9/11

9/11 Predicted the Role of Bloggers (I’m Not Kidding)

I don't know about you, but 9/11 footage still wipes me out. It doesn't get any easier to watch. But this morning MSNBC was running the first few hours of coverage from the TODAY SHOW in real time and I watched a couple of hours.

It was like watching a horror movie as Katie and Matt started out so cheerily, then began reporting a "small plane" flying into the first Tower. Then, gradually, the awful reality began to emerge. And for a good long time, and intermittently thereafter, it was "eye witnesses" and "neighborhood residents" and other information "civilians" who delivered the best information.

I listened as a young woman on the telephone, on her way to work at a downtown hotel and having just emerged from the subway just below the Trade Center, described the early sights of the attack. She calmly detailed what she saw, at least until the second plane hit when she responded with understandable emotion. Even then, she was able to carefully report developments – even putting her questioners on hold to check with a local policeman. No seasoned reporter could have done it better.

Later, other eyewitnesses appeared, one after the other. They used words like "reportedly," were very careful as they described what they saw, and offered careful, tempered accounts. This went on all day. Of course those closer to the real product of the attacks, the bodies, the people jumping out of the windows – civilian and reporter alike – were deeply moved and it showed.

So fast-forward to today. As the mainstream media fights for its life, as programs like my alma mater (9 years) the TODAY SHOW move more and more toward infotainment, the serious, thoughtful and original journalism is done as often on blogs as it is anywhere else. Of course there are impulsive writers and rumor mongers and gossip tramps but that's true everywhere and, as the witnesses demonstrated eight years ago, you don't need a network paycheck to deliver reliable and well-presented information. The citizen army of bloggers today is validated every time a caring and thoughtful eyewitness offers mainstream media a sane, helpful description of what's happening, or has happened.

So next time you hear someone going on about "those bloggers" and their untrustworthy nature, take it from a long-time broadcast journalist turned blogger: it's the content of character, not the brand of employer, that makes a journalist.

Photo via Creative Commons by macten

9/11 AND ART

One of my favorite books is William Gibson’s PATTERN RECOGNITION. It’s the story of a "cool hunter" named Cayce Pollard . Her job is to help worldwide companies evaluate their logos and design for "coolness ." She’s a gypsy, finding Pilates studios in the cities she visits and completely engaging the reader (at least this one.) Behind her quite remarkable self, however, lies her grief of the loss of her father in lower Manhattan on September 11. It’s a shadow that haunts all the elegant activity, spectacular writing and remarkable plot lines that are part of any Gibson work. Published in 2003, it was one of the early novels dealing with the horrors of that day in 2001.

There have been several since then, as well as, in the past year, three movies including Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. IMDB lists 11 altogether, not counting Stone’s new film. Apparently, at least to those I know who’ve seen them, several of these films are pretty good.

Last night I finished a book saved, in its last chapters, by that terrible time. THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN, by Claire Messud, got spectacular reviews — front page in the Sunday Times Book Review — and sounded great. What it is is a kind of lesser BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES about lefties living on the West Side (the Beresford is on the cover — not too subtle, right?), their offspring and several other 30-somethings who went to Brown. The whole point of its 431 pages is to reveal the phony side of the lives of the politically correct with their Central Park West apartments, their kids – haunted by parental successes they can’t match, and the rest of the crew ten years out of college and aimless. It’s all OK – but not great. Then, in the middle of a serious act of betrayal by Grand Old Man liberal and a friend of his daughter, two planes hit the World Trade Center — right outside the window of her apartment. Everything that felt so false for all those pages is rendered just as superficial as we thought it was.

I’m not sure it’s enough for me – maybe if I hadn’t lived 20 years on that very West Side and admired many of those people myself – all the while realizing that maybe many of them weren’t who I wanted them to be, it would make more sense. I’m not sure why the book irritated me so and maybe that makes it better than I’m telling you it is – but it’s in my head and it’s making me mad. Can someone else can help me figure out why?

Today is hard. I have been working to let bloggers know about the CNN free re-broadcast online of their 9/11/2001 coverage and so it’s been on my mind for weeks. Even so I can’t get past the awful feelings to anything resembling wisdom.

I just posted to Mom-101, written by Liz Gumbiner, whose birthday is today. Can you imagine carrying that around? I met a kid around 10 with the same birthday and when I asked him his birthday his response was positively apologetic. He already knew.

Instead of me writing what everyone else is writing, I’m going to send you to Liz. Her words say it all.

INSIDIOUS

REPOSTED FROM VOX 8/10:

I quit smoking in 1992 – right after the elections, just like I promised. Of course it was the 6th or 7th time I’d promised but I actually did it. Put the money away in a jar just like they told me to at Smoke Enders and, since my kids had made me quit, gave each of them a year’s worth when they graduated from college. One on the road with the Grateful Dead; the other went to NYC, where we lived when he was little. They deserved it, living with all that smoke for all the years it too me to quit, throwing whole packs of smokes out our apartment window and generally being real pills until I finally kicked the habit.

Why am I talking about this 14 years later? Because today I really wanted to smoke a cigarette. Amazing. Of course I won’t and it will pass but it’s a shock to remember the desire after all this time. Probably all the terrorism nonsense. Peter Jennings said he started again after 9/11, I remember. But I’m just generally appalled at the power of this drug. It may not capture me again but it’s a powerhouse.