Watching the World Change, page 30
Working under the auspices of the medical examiner, the group inside the tent included members of the uniformed services (police, Fire Department, Port Authority, the National Guard, among others). The team’s role was to triage and prepare any remains for further examination at the city morgue. “The idea was to get the remains packaged properly,” the head of the medical examiner’s DNA lab, Robert Shaler, now recounts, “and then get them back where the autopsy could be done so that things could be documented properly.” Whatever the search-and-rescue squads recovered was “put in a log book,” says Shiya Ribowsky, director of World Trade Center identification operations. “The whole site was gridded out. The GPS satellite position of where it was found was noted, as well as who found it. If they were remains, the remains were tagged, then placed in body bags. I doubt very highly that what they carried that Saturday was a corpse. In fact, I only saw one whole intact body in all my time there. Instead, it was probably a significant portion of a body.”
We stood under the threshold. The men with the stretcher stopped at the tent door and stood for a moment, half in daylight, half in shadow. Harry took photographs of the priests, the escorts, the stretcher that they carried. And then the men inside the tent became agitated. A knot of faces closed in around us.
“Get the hell out of here,” one said.
“You sick fucks,” said another.
The mere presence of a camera in this sanctum was intolerable. Heads turned, faces reddened. Two men at the tent door seemed to move toward us. We felt certain that police would soon be summoned to escort us off the grounds.
As we walked, Harry pressed the automatic rewind on his camera. He slipped me his exposed roll, which I hid in a pocket of my knapsack. Silently, we took our leave and hustled away. We could still hear one of them swearing.
Our escort around Ground Zero’s outskirts was Mike Carter, then vice president of the firefighters’ union (now a financial planner). At first he rebuffed our attempts to gain entry to the site even though we explained our intention to photograph “the heroes” of Ground Zero. “The perimeter’s in almost total lockdown,” he explained, adding, “how on earth can you photograph heroes here? These are the heroes.” He gestured, pointing to his unseen colleagues under the rubble.
After lengthy conversation, Carter acknowledged that our photographic mission might have some merit. Soon he was helping to spirit us past sentries at roadblocks. He looked the other way as we burrowed camera equipment in backpacks and bulky clothing. He led us to the site perimeter, introducing us to firefighters who would pose for Harry’s camera.
Carter offered up his own Tuesday tale. “I was in my car when the south tower fell,” he remembered. “I got there and was carrying equipment in and we were quickly approaching the north tower.” But Carter and his crew were held back by a chief who insisted they wait a while before he deployed them. “Three more minutes, I would’ve been directly in front of it. I would’ve died.” Several months later, photographer Todd Maisel, who covered 9/11 for the New York Daily News, would send Carter a CD with 560 photographs that showed the event unfolding, minute by minute. “I sat down with a couple of beers one night,” Carter now recalls. “I watched one frame at a time, for hours. I had this need to have to know…What were the first two units doing? Where were the rigs parked? What were the expressions on their faces? It wasn’t a morbid curiosity. It was literally looking at the history of the event before I got there. A good friend, Danny Suhr, was killed. My understanding is that he was hit by a jumper. Todd has pictures of the guys in the company dragging Danny away from the towers. I got an opportunity to see their faces.”
Pictures served a deeper purpose too, as solemn proxies for the deceased. Says Carter: “I literally went to funerals—over a hundred—in a four-month period. It was sucking the life out of me. At the funerals, up in the front by the altar, they would have pictures. At all the line-of-duty funerals before that, I had never seen photographs displayed this way. So the pictures were standing in for the bodies they couldn’t find. At the memorials, where there is no casket, they would set up a little table, normally put a helmet out, a folded American flag, and they would have photos of the firefighter.”
