turned out to be a joke. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission still doesn't know how many foreign nationals work at nuclear plants; the reactor sites fail security checks about half the time. But talk to a customs inspector, and you'll understand that stopping every truck in search of spores and dirty bombs would mean 16-hour delays and halted assembly lines at auto plants throughout the hemisphere. Whose scales shall we use to balance security and prosperity and freedom?
The notion of recruiting the UPS driver into a domestic spy service was widely ridiculed, but people argue freely that we are all spies now, unrepentant racial profilers. "Driving down the highway, I'll look at people in cars and decide if they're people I should try and get away from," says a Chicago businessman. If a car's occupants "look like terrorists, I'm going to try and not drive too close to that car. It might explode." Some Muslim Americans say they can't imagine normal anymore. A Muslim woman in Florida who wears a hijab, or traditional head scarf, says she is afraid to stand at a bus stop for fear of a car swerving to hit her. Some men named Mohammed have changed their name to Michael.
The books and seminars on Islam are booming, but does greater knowledge of other faiths lead to understanding or alarm? "I've been this big pluralism person. I've studied Islam, been to mosques, done ecumenical stuff," says Mary Nilsen, an Iowa writing instructor, "[but] Muslim fundamentalism really scares the hell out of me. A lot of people have become more educated about Islam, more tolerant and open. I think I've just edged the other way, and I'm not very proud of that." West Point has reinstituted its language requirement, trimmed back in 1989, as well as culture classes and added a new terrorism course. At Emory University twice as many students have signed up for Arabic courses as last year. There has been a 50% increase in enrollment for religious studies at Georgia State since last summer. But over at the business school, the hot class is corporate risk management.
Is the young generation really transformed? A New York City student tells his parents, "Yeah, I know, I'm lucky to be alive. I just don't want to hear it anymore." A survey by the Horatio Alger Association found that two-thirds of teenagers believe that Sept. 11 was the most significant event of their lifetime. Parents say it is their kids' Watergate and Vietnam rolled together and see a blessing and a curse. "Best-case scenario?" asks a white mom of an adopted black son, 9. "His generation pays attention to world politics and doesn't ignore--as I feel I have--foreign policy, with the idea that it can't affect us. Worst-case scenario? They're fearful of people who look different from them, different cultures, different religions. We're working harder now at making that not happen."
Parents like the fact that their kids finally have real role models, not radioactive rock stars and bionic athletes. Being a cop or a fire fighter is now less a trade than a calling. Leaving Shea Stadium after a New York Mets game one summer afternoon, an 8-year-old boy with a baseball glove approaches the cops directing traffic and asks one to sign it. "Don't you want a ballplayer's autograph? Why a cop's?" the officer asks. The boy responds, "Because you helped save the world."
President Bush tried to find an escape hatch from the corporate scandals that stalked him this summer in the spirit of higher callings and new priorities. He addressed the attack of the robber barons by saying, "You know, the bottom line and this corporate-America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbor, loving your neighbor like you'd like to be loved yourself?" But people who do not live in New York and Washington have been hit more directly by the attacks on the markets than by the attacks of last fall. Enron's collapse turned its hometown of Houston inside out. "That affects a lot more people's lives on a day-to-day basis," says resident George Nelson. "If you are afraid that you might be unemployed, you are not thinking about 9/11." More people said they thought the country was on the right track in October--amid daily alerts and anthrax fears and fire fights in Afghanistan--than in July.
It is harder for the President to argue that we are at war when so little is asked of anyone but the soldiers doing the fighting. "The fact that the country quickly returned to normal life is something I do not quite understand," says Duane Jackson, a retired Wisconsin businessman. "Perhaps because no one is having to make any direct sacrifices like we did in World War II. We fight a phantom war, against an unseen enemy, with no direct battle lines. Where is the war?" During the Civil War, he notes, more than "600,000 lives were lost, and yet we do not even have a special national holiday to remember any part of that great conflict. So my feelings on 9/11 remain complex and, in a strange way, uninvolved."
Because Sept. 11 is still one of a kind, people can make it what they want. The left says it has made us more aware of the need to be both humble and generous at home and abroad. The right is glad we now honor our soldiers and suspect our allies and can finally agree that some values are not just a matter of opinion. The faithful talk of a spiritual revival, even though the pollsters say that moment has passed; if we are on a spiritual journey, it does not necessarily pass through a sanctuary, and clerics from coast to coast must wonder whether they missed an opportunity they never expected to have, when they were flooded with people searching for answers but who, after waiting a few weeks, went looking elsewhere.
