The First 48 Hours
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in Lower Manhattan this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Obviously we're back after skipping a week, one of the reasons being that WNYC where we produce our show is located 6 blocks from the World Trade Center and we were evacuated. In fact, this show has been produced partly in the good offices of Public TV Station WNET which is not set up for radio! So if the sound is not quite up to par, that's why.
Still we were on the air last week, working on NPR's Special Coverage, and one of OTM's contributions was this chronology of the first 48 hours of coverage by our producer at large Mike Pesca. There's a lot of new ground to cover this week, but we'd like to begin with this recapitulation of how it started.
MIKE PESCA:We didn't know it then, but early Tuesday morning America was a normal place. The American media were operating as normal. The front page of the New York Times featured a primary that few New Yorkers had been paying attention to. Fergie was discussing weight loss on Good Morning America. Mr. Peanut had shown up on the set of The Today Show.
And then the first plane hit.
WOMAN: We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion--
MIKE PESCA: The terrorists had already succeeded on one count, gaining media attention, and with the cameras trained, the second hit.
MAN: We just saw on live television as a second plane flew into the second tower of the World Trade Center.
MIKE PESCA: Within half an hour a New York landmark was toppled.
MAN: The entire building has just collapsed--
MAN: The whole side is collapsing?
MAN: The whole building has collapsed.
MAN: The whole building has collapsed?
MAN: The building has collapsed.
MIKE PESCA: The nation's confidence was shattered.
MAN: Another update Cindy--
WOMAN:Ah-- wait a second - this is - is this a live picture? This is a live picture. We are seeing the second World Trade Tower Center [sic] - World Trade Center Tower Number One has just collapsed, ladies and gentlemen - you see it live in our picture.
MIKE PESCA:Two hours prior, the biggest news story of the year was Chandra Levy. But here now was disaster layered on disaster, multiplied by the prospect of war. A U.S. airliner has not been hijacked for over a decade. Four were hijacked on that day. Buildings were falling. The symbols of American power were burning, and the tape was rolling.
MAN:This is taped just a short time ago - this is the best look we've had at the damage at the Pentagon where another plane apparently made a suicide plunge....
MIKE PESCA:For the first few hours the television infrastructure of 21st Century America paid off. Having 30 cable channels was actually a good thing. Every channel offered a different news feed while news consumers edited with their remotes.
But with all those options, viewers had the responsibility for distinguishing fact from fiction. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: Breaking news! On WCBS 880 -- Right here -Right now!
MAN:We don't know if this is simply rumor and the way people talk when something like this happens. It is certainly not fact at this point - something has happened to the State Department. We don't know what yet. We hear that it might have been a plane. Stay with us for the very latest on that angle. There are fresh developments. Moment by moment....
MIKE PESCA: Confusion in the streets and in the newsrooms. That story wasn't true. These sources weren't reliable.
MAN:According to reports, and I want to stress this is coming from the affiliate there who got this from the scanner, so let's put this in perspective--
MIKE PESCA: News outlets were putting it all out there, correcting things as they went along.
MAN:We've since disproved, by the way, with apologies to our viewers that there was ever a car bomb at the State Department. We have knocked down that there was ever a plane crash at the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains, Camp David. Those stories not true. Associated....
MIKE PESCA:While Brian Williams on MS-NBC and most of the other networks concentrated on the effects of the terrorism, CNN was the only one to take viewers to the home of suspected perpetrator Osama bin Laden.
MAN: This is a Taliban spokesman talking now. This is coming to us by videophone from Afghanistan.
MIKE PESCA:The videophone didn't offer as clear as picture as a camera, but none of the other supposedly "global" news-gathering organizations had been willing to pay for a reporter and equipment in this remote region.
By day's end, no network had gone away from the story or even aired a commercial. They even shared each other's tape and gave each other credit. The rules of broadcasting had begun to fade.
On Wednesday TV was still attempting to provide a public service. Web sites and local news stations allowed people to air their grief and publicize pictures of the missing.
MAN:Well, if we get that picture from you on our list-- website, we will certainly put it up, and we will do everything here to-- to what we can to-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN: Can I leave you my number?
MAN: Absolutely! Absolutely. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN:Okay. If anybody has any information, Joseph was wearing a - black pants and a black short-sleeved shirt. My number is 7 1 8-- 2 2 7--
MIKE PESCA:Still things were beginning to revert to form. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] Theme music had been assigned. Individual networks were attempting to "brand" the events of the past day. When the story broke the graphic on the Fox Newschannel read Day of Terror with the word "terror" presented in a font that seemed to be dripping blood.
Soon thereafter the graphic changed to Terrorism Hits America with "terrorism" in more restrained block letters.
MTV was back to playing videos, interspersed with public service messages of special import to the MTV audience.
ANNOUNCER:You must be 17 years old to donate blood. You must be 110 pounds. And you cannot have been tattooed or have had any ear or body piercings in the past 12 months.
The Gulf War was CNN's finest hour. Now the Fox Newschannel was attempting to make this their loudest. A national crisis would not divert Fox from the formula of opinionated primetime hosts.
Here, host John Gibson berates a terrorism expert for urging caution.
MAN:There's a good deal of anger right now, and the country is behind a response. Why wait while we have a bunch of Sherlock Holmes' going around and nailing down exact connections everywhere when we know what happened!? We know it's bin Laden! You know it's bin Laden-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN: But we, we-- but we--
MIKE PESCA:By Thursday things had calmed down a bit. America was busy, in the words of Dan Rather, "re-defining normal." For television, normal was sustained shots of a pile of rubble where the World Trade Center once stood. There were so many stories to tell. Stories of the missing, the displaced, the suspected. Stories told in the familiar vernacular of the modern media.
WOMAN: Lying in that rubble, a simple rag doll. A sad reminder of all the lives that were forever changed.
MIKE PESCA:Once again television used theme music and bold faced titles to package a tragedy. That durable device, the simple rag doll, is in fact mostly a reminder of the limitations of those who resort to drama because they can't convey the reality.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was On the Media's producer at large Mike Pesca. What the Press Isn’t Covering
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Of course the reporting on the terrorist attacks and the aftermath has continued apace, covering the rescue efforts, the death toll, the criminal investigation and the preparation for what is being called America's War against Terrorism. Here to update us on the coverage is Scott Shugar who writes the Today's Papers column for Slate.com Scott, welcome back to On the Media.
SCOTT SHUGAR: Hi, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD:The coverage of these events, television and the print media has been pretty phenomenal and quite expansive, but I'm just wondering, as someone who reads the papers all the time, have you detected anything particular that's missing?
SCOTT SHUGAR:I see two big holes, Bob. I see two stories that are crying out to be done that I think in other contexts would have been much further along than they are now. The first one is the question of exactly how it is that no Air Force fighters were able to intercept any of the four airplanes. I mean that's an incredible fact if you think about it. We have a North American Defense Command that has a budget of some large number of dollars and has fighter aircraft that are on alert -- yet basically they weren't able to bring any of their assets to bear.
That could be scandalous, but it certainly bears looking into.
BOB GARFIELD:Well I have seen some stories, for example, that there were fighters that were on their way to intercept the plane that had hit the Pentagon but were 8 minutes away when the crash occurred.
SCOTT SHUGAR:I've seen some coverage of this story also, but basically it's been incredibly complacent. The AP moved a story late in the week giving the times at which the Air Force scrambled planes.
But that very story said: but it's not clear what they could have done if they'd gotten there anyway. That is incredible to, to think that we have this whole air defense establishment -- planes with missiles connected to the FAA -- and the whole point is really maybe they can't do anything. That, that's not what they say when they ask for the money for the budget.
So I think it's been pretty lazy reporting. It was partially deflected by the White House because they rolled out Dick Cheney last weekend to basically dazzle the press on Sunday when he appeared on Meet the Press when he said that the President authorized shooting down airliners that didn't respond to--commands from the fighters.
BOB GARFIELD: "Take them out," as the vice president put it.
SCOTT SHUGAR: Which of course was very dramatic and seemed to divert the press from the basic issue.
BOB GARFIELD: You said there was another story that you thought got under-covered.
SCOTT SHUGAR:Yes. It has been reported that the FBI had identified two people who turned out we believe to have been among the hijackers as being people that they didn't want in the country, and they notified the INS, and the INS reported back basically sorry -- too late - they've already come in. And the reporting seemed to basically stop at that point!
This seems very complacent to me. It's as if once the FBI had determined that the people have gotten into the country, that's it. That's it, that's it investigatively. Which of course we now know is false. They arrested so many people on the days afterwards that it raises the crying question: why didn't the FBI do these other things then?
BOB GARFIELD:For our purposes the, the crying question is: why did journalism pull up short? What makes these news organizations less aggressive than they might have been on these subjects in the past?
SCOTT SHUGAR:I think that there's a-- two-fold answer. One is there are a lot more obvious doable stories right now. When you have 5,000 murder victims you can do incredible human interest stories from now until doomsday.
The other reason is that journalists are afraid -- either consciously or subconsciously -- of appearing to be unpatriotic. To think that being a patriotic journalist requires you to have missed stories like this I think is a huge mistake.
After all, if a story like this leads to the improvement of how the FBI investigates suspicious characters once they're in the country or if a story like I was mentioning before about how the FAA and the NORAD handle hijacked aircraft would improve that system, both of those would be of great benefit to the country.
BOB GARFIELD:Well I must say that my suspicion on this is that the New York Times and the Washington Post and the L.A. Times and the Boston Globe and maybe, you know, ABC News are actually working on these stories right now to try to do a post-mortem on What Went Wrong.
But as to the larger question of when a misguided sense of patriotism gets in the way of basic journalism, do you see that happening a lot?
SCOTT SHUGAR:I think in the Gulf War it happened quite a bit. I think basically journalists are aware that nowadays they are reasonably unpopular among ordinary folk, and I think that they're aware that one of the things they're most unpopular for is the widespread belief that journalists are in it for the "big story" and the "big paycheck," so I think it's not too far from the conscious mind of most newspaper reporters and news anchors to avoid reinforcing this impression.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well thank you very much!