In the firehouses, sometimes near the engine bay, shrines would rise. Often personal effects and regalia would be laid upon a table, surrounded by flags, bunting, fire axes, painted frescoes, flowers, candles, and photographs. “It reminds me of the months I spent in Belfast and Northern Ireland,” says correspondent Regis Le Sommier, who visited many stations. “Wall paintings there proclaim heroic deeds and remember dead heroes in the same way. Street after street, it is roll of honor after roll of honor, a deep sense of martyrdom that runs through generations. A lot of fire-fighters in New York are of Irish descent and their way to commemorate [and] venerate [may have this] cultural element to it.”
With new seasons came new funerals. “From my town, Suffern, New York,” Carter recalls, “Charlie Anaya had just gotten on the FDNY. September 11 was the first fire he ever went to, poor guy. They found his remains [later that winter]. They had used DNA. They finally buried him in May. On the back of the funeral program they had pictures. In one of them, he’s with his wife standing with his children, standing on a dock in Jersey City. Almost rising up right behind his head were the twin towers.
“Who would think,” he says, exhaling deeply, remembering the ex-Marine who had re-upped during the Gulf War, “that such an evil thing was going to happen in the very building that was the backdrop to such a beautiful photograph? Who would’ve looked at his smiling face, [on] clearly a beautiful day, and said, ‘Two years from now this building’s gonna kill you?’”
In the days after 9/11, colleagues of Carter’s in the FDNY’s photo unit assembled a collection of headshots of the firefighters lost while responding to the emergency at the towers (Image 28). In a matter of weeks, a poster bearing the faces of 343 men—in eighteen tidy, heart-rending rows, framed by a pair of American flags and two Fire Department shields—would grace the walls of homes and offices as well as scores of watering holes and restaurants throughout the five boroughs.
28. A poster pays homage to the 343 members of the FDNY who lost their lives at the World Trade Center on September 11. (Courtesy of the FDNY)
The men who had tried to banish Harry and me from Ground Zero that day would have seen no paradox in sanctioning these pictures of the dead. This grid of faces was a sign of tribute, not of trespass. Placed in this formal, authoritative context—each in department dress, each accounted for, each burnished by his proximity to symbols of brotherhood and country; all positioned under the headline “New York City Fire Department Members Who Made the Supreme Sacrifice”—the firefighters were being given their due, recognized as heroes in a manner that was graphically proper, incontrovertible, and permanent. Their images, like souls, would surely outlast them.
After ninety-three hours of uninterrupted news coverage, CBS television finally resumed its regular rotation of commercials on Saturday at 6:00 a.m. When the attacks began, says Sandra Genelius of CBS News, “we were on live with The Early Show. The network went on at 8:55 and officially went…straight through with not a single commercial. Unprecedented in [CBS] television history.” The other networks ran similar, marathon coverage, withholding commercials until some time around the ninety-to-one-hundred-hour mark.
Clearly, TV had been the great connector that week. When photographer Andy Levin brought his early “take” of the attacks to the Sygma photo agency on West Twenty-fourth Street, with its ninth-floor view of the still-smoking towers, he was struck by the fact that “the entire staff was looking up at a TV in the center of the room, watching the replays of the second plane exploding into the tower [instead of watching the] actual disaster unfolding only a mile away, and visible from the windows.”
Even those without televisions learned about the events through television. Luc Sante doesn’t have a TV because his house is on a road with no cable hookup and is situated in a pocket valley in upstate New York that is resistant to aerial reception. But he got the news from a television viewer: his mother’s cousin, calling from Belgium. “This was an old woman who lives in the country,” he says. “She doesn’t know we didn’t live in the shadows of the towers. [After her call,] I stayed online almost continuously, trying to find footage and ground-level reports from lower Manhattan.”
Likewise, Robert Pledge felt eerily out-of-sync with the day. The West Side office of his photo agency, Contact Press Images, had neither a TV nor a view of the towers. (His garment district building was not wired for cable.) Instead, he relied on television, secondhand, as friends and clients overseas vividly described the scenes on their screens. “Everything was in deferred time,” he recalls. “The calls came in from Delhi, Paris, Berlin, London, Tokyo, California. I knew the world [had] changed that day, for the worst, because of the amplification. TV had magnified it for everyone, and immediately. I understood the event’s importance by this bow shock from Europe. We actually saw it through other people’s eyes.”