The only things scarier than the questions we can't answer are the answers we can't avoid. Somewhere in the back of our minds is the knowledge that stunned us that day--knowledge about how America is seen, about where democracies are vulnerable, about what we are capable of at our very best, what courage, what creativity, what kindness individually and collectively. That knowledge, now framed as memory, still poses a challenge. When we didn't know we had the strength, there was no shame in not using it. But now that we know what we can do, how do we excuse ourselves for falling back into the shallows? "In some pathetic way, I miss the realness of it all," says Nilsen, who still has an American flag propped up in a planter in her Des Moines kitchen: "People were real, and now we're back to all this petty politicking. Not that I want another bad thing to happen, but something in me misses the kind of country we were during those weeks."
The survivors and the soldiers on the front lines still live in that country. Most of us will just be visiting sometime in the next few weeks, dragged back by a thousand hours and pages of retrospective and elegy. We will be reminded of the destruction, relive the fury and fight again the battle between the change we value and the change we fear. We're not meant to have fixed everything by the big day; as with New Year's resolutions, anniversaries are a chance to take stock and keep working. And this first one is important because with each successive one, the memory may fade. Whatever other wars we fight together, this one we each get to fight alone, defending our habits and confidence and freedom against enemies who would destroy them and using as a weapon the skills we have built by doing so. We know more now. If only we can remember that we do.
--Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington, Harlene Ellin/Chicago, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Mitch Frank/New York and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines
Photographs by Sean Hemmerle, who, inspired by World Trade Center photographs taken before and on 9/11, revisited the site to see how the landscape had changed almost one year later
With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington, Harlene Ellin/Chicago, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Mitch Frank/New York and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines
Monday, Sep. 09, 2002
What a Difference A Year Makes
By NANCY GIBBS
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003212,00.html
The country is more united, and less; more fearful and more secure, more serious and more devoted to American Idol. It is like looking at your child's baby pictures. You know exactly who it is: every feature is both different and the same, despite new expressions, and furrows and knowledge.
Holding two contradictory ideas in your head was supposed to be a sign of first-rate intelligence. Now it just feels like a vital sign. To say we have changed feels like rewarding the enemy, but to deny it risks losing the knowledge for which we paid a terrible price--knowledge about who we become under pressure, in public and private. People talked about living on a higher plane, with an intensity of fear and faith and gratitude, when it was easy to salute and hard to sleep and nothing was bland or phony or cheap. But we could not live there forever; it was like the day you graduate from high school or your first child is born or your father dies--days of power and insight that grab you for a moment and, when they let you go, leave marks on your skin.
What marks can we see now? President Bush says great good may come from the evil that struck, but you need a long lens to bring that hope into focus. We resist the idea that we have changed because so much of the change of the past year feels like damage. Lives have been lost or broken. Whole sectors of the economy are in intensive care. We talk about the need to balance freedom and security, but both have shriveled in the heat of the threat. There seemed to be a spirit of infectious virtue everywhere we turned a year ago; we have since looked from the pulpit to the boardroom to the baseball diamond and wondered if there was an honest man anywhere in sight.
So, having hardened the soft targets and stored some water and a flashlight, we try to move on as though nothing fundamental has been lost, head down the road in our gas-guzzling cars and not mind if there's a checkpoint along the way. The Fourth of July fireworks in Omaha, Neb., this summer culminated first in a proud, fiery, red-white-and-blue U.S.A., then in rockets that formed smiley faces, then peace symbols. Which mood best fits the moment? Berkeley, Calif., the antiwar town, is busy promulgating laws that would ban coffee that's not environmentally friendly. The most popular TV show for the year was Friends--whose Manhattan-based characters, notes Chicago Tribune TV critic Steve Johnson, "never seemed to realize the skyline had changed." Applications are up for both the Marine Corps and the Peace Corps; does that reflect good hearts or bad job prospects?