SCOTT SHUGAR: Sure.
BOB GARFIELD: Scott Shugar writes the Today's Papers column for Slate.com.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up: Hollywood rewrites history to protect our delicate sensibilities; comedians in confusion; and what audiences want now on screens big and small.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. International Papers
September 22, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. The first days after the World Trade Center attacks saw newspaper headlines around the world declaring sympathy and unequivocal support for America.
Almost two weeks later, while bipartisan support for the president seems to be holding in the U.S., divisions are appearing in the European press.
Martin Walker joins us to review the European editorial pages of the past week. Martin, welcome back to the show!
MARTIN WALKER: Hello.
BOB GARFIELD:My expectation was that some of the more contrarian points of view would be expressed in French and Italian newspapers, but one of the most stunning broadsides against the United States' position in this came from England! Tell me about the New Statesman piece.
MARTIN WALKER:Well the, the New Statesman which is a traditional left wing weekly had a piece that said Americans would do well to ask themselves why, despite what should be an enormous propaganda advantage in beaming their way of life to every corner of the globe, their ideals and values have signally failed to inspire the Third World young in the way that Marxism did and Islam now does.
And it finishes up by saying if America seems a greedy and overweening power, it's partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to both Al Gore and Ralph Nader.
We've had something even stronger in, in my old newspaper, The Guardian, where another left wing columnist has, has written that the Rupert Murdochs and the BBC Foreign News chiefs and everyone else who refused to understand the difference in the Middle East between the violence of conquerors, exploiters and oppressors on the one hand and the violence of the conquered, the exploited and oppressed on the other.
I think that really reflects the poll of the, of left wing opinion in quite a lot of Europe. What I am surprised by is that that is not the kind of comment that we've been hearing from some of the traditionally left-leaning European papers like for example France's Le Monde which had a, a very strong piece this week which talked about "the just war" against terrorism.
What it concludes is that it remains that the doctrine of a just war does not only permit us to condemn without reserve the actions of terrorists; it must also be one of the criteria by which we ought to judge the "crusade" against terrorism charted by President Bush. And I think that, that represents if you like the, the sensible left--liberal critique of the American position which is: let's wait and see what he actually does and on the whole we, we, we support America in this and we're feeling deep solidarity with America about it -- but nonetheless, please America, don't go to extremes.
BOB GARFIELD: What have you heard from Germany?
MARTIN WALKER:In-- in the Frankfurt Algomeiner Tzeitel [sp?] Klaus Deiter Frankerburger wrote a, a very, very interesting editorial this week in which he, he condemned the -- what he called the thoughtless left, and he says that: those who confine themself to righteous indignation against the Americans will have to ask themselves whether they want to help fight this war or whether they in intentional or unconscious solidarity with the Taliban want to help perpetrators pass themselves off as victims.
This question of the distinction between "perpetrators" and "victims" is one that does seem to be something of a fault line in the--in the European press.
BOB GARFIELD:A lot of people were surprised in the early days of the crisis when President Bush used the term "crusade" to describe his goal of tracking down terrorists wherever they may lurk and smoking them out and bringing them to justice.
I wonder if in Europe where the Crusades began - has taken particular note of that phraseology and is girding for a war between Europe and Islam.
MARTIN WALKER:Well Il Messagero [sp?] which is an Italian newspaper that broadly supports the, the moderate Socialist Party there made the point that this was a particularly unfortunate phrase because of course it was -- it's Osama bin Laden himself who uses the phrase "the new crusaders" to describe the role of the British and American troops who are in the Persian Gulf and who have been mounting the no fly zone patrols over Iraq.
The very concept of Crusader does tend to strike any Arab reader in, in a rather unfortunate way.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Martin Walker, thank you very much!
MARTIN WALKER: Thank you!
BOB GARFIELD: Martin Walker is the chief international correspondent for United Press International. [MUSIC] Like a Movie
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: The tragedy at the World Trade Center was an international event not least because of television. Certainly never have so many people seen so much violence in so close to real time. Where did we find a common vocabulary to describe what we saw? We heard the answer again and again from the witnesses who fled the smoke and the debris: Hollywood. It was like a movie they said.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Talk to me about what it was like -- were you able to get out - was it-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: Well it was, it was like it was a, a World War II war movie. I mean there was just debris everywhere.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Or like a horror movie, a science fiction movie, a disaster movie. We've enjoyed so many images from the anonymous darkness of a theater, we never imagined, not for a second, that they would burst through into the light of a late summer morning. [SOUNDS OF DESTRUCTION]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: When you saw Independence Day--
MAN: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- when the White House blew up--
MAN: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- did your audience cheer?
MAN: Yeah. Yeah, it was like whoa!!!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tim Gray [sp?] is a columnist for Variety.
MAN:I mean up until a week ago you would see a big building exploding and think cool, dude! Wow! Terrorist's role was cartoon creatures that were just there to be eventually foiled by the heroes, and whenever the terrorists created their mayhem, it was always a room full of anonymous people who got blown up. None of the heroes ever got even maimed by the terrorists.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:If you log on to the Internet Movie Data Base you can type in the word "terrorist" under "plot" and come up with 270 matches -- most in the last 15 years or so. Take the Die Hard series, inaugurated in 1988. [MOVIE MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
ALAN RICKMAN AS VILLAIN IN DIE HARD:Due to the Nakatomi [sp?] Corporation's legacy of greed around the globe they're about to be taught a lesson in the real use of power. [PAUSE] You will be witnesses. [DRAMATIC CHORD] [SOUNDS OF MAYHEM]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:In the first Die Hard, terrorists take over the office tower of a multinational corporation. In the second, they hijack an airliner. In the third, they try to take down New York City and they perish in a blaze of digital effects. Tim Gray.
TIM GRAY:I, I can't imagine anybody watching a movie now filled with pyrotechnics with the same kind of innocence we had before, you know? Every country in Europe went through World War II where they, they went through horrible experiences -- where entire towns were bombed and destroyed, and America hasn't been under fire in World War I or World War II, and suddenly we're under fire here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:European cinema is not known for dazzlingly-rendered explosions. The violence tends to be more intimate. American movie mayhem is popular there partly because, Gray suggests, we set most of our destruction here. They can savor it and shrug it off just as we do. It also may be that Europeans, living in a continent that has seen so much war, were better able than us to comprehend what unfolded Tuesday on television. Novelist Ian McKuen [sp?] watched from London.
IAN McKUEN:Nothing Hollywood ever dreamed up prepared us for a minute for, for any of this, because we know the difference. We're not stupid. Even before the towers crumbled and we were simply watching through telephoto lens we knew, we could imagine the hell inside as people ran for their lives, that we knew the elevators would not be working, we knew the pandemonium that must be going on in these stairwells with people trying to get down.
Also there are no heroes. Not at that stage. There are only victims. And that's unlike Hollywood. Those Hollywood dramas seem piffling alongside this.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:During the Depression what Americans wanted from Hollywood was musicals and screwball comedies. In the '40s we wanted movies about the war. In the '50s, confronting nuclear holocaust, we needed horrific giant ants and body snatchers to exorcise our fears.
But when the Vietnam War was being waged we did not want to see it on the big screen, maybe because we saw enough of the real thing on television.
Who knows what we want now? A call to a video store on the upper east side yielded an ambiguous answer. The manager said romantic comedies were flying out of the place. No disaster films, he said, except one. The Siege. The one disaster movie with a message.
MAN:What if what they really want -- what if they don't even want the Sheik?! Have you considered that?! Huh?! What if what they really want is for us to heard children into stadiums like we're doing and put soldiers on the street and, and have Americans looking over their shoulders, bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit?! Because if we torture him, General, we do that -- and everything that we have bled and fought and died for is over! And they've won!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now Hollywood is scrambling to re-schedule, putting off the debut of a couple of TV series; eliminating re-broadcasts of boom-boom movies like Independence Day and postponing some theatrical releases including a comedy with Tim Allen called Big Trouble about a suitcase bomb that winds up on a plane.
It also has shelved for now the new Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Collateral Damage, about one man who loses his family and takes on a terrorist singlehandedly. The tag line for the movie trailer said: This Fall the war hits home. [MUSIC] Will Farrell
September 22, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As the nation creeps toward normality this week, the late night talk shows return to air, but for the most part the jokes have not. David Letterman and Craig Kilborn attempted serious policy discussions. Conan O'Brien programs have offered the comedic equivalent of a good-natured shrug.
BOB GARFIELD:This past week Brooke hosted a national call-in program with Saturday Night Live's Will Ferrell, famous for his savagely funny impersonation of-- President Bush. The cast of SNL had just met to plan next Saturday's show. It was a gathering of some of the country's comedy elite, and it was clear they didn't have a clue.
WILL FERRELL:Yeah, the one place you'd think maybe there would be some tasteless jokes we, we were-- we weren't coming up with them. Yeah. Yeah. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what happened? Did you set some ground rules? Did you say okay, first off - no Bush jokes, [...?...]. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WILL FERRELL:Well I think the political and topical humor that we're usually known for we're, we're going to have to kind of keep our foot off the gas pedal for a while. I guess we'll be making fun of celebrities. You can always do that, right? Yeah. Mm-hm.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's fair game.
WILL FERRELL: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The fact is that nobody really seems to care about celebrities right now.
WILL FERRELL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is - this is the time of the genuine working class hero.
WILL FERRELL:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it may be, for those of us in humor, our one salvation to still be able to tell -- I don't know -- the Cast of Friends type jokes. We're, we're beginning to enter a new era for so many different things, including comedy - you know - and watching David Letterman last night who is-- he even said it himself, he's based his whole thing on making fun of, of things and people -especially in New York and-- it's just not appropriate right now. Yeah. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So I mean where is comedy in this country and especially in this city and on Saturday Night Live if irony is suddenly off-limits?