David Grogan, a science editor, had the opposite reaction. He was only ten years old in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but he retains distinct impressions of television’s power, back then, to unite the nation. “I remember watching the initial news reports that day in the classroom,” Grogan says, “and then huddling around the TV at home with my family during the next few days, while other families across the country huddled around their sets. Television helped draw people together and had a calming effect. It was as if we were all gathered in a giant circle, holding hands.” But Grogan’s television experience on September 11 was anything but calming.
On 9/11, he walked from his Brooklyn apartment across the Manhattan Bridge and into the city, against the tide of evacuees—to extract his daughter from school. When he returned home, he turned on the television, expecting an update. (Grogan’s proximity to the twin towers’ antennae had always given him such clear reception that he didn’t need cable service.) Yet all he encountered was a dull gray on every channel but one: a public station, he recalls, broadcasting from outside the city. The smoking skyline was faintly visible through a flurry of white static. He watched what he calls “the loop-loop of the footage of the plane hitting the trade towers.” Then the TV went dead.
“For me,” Grogan says, “watching the same footage of the towers played over and over again—even during the short time we had reception—was mind-numbing. The more I saw it, the more unreal it seemed…Much of TV news these days is inherently unreal because of the way time is distorted…That’s not hard news: it’s just visual porn.” For Grogan, TV deconstructed the event in a manner that made it, in an odd way, too palatable when compared to the view he could see plain as the blue day out his window: “I don’t trust TV as a source of hard news in any sense…TV makes it easier for people to say, ‘Let’s go get ’em.’ You see it in a box and you’re at a remove. You can imagine responding like a cowboy.
“I don’t discount the fact that people who watched the towers burning on TV might have experienced a similar shock to their systems. But I suspect it was of a qualitatively different nature. There was clearly a lot of fear and anger across the nation—which subsequent news coverage helped bring to a fever pitch. My impression is that New York in the weeks after 9/11 was not a place in the grips of fear and anger, but rather a place where tragedy triggered a remarkable outbreak of kindness among friends and strangers alike.”
Anthony Liotti seems to suggest that television’s shortcomings are merely a reflection of the nation’s. A marketing executive at a large brokerage firm, he walked down sixty floors on September 11. Liotti says he understands the inherent limits of television in a culture as dispersed as ours. “We’re the United States,” he allows, “but this country’s come to a point where if it doesn’t happen in your backyard, it doesn’t happen to you. Did the Oklahoma City bombing directly affect me, here in New York? Not really. Not until I went there on business and saw the memorial with these chairs representing all the people killed there, with little chairs for the kids. [To a New Yorker,] taking the Trade Center down was like taking the pinstripes off the Yankees. Here, it affects you. I saw two bodies obliterated before my eyes, just like that. TV [didn’t] show that. It’s superficial. TV doesn’t connect us in a way that matters.”
Television—American television at least—also took on the role of the Great Homogenizer, largely unwilling to address the larger political issues behind the attacks during that first week of sorrow and shock. The photographer Larry Towell recalls being interviewed with other photographers just after September 11 for a segment for CBS News. In Towell’s view, it was a time of national reflection, not rage. “America was still questioning why this could have happened,” he says. “The war drum hadn’t yet been beaten. There were vigils in Union Square. There was a pensive attitude.” Towell says that as the TV cameras rolled, he and his fellow journalists focused on: “What were they striking at? What were they saying to America? It was a sensitive thing.” When the segment aired, however, the comments were reduced to a short clip about their experiences shooting pictures. “I remember feeling a little deceived. I remember a producer saying, ‘Well, we’re going to cut out all that anyway’—anything about questioning our previous actions as a country, [about] how this relate[s] to foreign policy and the Arab world in general.”
