The Media & The Attack

[pluckyduck]

Okay, you've got gripes, and hopefully a few kudos too.

Where did you get your news? How do you think the media did with this most unprecidented of all news events?

In general, I think that the human beings who covered the news did as well as human beings in the middle of such chaos could. I think that the people at Fox should be ashamed of themselves. Given the sensationalistic way they handled some film clips of a few offshore Arab reactions to the WTC attack, we should wrap them all in head turbans, drop them in the middle of some small town down south or in the midwest, and let them reap a bit of what they sewed. Not that I feel strongly about that or anything.

Who did well? Who did poorly? And, what, for heaven's sake, is next?

Andrea

I tend to disagree. I think that every station used what clips they had and gosh I have to say that when I have only been watching one station (any station) it gets tedious. I think that to not show these sorts of clips would have meant not covering the accident properly. There *are* people that rejoiced when the planes hit. We aren't the most glorified nation in the world and many people do have ill will towards us. I think that most people channel surfed a lot with regards to the accident so the effect of Fox's repetition basically gave us more of a full coverage of the event as opposed to a PC lockdown on the situation.

I have gotten a little bit annoyed in watching many of the stations when they assert at fairly inoppropriate parts of a broadcast to 'make sure that you don't blame all Arabs'. I don't think that there really are very many people that are blaming all Arabs and really don't think that asserting this over and over is going to change those few people that do blame all Arabs.

I have also been getting a bit tired of stations choosing sound bites that seem to enforce a certain side or another (including Fox) and kinda tired at some of the spins people take on these things (the way people are spinning things even as they supposedly put on a nonbiased broadcast). So far I have been able to find examples of this on all of the stations I have watched (with the exception of PBS--ummm... except that PBS did cancel The Lawrence Welk show in favor of a concert series in order to make things more peaceful) and wouldn't even say that Fox has been the worst that I have seen...

Ander

I will say that I did end up watching Fox for a bit longer than I did other stations (not Fox News but the New York Fox affiliate--I was at my brothers' house and they have digital cable) because they actually were more focused. They actually put Giulliani on full screen (except a ticker below him) when he was giving his speech a couple hours after the incident while other stations had a couple of windows going at once. I thought this was a bit more respectful of the speaker and allowed me to concentrate a lot more on what he was saying...

Ander

[AuntieEmma[$]]

Speaking of media, does anybody know a good online site they can recommend for news? I like Salon for commentary, but haven't seen anyplace I really like to get breaking news from different sources. Yahoo's usually good for that kind of thing, but now they've got their coverage scattered over so many topics that it's hard to follow.

Hmmmm... who on here always sticks his foot in his mouth when someone mentions the media... hmmmmmm...

(Oh, crap, that's my cue!)

I've been tossing comments here and there about the media coverage and the frenzy of local newsroom journalists descending like vultures on major events and straining resourced instead of lending a helping hand.

The initial coverage stuck to facts better than I expected. But I think the broadcast networks cut back just a half a day too late... the speculation-to-news ratio was way out of hand on that last day. The bidding war on all the ex-White House and Pentagon staffers must have taken a while, and when they made the rounds they got the "journalists" and special correspondents thinking out loud, too.

CNN did well to stick An-DRAY-uh Thompson in a closet and lock it until the coast was clear.

FOX rhymes with shocks. They have *zero* respect for the event. I was surprised that FOX didn't retrack the jumpers with Van Halen.

Barbara Walters' report on the famous people dead and the "lost restaurant" bit made me puke. Starf*cker to the end.

Some sites to check out for how the TV people feel about the coverage:

http://www.medialine.com/ (Go to Open Line)
http://www.tvspy.com/ (Go to Water Cooler)
http://www.fuckedtelevision.com/
http://www.newsblues.com/

There's some stories on other sites about anchors having to pull 12 hour shifts and such... f- them, f- them all. Watched a tape of the Allison floods produced by my old station and the anchors came off as whiners when THEY mentioned 9 and 12 hour runs.

Reports of the same whining is trickling out in the industry rags.

The engineers and photographers and studio people have probably been going full-throttle for days now out in the wreckage and stench. The person who pulls in all these feeds and keeps them coordinated, well, that's a Herculean task and very few people can do it at that level. They are a human fuse to that huge current. Would they give that up for the mere risk of bedsores from sitting in a cushioned anchor chair all day?

Hell no. When you see an anchor get snippy behind the desk at a shot being a second late or a camera angle off, rest well that I have spat at the screen in a Donald Duck megaquack-fury.

On a final note, there's a handful of TV people who are missing in the tragedy. A lot of TV and radio stations had their transmitter equipment on WTC1, and with those come people. I may have been a pale shadow of an engineer, but I can feel their loss.

One final note... MSNBC needs to cut back on the graphics, tickers, and garbage on the screen. Everybody's starting to overwhelm the screen with useless graphics and branding to the point where I'm surprised that they even need to roll tape or have an anchor.

How bad was it? There was the 1-billionth replay of the second plane hitting the WTC and the graphics covered up the impact. If this had been reality, the graphics might have acted as shields and spared many thousands of lives.