WILL FERRELL:Yeah, I, I'm, I'm-- I'm not quite sure! I, I don't know if, if we're going - going to be going back to literally the-- the days of Vaudeville and we're just going to be doing slapstick and - you know - slipping on banana peels on stage. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But who's going to laugh at that?
WILL FERRELL:Probably no one, but-- [LAUGHS] but we'll be trying - I don't know! I don't know - and, and who knows if anyone will be laughing at anything, so--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How will you know it's time to get back and make fun of stuff again?
WILL FERRELL: I, I guess by baby steps you've already sensed that there's a slight return to normalcy here in the city-- you know. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well David Letterman did make fun of Regis Philbin -- that, that's-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WILL FERRELL: Yeah, right! So that's-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- what you'd call a, a baby step.
WILL FERRELL: Right. And-- if every 2 weeks there's another horrible news story you're not going to -you're still not going to want to yuck it up, so--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I'd like to bring in Deborah now in Manville, New Jersey. Thank you very much for coming on.
DEBORAH:Oh, thank you for the program! I really felt very compelled to call. I, I find that we really and truly do need some humor right now. I believe in laughter as part of the healing process.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If Will Ferrell went into his famous George Bush imitation, could you still find it funny? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
DEBORAH: Right. No. No, I don't think so--
WILL FERRELL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DEBORAH: --and you know as Will was saying you know it's, it's tough!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you want to laugh but you don't know what you can laugh at right now.
DEBORAH: True. Very, very true.
WILL FERRELL:Yeah, well I, I think the humor'll go back to more just observational humor about just quirky things in life and, and, and silly characters that, that aren't based in reality at all.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you see the resurgence of Shecky Greene?
WILL FERRELL: Y-- [LAUGHS]. Maybe just a lot of knock-knock jokes. Max Robbins
September 22, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The same problem that confounds TV comedians afflicts the rest of television too. We've asked TV guide columnist Max Robins to address the question: what does the public want to see, and more importantly, what doesn't it want to see?
MAX ROBINS:There's certainly a sense among people in the television business that perhaps those kind of mean-spirited, Machiavellian reality shows that have been so popular - that this is a country now that doesn't want to watch people, you know, put the shiv in each other's back to win a million dollars.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does that signal the end of the entire reality-television genre?
MAX ROBINS:It may not signal the end of reality television as a genre per se, but when a country's lived through something so horrific and that was, I mean - I, I don't mean to sound glib here but reality-tv to the, the Nth degree -- are they really going to want to watch a show called Survivor or a show called Fear Factor? A lot of what these shows had going for them is that the audience gets a vicarious thrill. They're geared in an 18 to 34 year old crowd that really up to this point hasn't had to deal with this kind of stuff before. I think you really have to ask -- now that-- well, that we're facing a whole lot as a country, if this is what we're going to look for, for entertainment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Have you been talking to production chiefs or media buyers, and is that what they're saying? Are they backing away?
MAX ROBINS:I talked to one gentleman who works for one of the biggest media buying companies. He was a key person in bankrolling Survivor to begin with, and he said to me, you know, I think the wind may be out of the sails for this. I talked to another - a, a very senior network executive and he said to me: in my gut I feel like it's over for this stuff.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So as far as the people who make these decisions where the money goes, the genre's run out.
MAX ROBINS:Well it's not going to be immediate, certainly. They have so much money vested in it that they're going to go ahead with it. I mean there is going to be a Survivor III. How well it does I think's a real big question mark.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I know this is really soon, but has anybody told you of new ideas, fresh ideas that may have been born out of this catastrophe?
MAX ROBINS:In a sense, yes. I talked to one veteran television writer/producer, and he was working on a series that was going to be based here in New York. Now this wasn't a reality series. All it was kind of about a down on his luck cop and his travails in New York. Well all of a sudden he's moved this cop to the Catskills, and it's about a cop who was burnt out working in New York, and now goes to the sticks to solve crime. So I don't think we'd go through a, a watershed moment like this without it having a very profound impact.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How are TV producers tweaking current programming in order to make it acceptable in a post World Trade Center explosion world?
MAX ROBINS:Well in a lot of ways, Brooke. For example the show SVU -- it's a spinoff of the popular Law & Order show. In the opening montage it used to be you'd see the World Trade Center. From what I understand, digitally they're taking it out. I understand they're even talking about taking it out digitally for the reruns of the show from the last couple of seasons that run on the USA network. In an episode of Friends, one of the characters makes a joke about hijacking a plane. Well, they went back in, edited it out. I think they're just kind of calling into question what kind of appetite there's going to be, and they're stuck in a way, because some of those shows are already made. They've invested millions of dollars. You have a show like Spin City where the mayor is this goofball.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You can't have a goofball mayor any more?
MAX ROBINS:A goofball mayor of New York? I don't know. I think it remains to be seen. I even got an e-mail from a research group. They're doing a lot of business now just vetting what kind of advertising and trailers for movies, for TV shows are appropriate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So now you have a new rating -- you have for sex, violence, language and now for inappropriate references to New York or violence.
MAX ROBINS:There is just a real attitude that nobody wants to offend. I mean in one sense you can say well you're messing with history. The Trade Center's existed in this city for a long time. So you have to take 'em out of a promo of a fictional show? Well I can understand how the producers are thinking because they're saying hey - they have a whole different meaning now than they did 2 or 3 weeks ago.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Max, thanks a lot.
MAX ROBINS: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: J. Max Robins writes The Robins Report for TV Guide.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, when emotion trumps objectivity, criticism seems anti-American and we consider the vocabulary of war.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. War in the Headlinhes
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Welcome back to On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. If we were doing an installment of our Word Watch series this week, the word unquestionably would be "War." War is widely applied to situations that are military, policy and personal. Recently it's been used in all those contexts. On the first day, even before President Bush invoked the word, "War" played heavily in the headlines of many newspapers. But not in all of them.
For instance the New York Times headline on Wednesday said: U.S. Attacked. But USA Today, the self-styled nation's newspaper ran with: 'Acts of War.' David Colton is page one editor of USA Today and he explained how the decision was made.
DAVID COLTON:That evening we obviously decided to go big and bold with the most dramatic photo we could, and we found a photo of the Trade Center being hit by the second plane, and one of the night editors wrote up a headline that said An Act of War, and we had a long debate about it -- because "an act of war" obviously is an official act. There hasn't been a declaration of war since World War II.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Were there any dissents to--?
DAVID COLTON:Yeah, there were-- I wasn't even completely sold on it. You know I said it, it feels a little jingoistic. It feels a little -- us taking a viewpoint. It's obviously an act of terrorism, but an act of war is -- has some political content to it. And we discussed putting quotes around it because a lot of people in town were saying that - there were certainly plenty of senators saying that it was tantamount to an act of war. And our USA Today/CNN Gallup Poll came in during this discussion, and one of the questions we had asked is: Do you consider this an act of war, and 86 percent of the public had said yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But when you put quotes around it the suggestion was you were quoting an official who would be in a position to make that determination, not just the public or some random senator somewhere who was using some political rhetoric.
DAVID COLTON:Well, all those objections I think fade in the common sense fact of what had happened, and we decided to put single quote marks around it, attributed to both our poll and the sentiment in Washington and go with it, and-- when the President woke up the next morning and spoke to the nation and said this is not act-- these are not acts of terrorism; these are acts of war -- I think that kind of, you know, just showed the common sense reality of what the situation was.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you think if the poll that had 86 percent of the people citing the acts as acts of war against the United States, if that poll had cited say 30 percent, do you think you still would have used the headline?
DAVID COLTON:Maybe not. Maybe not. I think the poll was a very good indicator of the-- the common sense of the country I think, and I don't think anyone woke up the next day and thought we are at war with someone. They knew that there was an act of war committed on the country. We have been careful not to go with figs- or promos that say: America at War which-- if you look at TV, America's New War is what CNN is doing. A lot of us - a lot of the media is using it in a more generic way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:When Rumsfeld was asked if this was an act of war he fudged a bit. He said that it was a vicious, well-coordinated, a massive attack against the United States. What words the lawyers will use we'll characterize it for them, and then the questioner went on to say so does this mean the U.S. is at war then?
And-- he wasn't ready to answer that question, the secretary of defense. We know that a headline is there to grab a person's attention. On the Wednesday in question, of course you didn't need a headline to grab anybody's attention.
So do you think the purpose of the headline has changed?
DAVID COLTON:I just think we had to capture the moment of what had happened in a non-tabloid way, and I think we, we perfectly captured what happened. There's a striking photo of the Trade Centers that is not overly gruesome. The page is full of information. And the Act of War in quotes backed up by reporting in the paper and public sentiment I think is a perfectly valid headline. We're really proud of that front page.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Colton, thank you very much.
DAVID COLTON: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Colton is the page one editor of USA Today. [MUSIC] Words and the President
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: So the day after some papers used the word "War" the president followed suit. A common sense label for these acts we just heard David Colton say. But what about all the other words uttered by President Bush since then? Never known for his verbal skills, the president chose in the days after the event to communicate with two often-conflicting audiences. He had to on the one hand play the field general, rousing the American public to action. But to the world he had to be a diplomat.
Though chronicling "Bush-speak" has become something of a cottage industry, in the days after the attack few of the president's words were challenged in the U.S. media. One exception was Tim Noah who writes the Chatterbox column on Slate.com. Tim, welcome to On the Media.
TIM NOAH: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:Your piece in Slate remarks on the use by the president and others of the word "cowardly" to describe the attacks. Why would that of all things get you to raise your eyebrows?
TIM NOAH:Well, I think that we need to maintain a, a tight focus on the moral outrage of these acts, and the convention in this country is, whenever there's a terrorist attack, to denounce the offender as a "coward." I think it substitutes testosterone for morality.
It's also inaccurate. Someone who sacrifices his own life to commit an act of terror is loathsome in many ways, but I think that we can't call him a coward.