The television audience remained all week long. And even though the commercials returned—and, with them, a small degree of normalcy—the face of television had been changed indelibly.
Behind the scenes, network news operations, post-9/11, instituted multiple fail-safe plans for dealing with breaking stories. More newsmen and women became proficient at using digital video cameras. (Once picture phones became popular, NBC News made sure that staff members, even nonjournalists, had mobile phones with cameras, just to have backup “coverage” if they happened to find themselves in the vicinity of a newsworthy event.) CBS News, as a direct result of the attacks, would start keeping “a reporter and producer [at the ready] with the necessary technical ability to go on the air at any time, should the need occur,” says Susan Zirinsky, the executive producer of 48 Hours. “We also have a series of alerts for various levels of management…that advise [us] if there’s breaking news. Without giving away trade secrets, we have technically upgraded so that those that need to talk, instantly, to decide the next course of action are able to do that.”
The on-screen palette would undergo a facelift as well. The “crawl line” that snakes along the bottom of many cable news programs (offering a whirligig of headlines, news nuggets, and corporate cross-promotions—“To vote, go to our Web site”) certainly predates September 11. It is a product of the go-go 1980s, when financial and sports news junkies required real-time updates in the guise of the stock market ticker and the wire service “zipper” that once adorned heavily trafficked urban facades. The crawl (or loop or scroll) was later gussied up, like a garish hemline, becoming a convenient way to accommodate both breaking stories and prepackaged filler material, such as anniversary items and celebrity factoids.
But then came 9/11. “CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News Channel,” according to Entertainment Weekly, “inserted the crawls on September 11 (FOX was first, at around 10:45)” and they’ve been up and running everywhere ever since. In these newsier times, viewers required facts, right then and there. What was the latest on the anthrax scare? Was the terror alert still at “orange”? How many casualties were reported overnight in the region where my nephew’s unit is stationed? And so the recorded segments and the feel-good pieces and even the newscasters themselves became secondary. The networks were admirably taking on the public interest burden that they had shouldered since the medium’s infancy.
Ever after, TV news directors stuck with the crawl, which would typically repeat its litany about six times an hour. The template was flexible enough to accommodate vital news (on September 12, CNN listed the names of the deceased aboard the doomed planes as soon as their identities became available) or divergent views (“The official Saudi news agency reports…”). But as the months went on, what began to matter, more and more, was the variety and richness (read: overload) of the news-watching experience. As the audience share fluctuated among TV-news consumers, eroded by competing and plentiful media options, the crawl became a way to help maximize a viewer’s visual “points of entry,” a lure for engaging those who might otherwise entertain the itch to switch elsewhere (especially the young, MTV-weaned, attention-deficit-prone). The crawl also allowed news desks to offer unsubstantiated items without guilt. “They can now run stories they haven’t confirmed, with attribution to a wire service like Reuters,” observed the Times’s Marshall Sella. “Zipping along at the bottom of the screen, it’s a sly way to appropriate other news outlets’ reporting.”
Meanwhile, the on-screen smoke screen of ever splashier graphics projected the illusion that viewers had actual choices—just as they did on their home computers. The crawl was accompanied by other accoutrements siphoned from the Internet, video games, and sports shows: stat boxes, drop shadows, logo bugs and Chyrons, and the Weblike arrows, overlays, borders, and dingbats that flooded the zone with color, trivia, texture, and movement. The screens at ESPN and Bloomberg can look as crammed as a nuclear reactor night watchman’s—carrying with it the hidden message that there is no real news hierarchy (or objective reality), no matter what the talking heads might imply. “Multiple images” presented on a single screen, New York Times critic Caryn James has noted, “capture the fragmentation of our postmodern world, with its sense that truth is often subjective…[providing] dazzling immersions into many points of view at once.”