The breaks on the half-hours started to turn from calls for donations to the Red Cross for the inevitable POPs and promo opportunities.

I hate promos.

Also, the stories about the networks losing money during all this... strikes me odd. So they lose money during the period when they're doing the job they're supposed to be doing (FCC: "To inform the public and serve the public trust"). Makes you wonder what they're doing the other 98% of the broadcast year when they rake in insanely huge profits and do their best to disguise as many as possible as operating losses.

[MrsNormanMaine[$]]

I watched a combination of CNN and ABC but with the sound off and had NPR provide the soundtrack as their commentary and analysis is much more intelligent than the drivel coming out of most of the TV talking heads.

My big complaint is TV processing the event and homogenizing it and packaging it in an attempt to tell me how I should feel about it. Assigning it graphics and theme music and a national theme song ('God Bless America') only serves to trivialize the horror and to distance it into another media created unreality which it most definitely is not.

MNM

[evmori]

I mostly watch CNN & ABC. I'm a big Peter Jennings fan. Have been ever since he was a field correspondant lon ago! These two seem to be the most objective, plus the tickers contain lots of other info. The local news here is terrible. Too much banter & not enough news. It's more like a variety show than news.

[shadow8]

With the limited time I have, I've mostly been keeping track of this event either via the Internet (with news wires such as AP or Reuters) or CNN. The AP and Reuters newswires are often rushed so they are prone to factual errors, but at least they constantly update the news down to the second.

I dunno why, but I trust CNN the most. Biases and subjectivity will exist unfortunately, regardless of what one watches, but in my opinion, CNN has done a fine job covering what they can regarding the whole World Trade Center and Pentagon tragedies.

God Bless All.

One unusual side-effect of all of this is that all those expensive ultra-zoomcam helicopters that local stations like to waste their money on and interrupt soap operas with insipid live car chases, pointless birds' eye view of police standoffs so the criminals know where to shoot, and construction workers who are lucky enough to have safety harnesses but bad hand-eye coordination...

They're all grounded.

Unless it's a station-to-airport run for fuel, almost all of them operate under visual flight rules (VFR) without a set flight plan. That's a no-no for now unless you're a cropduster. Not sure how emergency medical services fall under the rules... I think they log a flight plan verbally with the dispatcher. I'll have to check with my brother-in-law who does the equivalent of LifeFlight in Atlanta.

(Watch out for EYEWITNESS NEWS FARMER-CAM! on a TV station near you.)

[AuntieEmma[$]]

Saw Nightline last night. Thought it was the best coverage I've seen on TV. They had someone who acts as a go-between with the U.S. and Islamic countries who was talking about what's going on internally in Pakistan now, and Ron Kuby (sp?) who was the lawyer for some of the first WTC bombers, talking about how the CIA had been working through a refugee center in Brooklyn, picking the most disgruntled, religious fanatical, loose-cannon types to train as warriors.

Also, mercifully, Nightline didn't show a single shot of the towers being hit or collapsing. I've seen enough of that -- don't want to relive it any more.

If you like that, Charlie Rose has been having some pretty decent interviews with various people that are pretty knowledgable (including some with some great knowledge of Middle Eastern culture) on the PBS station. Absolutely no graphics involved, just a talk with the other person. He asks some really solid questions and can sometimes get some pretty straight answers where lots of these other people go for fluff or goofy stuff.

Ander

Charlie Rose is a class act. He came down to Houston for the 1992 GOP Convention and did his show from KUHT/PBS for a week. (I was at KUHT from 9/1991 - 11/1994) McNeil-Lehrer was down there, too, but Charlie did his stuff from the studios and not the Dome.

His production team was pretty well-read and did a lot of research and practice questions before the shows. If the guest had a book or twenty, somebody had read them all and probably twice. The guest was respected, but questioned in order to reveal more to the audience.

I remember Newt Gingrich going through the building and I nearly dropped a Tandy 1000 on him... by accident. Yeah, that's the ticket. Also, Ann Richards autographed a Laserjet IIID printer, but the custodian cleaned it off. "Damn, that stain was hard to get out."

Sheesh.

[erik_kosberg]

Originally posted by file13
One unusual side-effect of all of this is that all those expensive ultra-zoomcam helicopters that local stations like to waste their money on and interrupt soap operas with insipid live car chases, pointless birds' eye view of police standoffs so the criminals know where to shoot, and construction workers who are lucky enough to have safety harnesses but bad hand-eye coordination...

They're all grounded.

Unless it's a station-to-airport run for fuel, almost all of them operate under visual flight rules (VFR) without a set flight plan. That's a no-no for now unless you're a cropduster. Not sure how emergency medical services fall under the rules... I think they log a flight plan verbally with the dispatcher. I'll have to check with my brother-in-law who does the equivalent of LifeFlight in Atlanta.

(Watch out for EYEWITNESS NEWS FARMER-CAM! on a TV station near you.)

The FBI has now imposed restrictions on cropdusters. Stepping on a few bureaucratic toes, aren’t they? I would have thought that such restrictions would fall under the FAA’s purview.