CounterPunch
Special Report:
9/11 One Year After
September
7, 2002
September 11:
One Year On
That's Entertainment!
by William McDougal
'The day that sent shockwaves around
the world. The BBC marks the anniversary of September 11 with
a series of special reports and commemorative broadcasts from
across the globe.'
BBC Programme Information
7-13 September 2002
As the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks
of September 11 approaches, broadcasters are preparing to go
toe to toe to see who will win the broadcasting war of attrition
which will mean wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the
al Qaeda attacks on America.
The BBC, like almost every other large
broadcast and media concern this side of Washington, is preparing
to commemorate the anniversary of what has glibly been called
'Ground Zero' with round-the-clock coverage across its radio
and television stations. Gathered together under a suitably bathetic
'The day that sent shockwaves around the world' banner, BBC coverage
will go into overdrive in a way not seen since the actual coverage
of September 11 (although BBC World Service did devote a week
of programming to the six month anniversary of the attacks).
BBC Radio 4, Radio Five Live and the
World Service will run extensive commemorative programmes to
complement coverage on the terrestrial and digital television
stations. BBC1 will also premiere 9/11, a documentary filmed
in and around the World Trade Centre when the two hijacked planes
struck New York's twin towers.
The only other recent equivalent precedents
in British broadcasting history are the deaths of the Princess
of Wales and the Queen Mother respectively which rightly
or wrongly were always going to be subject to a 'war chest'
programming strategy. In a BBC press release issued in April
of this year, acting Director General Mark Byford praised all
BBC staff for their efforts in securing overnight figures for
the BBC coverage of the Queen Mother's funeral:
'We should feel very proud of our coverage
in providing programmes of real quality, depth and distinction.
It was a very big team effort. Our professionalism, skill and
outstanding creativity shone through in capturing the events
so magnificently for audiences across the country and the world.
We are gratified that the large majority of viewers turned to
the BBC to witness yesterday's historic funeral service.'
The BBC celebrated an audience peak of
7.1 million viewers and a 58.2% audience share in contrast to
ITV's 3.3 million and 27.1% of audience share. The BBC's outside
broadcast of the occasion pulled together more staff and equipment
than the combined studios of Television Centre. A team of more
than 350 people, 100 cameras, 15 television mobile control vehicles
plus 100 trucks, ten large mobile radio studios and approximately
1,000 miles of cable were used to ensure the successful live
BBC broadcast of the procession to Lying-in-State and the funeral
service. Requisite television gravitas was lent to the proceedings
by the BBC's resident man-at-arms David Dimbleby, while Fergal
Keane was whisked away from less pressing business in Lebanon
to commentate on events for BBC radio.
It is this sort of infrastructural and
logistical muscle which will allow BBC Radio 5's Five Live Breakfast
to be broadcast from New York. Former BBC Radio One DJ Simon
Mayo also presents from New York while the afternoon show presented
by Peter Allen and Jane Garvey will be co-presented in Washington
and Jerusalem respectively. The BBC's pop music station, Radio
1, will carry live reports from Ground Zero in its Newbeat programme
throughout the day.
More cynical minds might question the
value of sending breakfast radio show teams and broadcasters
more familiar with the back catalogues of Britney Spears and
the Spice Girls half way across the world to broadcast the day's
latest hits mixed with on-the-spot interviews with grieving New
Yorkers.
As if that wasn't enough, add to that
list a specially developed website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/september11)
which promises to carry 'archive material, news and information,
international views and historical background to help put the
events of the past year into context.' Live webcasts from Ground
Zero are also promised. The surfeit of coverage has of course
nothing to do with constant speculation regarding the licence
fee nor the criticisms levelled at the BBC's rolling news service
BBC 24 (annual budget of 50 millions pound sterling compared
to SKY's 20 million operating costs) which is caught in a three-way
fight between CNN and SKY.
The BBC is proud of the way it handled
its September 11 coverage last year--it won a clutch of journalism
awards including the Foreign Event Special Award from the FPA
as well as the George Polk Journalism Award for its 'authoritative,
wide-ranging accounts of the attacks on America and the war in
Afghanistan'--pointing to the fact that it was able to take advantage
of its international bureaux to bring immediate on-the-spot eyewitness
reports. Not ones to normally crow, the BBC (in a report submitted
to the Culture Secretary in December 2001 in support of the current
independent review of BBC News 24) stresses the strength in depth
of BBC reporting:
'Our newsgathering strength has been
in evidence throughout the conflict with experienced reporters
on both sides of the front line, including the first Western
reporters into Kabul. BBC News 24 also managed to find a diverse
range of contributors, benefiting from its close connection with
BBC World, as were more able to persuade news-makers to appear
in the knowledge that they would be heard across the world as
well as in the UK (including Madeleine Allbright, General Musharaf,
Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Netanyahu).'
Just as was the case with their exhaustive
and exhausting royal funerals coverage, the BBC's coverage was
a logistical and technical triumph (though whether the rogue's
gallery of interviewees listed truly deserves the epithet 'diverse'
is certainly questionable).
More problematic still is the sort of
slick linguistic casuistry--which presupposes an agreed consensual
agenda--more typical of advertising copywriters and feature film
trailer writers ('The day the world changed', 'The day the
world changed forever' and other tired variations of the
same theme).
Similarly emotionally charged appeals
to some imagined wider public sentiment were expressed in BBC
World's 'The Shrine' (31/08/02), a documentary marking the fifth
anniversary of the death of Princess Diana as part of the channel's
'Modern Times' series:
'A powerful and moving account of the
astonishing late summer days that saw a normally genteel Royal
park transformed into a site of fervent devotion. Richard Alwyn's
film catches the vigil like atmosphere outside the Palace in
the hours before the funeral, the anguish in Hyde Park during
the ceremony, and the tranquillity of the night times spent in
sleeping bags around fires.'