BOB GARFIELD:All right let's talk about "Bushisms" for a moment. Thursday night in the joint session of Congress President Bush spoke to America and the world about the crisis, and it was a brilliant performance! But it was very different from the George Bush we've come to know! The one we're accustomed to isn't shall we say very facile with language.
His first statement about the attacks on the 11th called the perpetrators "folks," for instance. Have there been any other "Bushian" phrasings that have struck you so far?
TIM NOAH:There was the Crusades gaffe. Bush referred to the war on terrorism as a "crusade" and of course that's language that's going to be very offensive to Muslims who do not have happy memories of the Christian Crusades.
It's also not a particularly happy memory for Christians since the Christians lost the Crusades. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] The Christians lost. There was another one. In fact let--let's just listen to this.
REPORTER: Are you saying you want him dead or alive, sir? Can in interpret your [...?...]--
PRESIDENT BUSH:I'm, just remember I'm - all I'm doing is remembering when I was a kid. I remember that-- they used to put out there in the Old West a, a wanted poster -- it said Wanted Dead or Alive. All I want and America wants him brought to justice. That's what we want.
TIM NOAH:I know a number of people objected to that language. I did not. I think he was expressing what a lot of people feel about Osama bin Laden. If the way to get him is to get him dead, then-- they'll be happy to get him dead. Even Michael Waltzer [sp?], author of Just and Unjust Wars doesn't seem to express too much disapproval of this, of this option.
BOB GARFIELD:Does America, by becoming a gigantic posse going out to find the bad guy -- does it sacrifice some of its moral authority with which it leads the world?
TIM NOAH:I really don't think it does! I think this is a very unusual situation. A, a, a country is not at war with us. A, an organization is! And therefore it's logical to go after the key people in that organization, including the leader!
BOB GARFIELD:This is obviously a time of global crisis. Does any of this matter? I mean why are we even discussing semantics? What's the point?
TIM NOAH:Well I think it's very important that the president use language effectively in mobilizing the country, and I, I must say in, in the speech that he gave Thursday night he mobilized the country very, very well. He used very forceful, sometimes poetic language. He did everything that in earlier remarks, especially his off the cuff remarks, he hadn't done.
BOB GARFIELD:On the other hand, Mayor Giuliani, for example, has won enormous admiration for not trying to be self-consciously eloquent but by just talking. Should the president continue to work off teleprompters and note cards mouthing prepared talking points or should he try himself to be Giuliani-esque and just to speak to America.
TIM NOAH:I don't think he should try to be Giuliani-esque. He's not Giuliani. Giuliani's a very good extemporaneous speaker. George W. Bush is not. Although I should make the caveat that the Crusades remark was in prepared remarks. Conversely he did speak extam--extemporaneously very well when he visited the World Trade Center.
BOB GARFIELD: Any sense that this guy is just growing rapidly on the job?
TIM NOAH:People love to say that. I don't know whether he's growing on the job or whether just collectively the administration is getting smarter about what ought to be said. But clearly we're seeing an improvement in the message coming out of the White House.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Tim Noah. Thank you very much.
TIM NOAH: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Tim Noah writes the Chatterbox column for Slate.com. LA Times Critic Condemned
September 22, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: With the emphasis on national unity, the usual critical function of the press is under some strain. Our case in point is Howard Rosenberg, the TV critic of the Los Angeles Times. The day after the towers fell his editors requested a column assessing the performance of the president on television. He said the commander in chief looked stiff and boyish. The response was instant, enraged and overwhelming. The verdict: Rosenberg is a bad American. As one reader wrote: he is a pathetic little man and I honestly question his patriotism and his allegiance to the U.S. The Times should get rid of Rosenberg before his stench infiltrates the whole organization. Howard Rosenberg joins us now. So were most of the responses along those lines?
HOWARD ROSENBERG:Yeah. As a matter of fact that was probably one of the more moderate ones. I, I got--approximately 900 e-mails, 99.5 percent of which were harshly critical, calling me, you know, "Osama bin Rosenberg," equating me with the-- the terrorists, ordering me out of the country, ordering me not to write again, ordering me to die. That was the tone. I got lots of criticism, and even though I respect my criticism and I, and a lot of, lot of times I learn from it-- it just sort of, you know, falls off. This time it didn't, because on some level I, I worried that perhaps they were right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But while you were writing it did you think oh, my God I'm going to get hammered for this?
HOWARD ROSENBERG:No, I knew I'd be criticized. In no way did I ever expect this level of criticism and this many e-mails. You know I didn't, I didn't really attack the president. I wrote about what I thought was his great capacity for feeling the pain of others. I thought in many ways his tears were very admirable. On the other hand I thought there were times when those tears were inappropriate, and that's the part that people really got mad about. I, you know I never really attacked -- it's not my place as someone who writes about television to attack anyone for his or her policies or on a personal level. It was purely a, an examination of the president as he appeared on television. And-- I, I thought it was rather measured. So that's why I was, I was really surprised at the level of criticism.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The headline writers titled your piece Bush's Image Fails to Fill the Screen, and you note that at one point when he was walking from his helicopter he seemed to be slinking guiltily. But that's just image, right? Aren't his pronouncements and his policies m-- vastly more important in the scope of things?
BOB GARFIELD:It's a good point, but I think in-- in the year 2001 it's very important for every president, every leader on any level to be able to communicate through - to the people through television. In some ways that can equal the importance of, of policy decisions! Because you know we look to our leaders, especially the president, for our cues. What he's feeling, we may be feeling. If he appears strong, I think it'll really embolden us. So I think it's more than just a matter of wanting your president to be a TV star. I mean that indeed would be very shallow and really s-- rather insipid. But I think it's importance to judge him on how he communicates to the people, and primarily today the president communicates through television!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Was it important to you to say these things?
HOWARD ROSENBERG:Yeah, I think it is. I -- you know in, in retrospect -- I will be quite honest with you - I don't regret writing anything I wrote. I think I should have waited another day. I think it was a bad judgment on my part and for which I take full responsibility. I mean I could have said you know-- it's a good idea but let me wait another day. He's going to New York. He's going to be around the town.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:If you were writing your column, say, during the Cuban Missile Crisis and you thought that JFK had struck a false note, would it be right to say it then?
HOWARD ROSENBERG:Oh, I think so. I, I really do. Those of us in journalism always walk this very fine line. We really have to watch our step. There are times when we should be sensitive to what the country is going through -- many times, as a matter of fact. And there are times when you want to rally round the flag. But also I think you can carry it to an extreme, and I think you know as the impact of what happened at - in New York really sort of softens a little bit and as time moves on, I think there'll be more and more second-guessing of the president and at least a-- at least pieces giving very close scrutiny to what he does.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
HOWARD ROSENBERG: My pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Howard Rosenberg is the TV critic for the Los Angeles Times.
Final Assessment
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Critics of the media -- this show more than most -- have long dined out on the embarrassing excesses and the appalling deficits of TV news. We never tire of ridiculing its superficiality, its sensationalism, its obsession with horse race politics over substantive policy, dead bodies over legislative ones, profit over probity. Then came September 11th. America, amid the horror, saw a breathtaking display of journalistic virtuosity on broadcast and cable alike. Exhaustive, expansive, responsible, restrained, inquisitive, sensitive and even oddly comforting -- the television networks cleared the decks, sacrificed at least 400 million dollars in advertising revenue and performed in a fashion verging on the heroic. Monica Lewinsky. Gary Condit. Who the hell are Monica Lewinsky and Gary Condit? It was a revelation to see that when real news happens, news of life and death consequence for the entire world, television still knows what to do in matters not only of substance but of tone. In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, TV hit every note.
Now the United States is headed into a war. What sort of war we can scarcely guess. But a war nonetheless. For the foreseeable future amid death and destruction, the nation will be relying on television. This is not time to backslide. But in the past few days there have been some discordant notes.
DAN RATHER ON DAVID LETTERMAN:But I couldn't feel stronger, David, that this is a time for us -- and I'm not preaching about it -- George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions, and-- you know as just one American-- wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.
BOB GARFIELD: On David Letterman's program, CBS News anchor
DAN RATHER declaring something like unconditional fealty to the president. As someone once said, this will not stand. Crisis or no crisis, it is not a news anchor's job to uncritically accept the leadership of any politician. Rather the opposite. It's his job to question everything. In Baltimore, WBFF-TV required its anchor teams to pledge on air their full support for the government's actions. WJLA in Washington has a new slogan: God Bless America. And each of the networks has incorporated into its graphic elaborate, ostentatious displays of the American flag.
This isn't hard to understand. In times of war and tragedy, choked for the right words, so many of us turn reflexively to the flag. In our ineloquence we rely on it to express our patriotism, determination and solidarity. Symbols are powerful, of course, and satisfying. But what they offer in simplicity they lack in depth. Lapel pins and God Bless America may reflect something of how we feel but do nothing to parse the complexities of what we think. Not to put too fine a point on it, serving the public and service democracy involves more than rallying around the flag. Didn't we learn a lesson in the Gulf War? Reporters in televised briefings were roundly despised by the public for badgering the military with questions, but the resulting reporting tended to take the government at its word. Only later did we discover that the Pentagon lied about bomb damage assessments and the efficacy of Patriot Missiles time and again. This isn't about mindless contrarianism or arrogance or cold disrespect. The issue is objectivity and credibility.
If TV news wants to be genuinely patriotic, it must continue to be the skeptical voice envisioned by the country's founders. Journalism's job is to unravel, not to unfurl. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers; engineered by Scott Strickland, and edited by Brooke. Our web master is Amy Pearl. Special thanks to NPR's New York Bureau and especially to New York's Public Television Station Channel 13.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large; Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from National Public Radio and WNYC in beautiful New York City. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in Lower Manhattan this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Obviously we're back after skipping a week, one of the reasons being that WNYC where we produce our show is located 6 blocks from the World Trade Center and we were evacuated. In fact, this show has been produced partly in the good offices of Public TV Station WNET which is not set up for radio! So if the sound is not quite up to par, that's why.