For a while last year, we All were One, stunned, numbed, crushed and inflamed. But the road forked somewhere, dividing those most directly affected from everyone else. It is one thing to choke up when we read the "Portraits of Grief" obituaries in the New York Times, another to wake up every morning knowing there's a pair of ski boots in your hall closet that will never be used again and decide whether this is the day you'll finally take off your wedding ring. Many may have had a burst of spiritual fuel, but that's not the same as having your minister suggest that God must have quite a plan for your life or he wouldn't have saved it, as a pastor told Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last survivor pulled from the hellfire. We all may want to be closer to our families, but consider Sergeant Randel Perez, who met his firstborn son on Christmas Eve by borrowing a commando's laptop and grabbing the satellite link from Afghanistan to visit the hospital website. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there," he told the image on the screen softly, over and over. It's one thing to calculate what we've lost; but then there's Victim Compensation Fund arbiter Ken Feinberg, advising a widower who wants to know whether he should fill out one claim form or two, since his wife was eight months pregnant. Most kids had their shock and confusion, but unlike Hilary Strauch, they didn't have a teacher pull them aside in the hall and say, "You're my hero," for how she has handled having her father crushed on TV.
TIME has tracked 11 people, 11 lives, men and women and children who are trailblazers in a new century, a new world, and they had no choice in the matter. A President elected in times of Peace and Prosperity finds he has to preside over War and Retrenchment. A military designed to sweep a continent is hunting shadows in caves. A progressive Pakistani girl sees her classmates reach for a burqa and wonders about progress and peace. We may dread the anniversary because we don't want to go back there, but these people have never really left. Sept. 11 might as well have been yesterday. So what do we owe them--and what can we learn from them?
On Sept. 10, we were living in a country with 19 terrorists poised to kill as many of us as possible, but we thought we were safe. From the next day forward, we thought otherwise. We bought gas masks and burned our mail, and flight attendants called in bomb threats to their airlines because they were scared to fly. People in Spencer, Iowa, began locking their doors, taking their keys out of their cars. Wal-Mart, which can race blankets, batteries and bottled water to any region hit by a hurricane or fire, ran out of the one thing everyone suddenly needed: a flag. Soon it was selling Little Patriots diapers. Spangle your baby's fanny with stars.
But at some point it was time to get on a subway or a plane. And that first ride, that first flight, was the first step back to Now. The blood banks had so much blood in the fall, they were throwing it out, but by Christmas some were putting out emergency calls because donations were lower than a year before. There was no baby boom nine months later. The markets survived the attacks, but not the crooks. The diabetics who craved the comfort of sundaes have gone back to watching their diets. The survivors are bickering over the payouts. The city is arguing over memorials. The doors are unlocked again in Spencer, but "nothing is ever going to be the same," says a local car dealer. Have we changed? Or just moved on?
The debate now has a natural geography. Washington is on a war footing, unless you call machine-gun squads near the Mall normal. Lower Manhattan has become hallowed ground, like Omaha Beach or Gettysburg. But elsewhere most people say the fear has largely passed or congealed into superstitions. A Chicago mom still won't take her kids to visit Dad in his Sears Tower office. People stay awake when they fly. Some Florida school districts have lifted the ban on cell phones, under pressure from parents who want to be able to reach their kids at any time. We have banned coolers from stadiums. Look around any city when a plane flies low, and you can see people pivot to the landmarks. The Empire State, the Golden Gate--is it still there?
The Washington Post reports that government experts know that lots of lives might be saved in the next terrorist attack if people had certain basic information: how to seal a room with duct tape or avoid radiation from a dirty bomb. But they don't trust people with the information, the paper quotes an official as saying, because "we're not in the business of terrifying the public." So members of Congress have evacuation routes, but the general population does not, despite the fact that a year ago the premise that people panic in a crisis was put to the ultimate test, and people passed, with honors. The states, soaked in red ink, can't do much without Washington's help. Texas put its land commissioner in charge of state security and gave him $50,000 to do the job. Last month President Bush decided not to release $5.1 billion for homeland security to show he's serious about controlling the budget.
There are the pragmatic reactions of a deeply pragmatic people determined to change as little as possible because we are so invested in our way of life. In Washington the government is installing 200 cameras around the city to safeguard the monuments to people who safeguarded our freedom. The D.C. hazardous-materials team, which used to be a part-time unit, now has more money than it knows what to do with. The fire chiefs have stormed the attics of the capital's municipal firehouses, dug the cold war-era Geiger counters out of their green canvas bags--some still bearing the old Civil Defense logo--and shipped them off to New Jersey for recalibration. Some of the counters' handbooks are dated 1963. All that's missing is a solemn voice intoning, "Everyone, remain calm."