Having waded through acres of adjective
and the sort of tired prose Hallmark greetings card writers kill
for, we learn that Diana's death 'changed the [British] people'.
True, blue rinsed pensioners and flags and banners monarchists
weeped and wailed, but there certainly wasn't the 'extraordinary
outburst of national grief' that has been claimed: an extraordinary
outburst of media coverage yes; but whether the two are one and
the same thing is debatable. We are invited to believe that Diana's
death re-framed Britain in much the same way that Ground Zero
is Year Zero for world history. The death of a jet-setting royal
and the events of September 11 brook no comparison one
is the stuff of OK! Magazine specials, the other a tragedy on
a grand scale but the framing of both in absolutist terms
demands consideration.
Not only are the invariably stars'n'trite
sentiments attached to 11/09 anniversary coverage bogus; but
the need to dress them up in neat little trailed packages with
suitably solemn snatches of music playing beneath suitably reverential
tones serves only to silence debate and to privilege a false
new world order discourse decreed from on high in Washington.
Worse still, as Michael Goldberg writing
in Salon (09/07/02) observes, 'in a media glutted world, September
11 couldn't help but become the ultimate reality show. So enamoured
were we of its rare shocking authenticity that we replicated
its image into infinity and leached it of its meaning.' September
11, he argues, has become the political sledgehammer that the
US administration can now take to any nut. Radio and television
wittingly or not--provide the dramatic narrative exigencies
required to support the risible war noises emanating from Washington.
Of course, the BBC is not alone in its
use of extra-diagetic music and sundry other dramatic devices
to hook the audience--this is symptomatic of a cultural sea-change
in news and factual broadcasting which is now regrettably the
norm from CNN to Channel 4.
Nor should it be singled out for its planned September 11 coverage:
again, this is demonstrably the case across the board--whether
you are in Bermondsey or Baltimore.
Nonetheless, the rationale behind the
decision to film a British Bank Holiday special (27/08/02) of
the gardening makeover programme 'Ground Force' in New York must
be questioned (you can probably imagine the scene as the allusive
penny dropped in some bright spark editor's head 'I
know! Why don't we').
In what must be the worst known case
of what the satirical British magazine Private Eye calls 'WarBalls'
the linking of anything and everything to September 11
on the flimsiest of pretexts--the Ground Force team of celebrity
gardeners undertook its mission to help by 'rejuvenating a small
area for a local community of New Yorkers who have been deeply
affected by the tragedy. In a three day project the Ground Force
team flew over to New York to surprise actress Bette Midler and
the local people of Lower East Side, Manhattan with a garden
in recognition of what the people of New York have been through.'
Writing in The Mirror (28/07/02), Jim Shelley commented on the
opening scenes of the programme where regular presenter Charlie
Dimmock looking at her New York holiday snaps replete with
twin towers as bearing 'the unmistakable stench of blatant
exploitation.' BBC America viewers hopefully won't be quite so
squeamish.
But why so much coverage? To paraphrase the much maligned Noam
Chomsky, the crimes of September 11 are indeed a historic turning
point not because of the scale but rather because of the
choice of target.
That, as the New Statesman argued in
its leader of 24/09/01, is the reason why British sympathies
are perceived as being almost wholly concerned with the sufferings
of ordinary Americans because they are 'people like us' as opposed
to ordinary people in the third world (or now, Afghanistan and
very possibly Iraq). These are sentiments which would seem to
be shared by commissioning editors the length and breadth of
Europe.
There is no question that the terrorist
attacks on the twin towers deserve to be comprehensively covered,
and indeed, deserve to be fittingly marked in tribute to the
dead and to the hundreds and thousands of Americans whose lives
were irrevocably changed by the events of September 11. Whether
September 11 has proved to be the turning point in recent modern
history as is so often claimed is a completely different question.
Certainly, the events of September 11 have left an indelible
mark on the global collective conscious which will not and cannot
be easily erased.
September 11 is without question a day
for mourning and reflection on what has passed and what might
yet still come to pass. Let us respect the tragedy of last year
without turning it once more into a rolling media jamboree more
concerned with audience share, overnight figures and the repetition
of febrile unchallenged half truths about the threat posed by
Saddam to western capitals.
Constant media raking over of the ashes
in the guise of tribute might ultimately prove to be as disingenuous
in spirit as the dollar hungry ghouls who tout Ground Zero DVD's
and Osama Bin Laden toilet paper on the streets surrounding the
site where the World Trade Centre once stood. It is impossible
to forget the cleaners, firemen, janitors and office workers
who lost their lives on that fateful day last year, but nor should
we forget the ordinary lives which have already been thrown into
turmoil in Afghanistan (and very probably Iraq if messrs Bush
and Rumsfeld continue to militate for war against their former
favourite despot).
Only this month, the World Food Programme
announced that rations to millions of Afghans are to be cut as
a result of international donors failure to honour promises to
help re-build the stricken country. UN figures calculate that
some six million Afghans still need food aid over the next year,
but a $90 million shortfall of required aid or 200,000 tonnes
of food means that the money required for the most basic
levels of subsistence is already beginning to run out as Washington
and Brussels continue to squabble over who should pay what. Whether
the eyes and ears of the BBC and CNN will be on the ground in
Kabul--or Baghdad should push come to shove--in quite such numbers
when that corner of the world's anniversaries come around remains
to be seen. As is so often the case, out of sight is very much
out of mind.
Perhaps George Orwell was only partially
wrong when he wrote that 'if you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever.' He should
of course have said a video loop of two jets crashing into the
World Trade Centre.
William McDougal
can be reached at: wmacdougall@msn.com
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