Still we were on the air last week, working on NPR's Special Coverage, and one of OTM's contributions was this chronology of the first 48 hours of coverage by our producer at large Mike Pesca. There's a lot of new ground to cover this week, but we'd like to begin with this recapitulation of how it started.
MIKE PESCA:We didn't know it then, but early Tuesday morning America was a normal place. The American media were operating as normal. The front page of the New York Times featured a primary that few New Yorkers had been paying attention to. Fergie was discussing weight loss on Good Morning America. Mr. Peanut had shown up on the set of The Today Show.
And then the first plane hit.
WOMAN: We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion--
MIKE PESCA: The terrorists had already succeeded on one count, gaining media attention, and with the cameras trained, the second hit.
MAN: We just saw on live television as a second plane flew into the second tower of the World Trade Center.
MIKE PESCA: Within half an hour a New York landmark was toppled.
MAN: The entire building has just collapsed--
MAN: The whole side is collapsing?
MAN: The whole building has collapsed.
MAN: The whole building has collapsed?
MAN: The building has collapsed.
MIKE PESCA: The nation's confidence was shattered.
MAN: Another update Cindy--
WOMAN:Ah-- wait a second - this is - is this a live picture? This is a live picture. We are seeing the second World Trade Tower Center [sic] - World Trade Center Tower Number One has just collapsed, ladies and gentlemen - you see it live in our picture.
MIKE PESCA:Two hours prior, the biggest news story of the year was Chandra Levy. But here now was disaster layered on disaster, multiplied by the prospect of war. A U.S. airliner has not been hijacked for over a decade. Four were hijacked on that day. Buildings were falling. The symbols of American power were burning, and the tape was rolling.
MAN:This is taped just a short time ago - this is the best look we've had at the damage at the Pentagon where another plane apparently made a suicide plunge....
MIKE PESCA:For the first few hours the television infrastructure of 21st Century America paid off. Having 30 cable channels was actually a good thing. Every channel offered a different news feed while news consumers edited with their remotes.
But with all those options, viewers had the responsibility for distinguishing fact from fiction. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: Breaking news! On WCBS 880 -- Right here -Right now!
MAN:We don't know if this is simply rumor and the way people talk when something like this happens. It is certainly not fact at this point - something has happened to the State Department. We don't know what yet. We hear that it might have been a plane. Stay with us for the very latest on that angle. There are fresh developments. Moment by moment....
MIKE PESCA: Confusion in the streets and in the newsrooms. That story wasn't true. These sources weren't reliable.
MAN:According to reports, and I want to stress this is coming from the affiliate there who got this from the scanner, so let's put this in perspective--
MIKE PESCA: News outlets were putting it all out there, correcting things as they went along.
MAN:We've since disproved, by the way, with apologies to our viewers that there was ever a car bomb at the State Department. We have knocked down that there was ever a plane crash at the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains, Camp David. Those stories not true. Associated....
MIKE PESCA:While Brian Williams on MS-NBC and most of the other networks concentrated on the effects of the terrorism, CNN was the only one to take viewers to the home of suspected perpetrator Osama bin Laden.
MAN: This is a Taliban spokesman talking now. This is coming to us by videophone from Afghanistan.
MIKE PESCA:The videophone didn't offer as clear as picture as a camera, but none of the other supposedly "global" news-gathering organizations had been willing to pay for a reporter and equipment in this remote region.
By day's end, no network had gone away from the story or even aired a commercial. They even shared each other's tape and gave each other credit. The rules of broadcasting had begun to fade.
On Wednesday TV was still attempting to provide a public service. Web sites and local news stations allowed people to air their grief and publicize pictures of the missing.
MAN:Well, if we get that picture from you on our list-- website, we will certainly put it up, and we will do everything here to-- to what we can to-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN: Can I leave you my number?
MAN: Absolutely! Absolutely. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN:Okay. If anybody has any information, Joseph was wearing a - black pants and a black short-sleeved shirt. My number is 7 1 8-- 2 2 7--
MIKE PESCA:Still things were beginning to revert to form. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] Theme music had been assigned. Individual networks were attempting to "brand" the events of the past day. When the story broke the graphic on the Fox Newschannel read Day of Terror with the word "terror" presented in a font that seemed to be dripping blood.
Soon thereafter the graphic changed to Terrorism Hits America with "terrorism" in more restrained block letters.
MTV was back to playing videos, interspersed with public service messages of special import to the MTV audience.
ANNOUNCER:You must be 17 years old to donate blood. You must be 110 pounds. And you cannot have been tattooed or have had any ear or body piercings in the past 12 months.
The Gulf War was CNN's finest hour. Now the Fox Newschannel was attempting to make this their loudest. A national crisis would not divert Fox from the formula of opinionated primetime hosts.
Here, host John Gibson berates a terrorism expert for urging caution.
MAN:There's a good deal of anger right now, and the country is behind a response. Why wait while we have a bunch of Sherlock Holmes' going around and nailing down exact connections everywhere when we know what happened!? We know it's bin Laden! You know it's bin Laden-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN: But we, we-- but we--
MIKE PESCA:By Thursday things had calmed down a bit. America was busy, in the words of Dan Rather, "re-defining normal." For television, normal was sustained shots of a pile of rubble where the World Trade Center once stood. There were so many stories to tell. Stories of the missing, the displaced, the suspected. Stories told in the familiar vernacular of the modern media.
WOMAN: Lying in that rubble, a simple rag doll. A sad reminder of all the lives that were forever changed.
MIKE PESCA:Once again television used theme music and bold faced titles to package a tragedy. That durable device, the simple rag doll, is in fact mostly a reminder of the limitations of those who resort to drama because they can't convey the reality.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was On the Media's producer at large Mike Pesca. What the Press Isn’t Covering
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Of course the reporting on the terrorist attacks and the aftermath has continued apace, covering the rescue efforts, the death toll, the criminal investigation and the preparation for what is being called America's War against Terrorism. Here to update us on the coverage is Scott Shugar who writes the Today's Papers column for Slate.com Scott, welcome back to On the Media.
SCOTT SHUGAR: Hi, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD:The coverage of these events, television and the print media has been pretty phenomenal and quite expansive, but I'm just wondering, as someone who reads the papers all the time, have you detected anything particular that's missing?
SCOTT SHUGAR:I see two big holes, Bob. I see two stories that are crying out to be done that I think in other contexts would have been much further along than they are now. The first one is the question of exactly how it is that no Air Force fighters were able to intercept any of the four airplanes. I mean that's an incredible fact if you think about it. We have a North American Defense Command that has a budget of some large number of dollars and has fighter aircraft that are on alert -- yet basically they weren't able to bring any of their assets to bear.
That could be scandalous, but it certainly bears looking into.
BOB GARFIELD:Well I have seen some stories, for example, that there were fighters that were on their way to intercept the plane that had hit the Pentagon but were 8 minutes away when the crash occurred.
SCOTT SHUGAR:I've seen some coverage of this story also, but basically it's been incredibly complacent. The AP moved a story late in the week giving the times at which the Air Force scrambled planes.
But that very story said: but it's not clear what they could have done if they'd gotten there anyway. That is incredible to, to think that we have this whole air defense establishment -- planes with missiles connected to the FAA -- and the whole point is really maybe they can't do anything. That, that's not what they say when they ask for the money for the budget.
So I think it's been pretty lazy reporting. It was partially deflected by the White House because they rolled out Dick Cheney last weekend to basically dazzle the press on Sunday when he appeared on Meet the Press when he said that the President authorized shooting down airliners that didn't respond to--commands from the fighters.
BOB GARFIELD: "Take them out," as the vice president put it.
SCOTT SHUGAR: Which of course was very dramatic and seemed to divert the press from the basic issue.
BOB GARFIELD: You said there was another story that you thought got under-covered.
SCOTT SHUGAR:Yes. It has been reported that the FBI had identified two people who turned out we believe to have been among the hijackers as being people that they didn't want in the country, and they notified the INS, and the INS reported back basically sorry -- too late - they've already come in. And the reporting seemed to basically stop at that point!
This seems very complacent to me. It's as if once the FBI had determined that the people have gotten into the country, that's it. That's it, that's it investigatively. Which of course we now know is false. They arrested so many people on the days afterwards that it raises the crying question: why didn't the FBI do these other things then?
BOB GARFIELD:For our purposes the, the crying question is: why did journalism pull up short? What makes these news organizations less aggressive than they might have been on these subjects in the past?
SCOTT SHUGAR:I think that there's a-- two-fold answer. One is there are a lot more obvious doable stories right now. When you have 5,000 murder victims you can do incredible human interest stories from now until doomsday.
The other reason is that journalists are afraid -- either consciously or subconsciously -- of appearing to be unpatriotic. To think that being a patriotic journalist requires you to have missed stories like this I think is a huge mistake.
After all, if a story like this leads to the improvement of how the FBI investigates suspicious characters once they're in the country or if a story like I was mentioning before about how the FAA and the NORAD handle hijacked aircraft would improve that system, both of those would be of great benefit to the country.
BOB GARFIELD:Well I must say that my suspicion on this is that the New York Times and the Washington Post and the L.A. Times and the Boston Globe and maybe, you know, ABC News are actually working on these stories right now to try to do a post-mortem on What Went Wrong.
But as to the larger question of when a misguided sense of patriotism gets in the way of basic journalism, do you see that happening a lot?
SCOTT SHUGAR:I think in the Gulf War it happened quite a bit. I think basically journalists are aware that nowadays they are reasonably unpopular among ordinary folk, and I think that they're aware that one of the things they're most unpopular for is the widespread belief that journalists are in it for the "big story" and the "big paycheck," so I think it's not too far from the conscious mind of most newspaper reporters and news anchors to avoid reinforcing this impression.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well thank you very much!