That's a little harder to do when the headlines report that the FBI's computers still can't talk to one another, its top managers are fleeing the force, the Customs Service can't find more than a thousand credentials that let people into the most sensitive areas of airports and harbors, and the Justice Department has lost 775 weapons and 400 laptops over the past three years. Al-Qaeda appears to be alive and well, or at least well funded. Pilots keep pushing for guns because, they say, the plan to put air marshals in planes turned out to be a joke. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission still doesn't know how many foreign nationals work at nuclear plants; the reactor sites fail security checks about half the time. But talk to a customs inspector, and you'll understand that stopping every truck in search of spores and dirty bombs would mean 16-hour delays and halted assembly lines at auto plants throughout the hemisphere. Whose scales shall we use to balance security and prosperity and freedom?
The notion of recruiting the UPS driver into a domestic spy service was widely ridiculed, but people argue freely that we are all spies now, unrepentant racial profilers. "Driving down the highway, I'll look at people in cars and decide if they're people I should try and get away from," says a Chicago businessman. If a car's occupants "look like terrorists, I'm going to try and not drive too close to that car. It might explode." Some Muslim Americans say they can't imagine normal anymore. A Muslim woman in Florida who wears a hijab, or traditional head scarf, says she is afraid to stand at a bus stop for fear of a car swerving to hit her. Some men named Mohammed have changed their name to Michael.
The books and seminars on Islam are booming, but does greater knowledge of other faiths lead to understanding or alarm? "I've been this big pluralism person. I've studied Islam, been to mosques, done ecumenical stuff," says Mary Nilsen, an Iowa writing instructor, "[but] Muslim fundamentalism really scares the hell out of me. A lot of people have become more educated about Islam, more tolerant and open. I think I've just edged the other way, and I'm not very proud of that." West Point has reinstituted its language requirement, trimmed back in 1989, as well as culture classes and added a new terrorism course. At Emory University twice as many students have signed up for Arabic courses as last year. There has been a 50% increase in enrollment for religious studies at Georgia State since last summer. But over at the business school, the hot class is corporate risk management.
Is the young generation really transformed? A New York City student tells his parents, "Yeah, I know, I'm lucky to be alive. I just don't want to hear it anymore." A survey by the Horatio Alger Association found that two-thirds of teenagers believe that Sept. 11 was the most significant event of their lifetime. Parents say it is their kids' Watergate and Vietnam rolled together and see a blessing and a curse. "Best-case scenario?" asks a white mom of an adopted black son, 9. "His generation pays attention to world politics and doesn't ignore--as I feel I have--foreign policy, with the idea that it can't affect us. Worst-case scenario? They're fearful of people who look different from them, different cultures, different religions. We're working harder now at making that not happen."
Parents like the fact that their kids finally have real role models, not radioactive rock stars and bionic athletes. Being a cop or a fire fighter is now less a trade than a calling. Leaving Shea Stadium after a New York Mets game one summer afternoon, an 8-year-old boy with a baseball glove approaches the cops directing traffic and asks one to sign it. "Don't you want a ballplayer's autograph? Why a cop's?" the officer asks. The boy responds, "Because you helped save the world."
President Bush tried to find an escape hatch from the corporate scandals that stalked him this summer in the spirit of higher callings and new priorities. He addressed the attack of the robber barons by saying, "You know, the bottom line and this corporate-America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbor, loving your neighbor like you'd like to be loved yourself?" But people who do not live in New York and Washington have been hit more directly by the attacks on the markets than by the attacks of last fall. Enron's collapse turned its hometown of Houston inside out. "That affects a lot more people's lives on a day-to-day basis," says resident George Nelson. "If you are afraid that you might be unemployed, you are not thinking about 9/11." More people said they thought the country was on the right track in October--amid daily alerts and anthrax fears and fire fights in Afghanistan--than in July.
It is harder for the President to argue that we are at war when so little is asked of anyone but the soldiers doing the fighting. "The fact that the country quickly returned to normal life is something I do not quite understand," says Duane Jackson, a retired Wisconsin businessman. "Perhaps because no one is having to make any direct sacrifices like we did in World War II. We fight a phantom war, against an unseen enemy, with no direct battle lines. Where is the war?" During the Civil War, he notes, more than "600,000 lives were lost, and yet we do not even have a special national holiday to remember any part of that great conflict. So my feelings on 9/11 remain complex and, in a strange way, uninvolved."