SCOTT SHUGAR: Sure.
BOB GARFIELD: Scott Shugar writes the Today's Papers column for Slate.com.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up: Hollywood rewrites history to protect our delicate sensibilities; comedians in confusion; and what audiences want now on screens big and small.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. International Papers
September 22, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. The first days after the World Trade Center attacks saw newspaper headlines around the world declaring sympathy and unequivocal support for America.
Almost two weeks later, while bipartisan support for the president seems to be holding in the U.S., divisions are appearing in the European press.
Martin Walker joins us to review the European editorial pages of the past week. Martin, welcome back to the show!
MARTIN WALKER: Hello.
BOB GARFIELD:My expectation was that some of the more contrarian points of view would be expressed in French and Italian newspapers, but one of the most stunning broadsides against the United States' position in this came from England! Tell me about the New Statesman piece.
MARTIN WALKER:Well the, the New Statesman which is a traditional left wing weekly had a piece that said Americans would do well to ask themselves why, despite what should be an enormous propaganda advantage in beaming their way of life to every corner of the globe, their ideals and values have signally failed to inspire the Third World young in the way that Marxism did and Islam now does.
And it finishes up by saying if America seems a greedy and overweening power, it's partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to both Al Gore and Ralph Nader.
We've had something even stronger in, in my old newspaper, The Guardian, where another left wing columnist has, has written that the Rupert Murdochs and the BBC Foreign News chiefs and everyone else who refused to understand the difference in the Middle East between the violence of conquerors, exploiters and oppressors on the one hand and the violence of the conquered, the exploited and oppressed on the other.
I think that really reflects the poll of the, of left wing opinion in quite a lot of Europe. What I am surprised by is that that is not the kind of comment that we've been hearing from some of the traditionally left-leaning European papers like for example France's Le Monde which had a, a very strong piece this week which talked about "the just war" against terrorism.
What it concludes is that it remains that the doctrine of a just war does not only permit us to condemn without reserve the actions of terrorists; it must also be one of the criteria by which we ought to judge the "crusade" against terrorism charted by President Bush. And I think that, that represents if you like the, the sensible left--liberal critique of the American position which is: let's wait and see what he actually does and on the whole we, we, we support America in this and we're feeling deep solidarity with America about it -- but nonetheless, please America, don't go to extremes.
BOB GARFIELD: What have you heard from Germany?
MARTIN WALKER:In-- in the Frankfurt Algomeiner Tzeitel [sp?] Klaus Deiter Frankerburger wrote a, a very, very interesting editorial this week in which he, he condemned the -- what he called the thoughtless left, and he says that: those who confine themself to righteous indignation against the Americans will have to ask themselves whether they want to help fight this war or whether they in intentional or unconscious solidarity with the Taliban want to help perpetrators pass themselves off as victims.
This question of the distinction between "perpetrators" and "victims" is one that does seem to be something of a fault line in the--in the European press.
BOB GARFIELD:A lot of people were surprised in the early days of the crisis when President Bush used the term "crusade" to describe his goal of tracking down terrorists wherever they may lurk and smoking them out and bringing them to justice.
I wonder if in Europe where the Crusades began - has taken particular note of that phraseology and is girding for a war between Europe and Islam.
MARTIN WALKER:Well Il Messagero [sp?] which is an Italian newspaper that broadly supports the, the moderate Socialist Party there made the point that this was a particularly unfortunate phrase because of course it was -- it's Osama bin Laden himself who uses the phrase "the new crusaders" to describe the role of the British and American troops who are in the Persian Gulf and who have been mounting the no fly zone patrols over Iraq.
The very concept of Crusader does tend to strike any Arab reader in, in a rather unfortunate way.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Martin Walker, thank you very much!
MARTIN WALKER: Thank you!
BOB GARFIELD: Martin Walker is the chief international correspondent for United Press International. [MUSIC] Like a Movie
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: The tragedy at the World Trade Center was an international event not least because of television. Certainly never have so many people seen so much violence in so close to real time. Where did we find a common vocabulary to describe what we saw? We heard the answer again and again from the witnesses who fled the smoke and the debris: Hollywood. It was like a movie they said.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Talk to me about what it was like -- were you able to get out - was it-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: Well it was, it was like it was a, a World War II war movie. I mean there was just debris everywhere.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Or like a horror movie, a science fiction movie, a disaster movie. We've enjoyed so many images from the anonymous darkness of a theater, we never imagined, not for a second, that they would burst through into the light of a late summer morning. [SOUNDS OF DESTRUCTION]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: When you saw Independence Day--
MAN: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- when the White House blew up--
MAN: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- did your audience cheer?
MAN: Yeah. Yeah, it was like whoa!!!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tim Gray [sp?] is a columnist for Variety.
MAN:I mean up until a week ago you would see a big building exploding and think cool, dude! Wow! Terrorist's role was cartoon creatures that were just there to be eventually foiled by the heroes, and whenever the terrorists created their mayhem, it was always a room full of anonymous people who got blown up. None of the heroes ever got even maimed by the terrorists.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:If you log on to the Internet Movie Data Base you can type in the word "terrorist" under "plot" and come up with 270 matches -- most in the last 15 years or so. Take the Die Hard series, inaugurated in 1988. [MOVIE MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
ALAN RICKMAN AS VILLAIN IN DIE HARD:Due to the Nakatomi [sp?] Corporation's legacy of greed around the globe they're about to be taught a lesson in the real use of power. [PAUSE] You will be witnesses. [DRAMATIC CHORD] [SOUNDS OF MAYHEM]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:In the first Die Hard, terrorists take over the office tower of a multinational corporation. In the second, they hijack an airliner. In the third, they try to take down New York City and they perish in a blaze of digital effects. Tim Gray.
TIM GRAY:I, I can't imagine anybody watching a movie now filled with pyrotechnics with the same kind of innocence we had before, you know? Every country in Europe went through World War II where they, they went through horrible experiences -- where entire towns were bombed and destroyed, and America hasn't been under fire in World War I or World War II, and suddenly we're under fire here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:European cinema is not known for dazzlingly-rendered explosions. The violence tends to be more intimate. American movie mayhem is popular there partly because, Gray suggests, we set most of our destruction here. They can savor it and shrug it off just as we do. It also may be that Europeans, living in a continent that has seen so much war, were better able than us to comprehend what unfolded Tuesday on television. Novelist Ian McKuen [sp?] watched from London.
IAN McKUEN:Nothing Hollywood ever dreamed up prepared us for a minute for, for any of this, because we know the difference. We're not stupid. Even before the towers crumbled and we were simply watching through telephoto lens we knew, we could imagine the hell inside as people ran for their lives, that we knew the elevators would not be working, we knew the pandemonium that must be going on in these stairwells with people trying to get down.
Also there are no heroes. Not at that stage. There are only victims. And that's unlike Hollywood. Those Hollywood dramas seem piffling alongside this.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:During the Depression what Americans wanted from Hollywood was musicals and screwball comedies. In the '40s we wanted movies about the war. In the '50s, confronting nuclear holocaust, we needed horrific giant ants and body snatchers to exorcise our fears.
But when the Vietnam War was being waged we did not want to see it on the big screen, maybe because we saw enough of the real thing on television.
Who knows what we want now? A call to a video store on the upper east side yielded an ambiguous answer. The manager said romantic comedies were flying out of the place. No disaster films, he said, except one. The Siege. The one disaster movie with a message.
MAN:What if what they really want -- what if they don't even want the Sheik?! Have you considered that?! Huh?! What if what they really want is for us to heard children into stadiums like we're doing and put soldiers on the street and, and have Americans looking over their shoulders, bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit?! Because if we torture him, General, we do that -- and everything that we have bled and fought and died for is over! And they've won!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now Hollywood is scrambling to re-schedule, putting off the debut of a couple of TV series; eliminating re-broadcasts of boom-boom movies like Independence Day and postponing some theatrical releases including a comedy with Tim Allen called Big Trouble about a suitcase bomb that winds up on a plane.
It also has shelved for now the new Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Collateral Damage, about one man who loses his family and takes on a terrorist singlehandedly. The tag line for the movie trailer said: This Fall the war hits home. [MUSIC] Will Farrell
September 22, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As the nation creeps toward normality this week, the late night talk shows return to air, but for the most part the jokes have not. David Letterman and Craig Kilborn attempted serious policy discussions. Conan O'Brien programs have offered the comedic equivalent of a good-natured shrug.
BOB GARFIELD:This past week Brooke hosted a national call-in program with Saturday Night Live's Will Ferrell, famous for his savagely funny impersonation of-- President Bush. The cast of SNL had just met to plan next Saturday's show. It was a gathering of some of the country's comedy elite, and it was clear they didn't have a clue.
WILL FERRELL:Yeah, the one place you'd think maybe there would be some tasteless jokes we, we were-- we weren't coming up with them. Yeah. Yeah. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what happened? Did you set some ground rules? Did you say okay, first off - no Bush jokes, [...?...]. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WILL FERRELL:Well I think the political and topical humor that we're usually known for we're, we're going to have to kind of keep our foot off the gas pedal for a while. I guess we'll be making fun of celebrities. You can always do that, right? Yeah. Mm-hm.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's fair game.
WILL FERRELL: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The fact is that nobody really seems to care about celebrities right now.
WILL FERRELL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is - this is the time of the genuine working class hero.
WILL FERRELL:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it may be, for those of us in humor, our one salvation to still be able to tell -- I don't know -- the Cast of Friends type jokes. We're, we're beginning to enter a new era for so many different things, including comedy - you know - and watching David Letterman last night who is-- he even said it himself, he's based his whole thing on making fun of, of things and people -especially in New York and-- it's just not appropriate right now. Yeah. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So I mean where is comedy in this country and especially in this city and on Saturday Night Live if irony is suddenly off-limits?
WILL FERRELL:Yeah, I, I'm, I'm-- I'm not quite sure! I, I don't know if, if we're going - going to be going back to literally the-- the days of Vaudeville and we're just going to be doing slapstick and - you know - slipping on banana peels on stage. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But who's going to laugh at that?
WILL FERRELL:Probably no one, but-- [LAUGHS] but we'll be trying - I don't know! I don't know - and, and who knows if anyone will be laughing at anything, so--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How will you know it's time to get back and make fun of stuff again?
WILL FERRELL: I, I guess by baby steps you've already sensed that there's a slight return to normalcy here in the city-- you know. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well David Letterman did make fun of Regis Philbin -- that, that's-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WILL FERRELL: Yeah, right! So that's-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- what you'd call a, a baby step.
WILL FERRELL: Right. And-- if every 2 weeks there's another horrible news story you're not going to -you're still not going to want to yuck it up, so--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I'd like to bring in Deborah now in Manville, New Jersey. Thank you very much for coming on.
DEBORAH:Oh, thank you for the program! I really felt very compelled to call. I, I find that we really and truly do need some humor right now. I believe in laughter as part of the healing process.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If Will Ferrell went into his famous George Bush imitation, could you still find it funny? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
DEBORAH: Right. No. No, I don't think so--
WILL FERRELL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DEBORAH: --and you know as Will was saying you know it's, it's tough!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you want to laugh but you don't know what you can laugh at right now.
DEBORAH: True. Very, very true.
WILL FERRELL:Yeah, well I, I think the humor'll go back to more just observational humor about just quirky things in life and, and, and silly characters that, that aren't based in reality at all.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you see the resurgence of Shecky Greene?
WILL FERRELL: Y-- [LAUGHS]. Maybe just a lot of knock-knock jokes. Max Robbins
September 22, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The same problem that confounds TV comedians afflicts the rest of television too. We've asked TV guide columnist Max Robins to address the question: what does the public want to see, and more importantly, what doesn't it want to see?
MAX ROBINS:There's certainly a sense among people in the television business that perhaps those kind of mean-spirited, Machiavellian reality shows that have been so popular - that this is a country now that doesn't want to watch people, you know, put the shiv in each other's back to win a million dollars.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does that signal the end of the entire reality-television genre?
MAX ROBINS:It may not signal the end of reality television as a genre per se, but when a country's lived through something so horrific and that was, I mean - I, I don't mean to sound glib here but reality-tv to the, the Nth degree -- are they really going to want to watch a show called Survivor or a show called Fear Factor? A lot of what these shows had going for them is that the audience gets a vicarious thrill. They're geared in an 18 to 34 year old crowd that really up to this point hasn't had to deal with this kind of stuff before. I think you really have to ask -- now that-- well, that we're facing a whole lot as a country, if this is what we're going to look for, for entertainment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Have you been talking to production chiefs or media buyers, and is that what they're saying? Are they backing away?
MAX ROBINS:I talked to one gentleman who works for one of the biggest media buying companies. He was a key person in bankrolling Survivor to begin with, and he said to me, you know, I think the wind may be out of the sails for this. I talked to another - a, a very senior network executive and he said to me: in my gut I feel like it's over for this stuff.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So as far as the people who make these decisions where the money goes, the genre's run out.
MAX ROBINS:Well it's not going to be immediate, certainly. They have so much money vested in it that they're going to go ahead with it. I mean there is going to be a Survivor III. How well it does I think's a real big question mark.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I know this is really soon, but has anybody told you of new ideas, fresh ideas that may have been born out of this catastrophe?
MAX ROBINS:In a sense, yes. I talked to one veteran television writer/producer, and he was working on a series that was going to be based here in New York. Now this wasn't a reality series. All it was kind of about a down on his luck cop and his travails in New York. Well all of a sudden he's moved this cop to the Catskills, and it's about a cop who was burnt out working in New York, and now goes to the sticks to solve crime. So I don't think we'd go through a, a watershed moment like this without it having a very profound impact.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How are TV producers tweaking current programming in order to make it acceptable in a post World Trade Center explosion world?
MAX ROBINS:Well in a lot of ways, Brooke. For example the show SVU -- it's a spinoff of the popular Law & Order show. In the opening montage it used to be you'd see the World Trade Center. From what I understand, digitally they're taking it out. I understand they're even talking about taking it out digitally for the reruns of the show from the last couple of seasons that run on the USA network. In an episode of Friends, one of the characters makes a joke about hijacking a plane. Well, they went back in, edited it out. I think they're just kind of calling into question what kind of appetite there's going to be, and they're stuck in a way, because some of those shows are already made. They've invested millions of dollars. You have a show like Spin City where the mayor is this goofball.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You can't have a goofball mayor any more?
MAX ROBINS:A goofball mayor of New York? I don't know. I think it remains to be seen. I even got an e-mail from a research group. They're doing a lot of business now just vetting what kind of advertising and trailers for movies, for TV shows are appropriate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So now you have a new rating -- you have for sex, violence, language and now for inappropriate references to New York or violence.
MAX ROBINS:There is just a real attitude that nobody wants to offend. I mean in one sense you can say well you're messing with history. The Trade Center's existed in this city for a long time. So you have to take 'em out of a promo of a fictional show? Well I can understand how the producers are thinking because they're saying hey - they have a whole different meaning now than they did 2 or 3 weeks ago.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Max, thanks a lot.
MAX ROBINS: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: J. Max Robins writes The Robins Report for TV Guide.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, when emotion trumps objectivity, criticism seems anti-American and we consider the vocabulary of war.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. War in the Headlinhes
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Welcome back to On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. If we were doing an installment of our Word Watch series this week, the word unquestionably would be "War." War is widely applied to situations that are military, policy and personal. Recently it's been used in all those contexts. On the first day, even before President Bush invoked the word, "War" played heavily in the headlines of many newspapers. But not in all of them.
For instance the New York Times headline on Wednesday said: U.S. Attacked. But USA Today, the self-styled nation's newspaper ran with: 'Acts of War.' David Colton is page one editor of USA Today and he explained how the decision was made.
DAVID COLTON:That evening we obviously decided to go big and bold with the most dramatic photo we could, and we found a photo of the Trade Center being hit by the second plane, and one of the night editors wrote up a headline that said An Act of War, and we had a long debate about it -- because "an act of war" obviously is an official act. There hasn't been a declaration of war since World War II.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Were there any dissents to--?
DAVID COLTON:Yeah, there were-- I wasn't even completely sold on it. You know I said it, it feels a little jingoistic. It feels a little -- us taking a viewpoint. It's obviously an act of terrorism, but an act of war is -- has some political content to it. And we discussed putting quotes around it because a lot of people in town were saying that - there were certainly plenty of senators saying that it was tantamount to an act of war. And our USA Today/CNN Gallup Poll came in during this discussion, and one of the questions we had asked is: Do you consider this an act of war, and 86 percent of the public had said yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But when you put quotes around it the suggestion was you were quoting an official who would be in a position to make that determination, not just the public or some random senator somewhere who was using some political rhetoric.
DAVID COLTON:Well, all those objections I think fade in the common sense fact of what had happened, and we decided to put single quote marks around it, attributed to both our poll and the sentiment in Washington and go with it, and-- when the President woke up the next morning and spoke to the nation and said this is not act-- these are not acts of terrorism; these are acts of war -- I think that kind of, you know, just showed the common sense reality of what the situation was.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you think if the poll that had 86 percent of the people citing the acts as acts of war against the United States, if that poll had cited say 30 percent, do you think you still would have used the headline?
DAVID COLTON:Maybe not. Maybe not. I think the poll was a very good indicator of the-- the common sense of the country I think, and I don't think anyone woke up the next day and thought we are at war with someone. They knew that there was an act of war committed on the country. We have been careful not to go with figs- or promos that say: America at War which-- if you look at TV, America's New War is what CNN is doing. A lot of us - a lot of the media is using it in a more generic way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:When Rumsfeld was asked if this was an act of war he fudged a bit. He said that it was a vicious, well-coordinated, a massive attack against the United States. What words the lawyers will use we'll characterize it for them, and then the questioner went on to say so does this mean the U.S. is at war then?
And-- he wasn't ready to answer that question, the secretary of defense. We know that a headline is there to grab a person's attention. On the Wednesday in question, of course you didn't need a headline to grab anybody's attention.
So do you think the purpose of the headline has changed?
DAVID COLTON:I just think we had to capture the moment of what had happened in a non-tabloid way, and I think we, we perfectly captured what happened. There's a striking photo of the Trade Centers that is not overly gruesome. The page is full of information. And the Act of War in quotes backed up by reporting in the paper and public sentiment I think is a perfectly valid headline. We're really proud of that front page.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Colton, thank you very much.
DAVID COLTON: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Colton is the page one editor of USA Today. [MUSIC] Words and the President
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: So the day after some papers used the word "War" the president followed suit. A common sense label for these acts we just heard David Colton say. But what about all the other words uttered by President Bush since then? Never known for his verbal skills, the president chose in the days after the event to communicate with two often-conflicting audiences. He had to on the one hand play the field general, rousing the American public to action. But to the world he had to be a diplomat.
Though chronicling "Bush-speak" has become something of a cottage industry, in the days after the attack few of the president's words were challenged in the U.S. media. One exception was Tim Noah who writes the Chatterbox column on Slate.com. Tim, welcome to On the Media.
TIM NOAH: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:Your piece in Slate remarks on the use by the president and others of the word "cowardly" to describe the attacks. Why would that of all things get you to raise your eyebrows?
TIM NOAH:Well, I think that we need to maintain a, a tight focus on the moral outrage of these acts, and the convention in this country is, whenever there's a terrorist attack, to denounce the offender as a "coward." I think it substitutes testosterone for morality.
It's also inaccurate. Someone who sacrifices his own life to commit an act of terror is loathsome in many ways, but I think that we can't call him a coward.
BOB GARFIELD:All right let's talk about "Bushisms" for a moment. Thursday night in the joint session of Congress President Bush spoke to America and the world about the crisis, and it was a brilliant performance! But it was very different from the George Bush we've come to know! The one we're accustomed to isn't shall we say very facile with language.