Because Sept. 11 is still one of a kind, people can make it what they want. The left says it has made us more aware of the need to be both humble and generous at home and abroad. The right is glad we now honor our soldiers and suspect our allies and can finally agree that some values are not just a matter of opinion. The faithful talk of a spiritual revival, even though the pollsters say that moment has passed; if we are on a spiritual journey, it does not necessarily pass through a sanctuary, and clerics from coast to coast must wonder whether they missed an opportunity they never expected to have, when they were flooded with people searching for answers but who, after waiting a few weeks, went looking elsewhere.
The only things scarier than the questions we can't answer are the answers we can't avoid. Somewhere in the back of our minds is the knowledge that stunned us that day--knowledge about how America is seen, about where democracies are vulnerable, about what we are capable of at our very best, what courage, what creativity, what kindness individually and collectively. That knowledge, now framed as memory, still poses a challenge. When we didn't know we had the strength, there was no shame in not using it. But now that we know what we can do, how do we excuse ourselves for falling back into the shallows? "In some pathetic way, I miss the realness of it all," says Nilsen, who still has an American flag propped up in a planter in her Des Moines kitchen: "People were real, and now we're back to all this petty politicking. Not that I want another bad thing to happen, but something in me misses the kind of country we were during those weeks."
The survivors and the soldiers on the front lines still live in that country. Most of us will just be visiting sometime in the next few weeks, dragged back by a thousand hours and pages of retrospective and elegy. We will be reminded of the destruction, relive the fury and fight again the battle between the change we value and the change we fear. We're not meant to have fixed everything by the big day; as with New Year's resolutions, anniversaries are a chance to take stock and keep working. And this first one is important because with each successive one, the memory may fade. Whatever other wars we fight together, this one we each get to fight alone, defending our habits and confidence and freedom against enemies who would destroy them and using as a weapon the skills we have built by doing so. We know more now. If only we can remember that we do.
--Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington, Harlene Ellin/Chicago, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Mitch Frank/New York and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines
Photographs by Sean Hemmerle, who, inspired by World Trade Center photographs taken before and on 9/11, revisited the site to see how the landscape had changed almost one year later
With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington, Harlene Ellin/Chicago, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Mitch Frank/New York and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines
Groups 3-4, Journalism After 9/11
In the forward and introduction of Journalism After 9/11 by Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, was in my opinion not an overly important topic. This entire article asked is whether journalist, news reporters and the like should have any right to report on 9/11 like they did, because many felt that there was too much propaganda and tabloid articles surfacing, that it was almost making a mockery out of 9/11. The authors also talk about how many of the news anchors from the well known even news channels like NBC, ABC, and CBS were harassed and were written about as having either no right to talk about 9/11, or report they way they do. The article is long and drawn out, I felt it was a waste of time, because I feel that the people reporting on 9/11, either right after the event or later on have every right to say and broadcast the news however they like, its their job!
One passage that is quoted and makes a lot of sense states that “the images were terrifying to watch, yet the coverage was strangely reassuring because it existed with such immediacy, even when detailed information was scarce. Imagine how much worse the nightmare would have been if broadcasting had been destroyed. On a day of death, television was a lifeline to what was happening” (Quoted in Journalism After 9/11). Of course there will be articles out there that are so flamboyant and over done, and sometimes not even reporting the truth, that’s why it is out job as citizens to pick and choose the material we want to read, from which sources we feel are credible, and be educated about the information being distributed, that’s what we have been learning in college for some odd years!
Besides, all of us who didn’t see it first hand, but watched it on TV, were deffinetly glued to out TV’s while the reporters did the best they could to either figure out what was going on or how to get the best coverage of the event, because we all wanted to see more. One Fox News vice presedent who was quoted saying “‘I think at first out audience and all the television news were like moths to the [screen]…We are addicted to the video of the horrific event’” (Quoted in Journalism After 9/11). Without the news coverage, we all would have been either left with our radios or completely in the dark, the news will always be the news, cause we want to know, we are a nation that thrives on information, being in the know.
Alicia
One passage that is quoted and makes a lot of sense states that “the images were terrifying to watch, yet the coverage was strangely reassuring because it existed with such immediacy, even when detailed information was scarce. Imagine how much worse the nightmare would have been if broadcasting had been destroyed. On a day of death, television was a lifeline to what was happening” (Quoted in Journalism After 9/11). Of course there will be articles out there that are so flamboyant and over done, and sometimes not even reporting the truth, that’s why it is out job as citizens to pick and choose the material we want to read, from which sources we feel are credible, and be educated about the information being distributed, that’s what we have been learning in college for some odd years!