His first statement about the attacks on the 11th called the perpetrators "folks," for instance. Have there been any other "Bushian" phrasings that have struck you so far?
TIM NOAH:There was the Crusades gaffe. Bush referred to the war on terrorism as a "crusade" and of course that's language that's going to be very offensive to Muslims who do not have happy memories of the Christian Crusades.
It's also not a particularly happy memory for Christians since the Christians lost the Crusades. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] The Christians lost. There was another one. In fact let--let's just listen to this.
REPORTER: Are you saying you want him dead or alive, sir? Can in interpret your [...?...]--
PRESIDENT BUSH:I'm, just remember I'm - all I'm doing is remembering when I was a kid. I remember that-- they used to put out there in the Old West a, a wanted poster -- it said Wanted Dead or Alive. All I want and America wants him brought to justice. That's what we want.
TIM NOAH:I know a number of people objected to that language. I did not. I think he was expressing what a lot of people feel about Osama bin Laden. If the way to get him is to get him dead, then-- they'll be happy to get him dead. Even Michael Waltzer [sp?], author of Just and Unjust Wars doesn't seem to express too much disapproval of this, of this option.
BOB GARFIELD:Does America, by becoming a gigantic posse going out to find the bad guy -- does it sacrifice some of its moral authority with which it leads the world?
TIM NOAH:I really don't think it does! I think this is a very unusual situation. A, a, a country is not at war with us. A, an organization is! And therefore it's logical to go after the key people in that organization, including the leader!
BOB GARFIELD:This is obviously a time of global crisis. Does any of this matter? I mean why are we even discussing semantics? What's the point?
TIM NOAH:Well I think it's very important that the president use language effectively in mobilizing the country, and I, I must say in, in the speech that he gave Thursday night he mobilized the country very, very well. He used very forceful, sometimes poetic language. He did everything that in earlier remarks, especially his off the cuff remarks, he hadn't done.
BOB GARFIELD:On the other hand, Mayor Giuliani, for example, has won enormous admiration for not trying to be self-consciously eloquent but by just talking. Should the president continue to work off teleprompters and note cards mouthing prepared talking points or should he try himself to be Giuliani-esque and just to speak to America.
TIM NOAH:I don't think he should try to be Giuliani-esque. He's not Giuliani. Giuliani's a very good extemporaneous speaker. George W. Bush is not. Although I should make the caveat that the Crusades remark was in prepared remarks. Conversely he did speak extam--extemporaneously very well when he visited the World Trade Center.
BOB GARFIELD: Any sense that this guy is just growing rapidly on the job?
TIM NOAH:People love to say that. I don't know whether he's growing on the job or whether just collectively the administration is getting smarter about what ought to be said. But clearly we're seeing an improvement in the message coming out of the White House.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Tim Noah. Thank you very much.
TIM NOAH: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Tim Noah writes the Chatterbox column for Slate.com. LA Times Critic Condemned
September 22, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: With the emphasis on national unity, the usual critical function of the press is under some strain. Our case in point is Howard Rosenberg, the TV critic of the Los Angeles Times. The day after the towers fell his editors requested a column assessing the performance of the president on television. He said the commander in chief looked stiff and boyish. The response was instant, enraged and overwhelming. The verdict: Rosenberg is a bad American. As one reader wrote: he is a pathetic little man and I honestly question his patriotism and his allegiance to the U.S. The Times should get rid of Rosenberg before his stench infiltrates the whole organization. Howard Rosenberg joins us now. So were most of the responses along those lines?
HOWARD ROSENBERG:Yeah. As a matter of fact that was probably one of the more moderate ones. I, I got--approximately 900 e-mails, 99.5 percent of which were harshly critical, calling me, you know, "Osama bin Rosenberg," equating me with the-- the terrorists, ordering me out of the country, ordering me not to write again, ordering me to die. That was the tone. I got lots of criticism, and even though I respect my criticism and I, and a lot of, lot of times I learn from it-- it just sort of, you know, falls off. This time it didn't, because on some level I, I worried that perhaps they were right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But while you were writing it did you think oh, my God I'm going to get hammered for this?
HOWARD ROSENBERG:No, I knew I'd be criticized. In no way did I ever expect this level of criticism and this many e-mails. You know I didn't, I didn't really attack the president. I wrote about what I thought was his great capacity for feeling the pain of others. I thought in many ways his tears were very admirable. On the other hand I thought there were times when those tears were inappropriate, and that's the part that people really got mad about. I, you know I never really attacked -- it's not my place as someone who writes about television to attack anyone for his or her policies or on a personal level. It was purely a, an examination of the president as he appeared on television. And-- I, I thought it was rather measured. So that's why I was, I was really surprised at the level of criticism.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The headline writers titled your piece Bush's Image Fails to Fill the Screen, and you note that at one point when he was walking from his helicopter he seemed to be slinking guiltily. But that's just image, right? Aren't his pronouncements and his policies m-- vastly more important in the scope of things?
BOB GARFIELD:It's a good point, but I think in-- in the year 2001 it's very important for every president, every leader on any level to be able to communicate through - to the people through television. In some ways that can equal the importance of, of policy decisions! Because you know we look to our leaders, especially the president, for our cues. What he's feeling, we may be feeling. If he appears strong, I think it'll really embolden us. So I think it's more than just a matter of wanting your president to be a TV star. I mean that indeed would be very shallow and really s-- rather insipid. But I think it's importance to judge him on how he communicates to the people, and primarily today the president communicates through television!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Was it important to you to say these things?
HOWARD ROSENBERG:Yeah, I think it is. I -- you know in, in retrospect -- I will be quite honest with you - I don't regret writing anything I wrote. I think I should have waited another day. I think it was a bad judgment on my part and for which I take full responsibility. I mean I could have said you know-- it's a good idea but let me wait another day. He's going to New York. He's going to be around the town.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:If you were writing your column, say, during the Cuban Missile Crisis and you thought that JFK had struck a false note, would it be right to say it then?
HOWARD ROSENBERG:Oh, I think so. I, I really do. Those of us in journalism always walk this very fine line. We really have to watch our step. There are times when we should be sensitive to what the country is going through -- many times, as a matter of fact. And there are times when you want to rally round the flag. But also I think you can carry it to an extreme, and I think you know as the impact of what happened at - in New York really sort of softens a little bit and as time moves on, I think there'll be more and more second-guessing of the president and at least a-- at least pieces giving very close scrutiny to what he does.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
HOWARD ROSENBERG: My pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Howard Rosenberg is the TV critic for the Los Angeles Times.
Final Assessment
September 22, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Critics of the media -- this show more than most -- have long dined out on the embarrassing excesses and the appalling deficits of TV news. We never tire of ridiculing its superficiality, its sensationalism, its obsession with horse race politics over substantive policy, dead bodies over legislative ones, profit over probity. Then came September 11th. America, amid the horror, saw a breathtaking display of journalistic virtuosity on broadcast and cable alike. Exhaustive, expansive, responsible, restrained, inquisitive, sensitive and even oddly comforting -- the television networks cleared the decks, sacrificed at least 400 million dollars in advertising revenue and performed in a fashion verging on the heroic. Monica Lewinsky. Gary Condit. Who the hell are Monica Lewinsky and Gary Condit? It was a revelation to see that when real news happens, news of life and death consequence for the entire world, television still knows what to do in matters not only of substance but of tone. In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, TV hit every note.
Now the United States is headed into a war. What sort of war we can scarcely guess. But a war nonetheless. For the foreseeable future amid death and destruction, the nation will be relying on television. This is not time to backslide. But in the past few days there have been some discordant notes.
DAN RATHER ON DAVID LETTERMAN:But I couldn't feel stronger, David, that this is a time for us -- and I'm not preaching about it -- George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions, and-- you know as just one American-- wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.
BOB GARFIELD: On David Letterman's program, CBS News anchor
DAN RATHER declaring something like unconditional fealty to the president. As someone once said, this will not stand. Crisis or no crisis, it is not a news anchor's job to uncritically accept the leadership of any politician. Rather the opposite. It's his job to question everything. In Baltimore, WBFF-TV required its anchor teams to pledge on air their full support for the government's actions. WJLA in Washington has a new slogan: God Bless America. And each of the networks has incorporated into its graphic elaborate, ostentatious displays of the American flag.
This isn't hard to understand. In times of war and tragedy, choked for the right words, so many of us turn reflexively to the flag. In our ineloquence we rely on it to express our patriotism, determination and solidarity. Symbols are powerful, of course, and satisfying. But what they offer in simplicity they lack in depth. Lapel pins and God Bless America may reflect something of how we feel but do nothing to parse the complexities of what we think. Not to put too fine a point on it, serving the public and service democracy involves more than rallying around the flag. Didn't we learn a lesson in the Gulf War? Reporters in televised briefings were roundly despised by the public for badgering the military with questions, but the resulting reporting tended to take the government at its word. Only later did we discover that the Pentagon lied about bomb damage assessments and the efficacy of Patriot Missiles time and again. This isn't about mindless contrarianism or arrogance or cold disrespect. The issue is objectivity and credibility.
If TV news wants to be genuinely patriotic, it must continue to be the skeptical voice envisioned by the country's founders. Journalism's job is to unravel, not to unfurl. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers; engineered by Scott Strickland, and edited by Brooke. Our web master is Amy Pearl. Special thanks to NPR's New York Bureau and especially to New York's Public Television Station Channel 13.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large; Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from National Public Radio and WNYC in beautiful New York City. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
- Back to story:
- September 22, 2001
-
Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
-
An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
-
Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
-
OTM Staff Picks, Volume 52
-
A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
-
Brooke Gladstone + Cyndi Lauper
-
A Source for Sources
-
A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
-
The Totally Legal Subpoena
- Department of Justice Warrant Names Journalist as a Possible Leak Co-Conspirator