Besides, all of us who didn’t see it first hand, but watched it on TV, were deffinetly glued to out TV’s while the reporters did the best they could to either figure out what was going on or how to get the best coverage of the event, because we all wanted to see more. One Fox News vice presedent who was quoted saying “‘I think at first out audience and all the television news were like moths to the [screen]…We are addicted to the video of the horrific event’” (Quoted in Journalism After 9/11). Without the news coverage, we all would have been either left with our radios or completely in the dark, the news will always be the news, cause we want to know, we are a nation that thrives on information, being in the know.
Alicia
Another Tape Ties bin Laden To Hijackings
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
A NATION CHALLENGED: THE EVIDENCE; Another Tape Ties bin Laden To Hijackings
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: December 10, 2001
A tape of Osama bin Laden found recently in Afghanistan shows him recounting how he listened to news reports on the radio of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center three months ago and quickly told others around him ''there will be more'' as he awaited the second attack.
Administration officials say they have read transcripts of the amateur videotape, which the White House is debating whether to make public, and that Mr. bin Laden seemed amused that many of the hijackers in the attacks apparently had not known they were on suicide missions.
''He suggests that they just thought they were involved in a conventional hijacking,'' one administration official said today.
''There is a lot of laughter on the tape,'' he added. ''What's new is the notion that some of the hijackers didn't know they were going to die.''
In fact, federal investigators have theorized for some time that the hijacking teams were divided into two distinct groups: one or two leaders on each plane who understood the mission and served as pilots, and assistants who were recruited to control the crew and passengers, but probably had no knowledge of the true goal.
American military forces or Central Intelligence Agency personnel working in Jalalabad discovered the tape, officials said, and its existence was first reported in The Washington Post this morning. President Bush has been briefed on its highlights, and today Vice President Dick Cheney and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, said they had read excerpts, translated from the Arabic.
But within the administration, a debate has broken out over the wisdom of making the tape public. Many in the White House argue that it will bolster the case to the Arab world that Mr. bin Laden planned the attacks and portray him as so cold-blooded that his own followers did not know their mission would result in their certain death.
Others, however, are arguing that many in the Arab world would find the discovery of the tape too convenient and charge that it was a creation of the C.I.A. and Hollywood collaborators. ''The quality is not good, the images are dark, and it would open us up to charges that we fabricated it,'' one senior official said today.
In an interview this morning on the CBS News program ''Face the Nation,'' Mr. Cheney called the tape ''one more piece of evidence confirming his responsibility for what happened on 9/11.''
But, perhaps reflecting the internal arguments within the administration about the wisdom of releasing the tape, Mr. Cheney added, ''We've not been eager to give the guy any extra television time'' and said he would ''rely on the experts as to whether or not it would be a good idea for us to release'' the video, or a transcript.
The tape in question is the second that the administration has discovered and kept to itself. The Arab television network Al Jazeera received the first of these tapes of Mr. bin Laden more than a month ago. In it, he offered extreme denunciations of the United States. But Al Jazeera decided not to broadcast it, administration officials said.
It is unclear why the network made that decision, but Al Jazeera had been sharply criticized in the West for broadcasting an earlier tape of Mr. bin Laden hours after the American bombing of Afghanistan began. The Bush administration obtained a copy of that tape, officials said, but chose not to make it public.
But in that first tape, Mr. bin Laden said nothing that would confirm he had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to an administration official who has reviewed it. The latest video, obtained in Afghanistan two weeks ago, records a much more informal talk, apparently at a dinner with his supporters.
The date of the recording is not clear, officials say, although the C.I.A. has told the White House that it believes that the tape is authentic.
During the dinner talk, Mr. bin Laden recounts how he had the radio on in the hours before the terrorist attacks, apparently expecting word of the crash. ''He knew when it was going to happen and tuned in,'' said one American official who has read the translation, ''or so he said. He was saying to people around him, 'Wait, there will be more,' or words to that effect.''
· 1
Just something stupid that relates to discussions we've had:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/11444/family-guy-lois-sways-idiot-undecideds
-Mike Torem-
aka the big guy with red hair that sits near the wall.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/11444/family-guy-lois-sways-idiot-undecideds
-Mike Torem-
aka the big guy with red hair that sits near the wall.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)