Sap-tastic Eleventh

MEDIA WATCH: Coverage of 9/11 emits its annual smokescreen.
by Evan George

The recent Oliver Stone film World Trade Center got flak from critics for playing too much like big budget Hollywood hero worship of the NYFD everyman. Meanwhile, this week’s over-produced personal drama “news coverage” of the 5-year anniversary of 9/11 escaped unscathed from media critics, not a dry-eye in the room.

What’s wrong with this picture—when we want our news sappier than our movies?

If you were an outsider looking in, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Sept. 11th was a totally unexplainable occurrence with no historical context and no future repercussions. One sunny day, 19 Arabs hijacked some planes, used them as missiles and killed 3,000 brave Americans. To remember them, we have given their loved ones a platform on which to grieve publicly, once a year, for the cameras.

Of course, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 hardly happened in a bubble; there are plenty of explanations and more than enough repercussions—but they’re hardly as touching as the sight of a newscaster shoving a big padded microphone in the face of a firefighter from Jersey who breaks down trying to say the name of his fallen colleague. Or a little girl dressed like a doll laying a rose on her father’s grave. Or a widow explaining why we must “never forget.”

The TV and newsprint coverage of 9/11 was steeped in personal drama for a myriad of reasons; concern for ratings and readership, though certainly up there, seems the less dubious of them by far.

Extolling the working-class Americans who died on the job responding to the Twin Towers attack is understandable, to a point. But by creating this freaky cult of the firefighter, we perpetuate the unfortunate notion that Americans care more about the life of an American than anyone else. The death of 3,000 New Yorkers five years ago keeps eclipsing everything that’s happened since. After all, the war in Iraq has resulted in the death of over 40,000 Iraqi civilians. And according to the Iraq Body Count project, the third year of fighting has seen the highest number of violent deaths yet.

Let’s not forget the 3,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers that have occurred since then in a botched war based on prefabricated lies.

In the end, obsessing over the tragedy of 9/11 isn’t just morbidly unhealthy for the national consciousness, it’s an act of political ignorance. On a day when “Special 9/11 Coverage” should mean we take an exhaustive look at what the War on Terror has accomplished—or not accomplished—we instead stare over and over again at the footage of the towers crumbling, as if to misdirect American rage all over again. The coverage of 9/11 was an effective smokescreen to the reality of world events then, and it’s a smokescreen now.

First there was ABC’s disaster of a made-for-TV movie “The Path to 9/11” that dressed up right wing, anti-Clinton conspiracy theories as reality. Then on Sept. 9, the U.S. Congress concluded once and for all that pre-war intelligence had in fact strongly disputed any connection between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda, contrary to the Bush administration’s assertions. This news was, of course, eclipsed by Bush’s 9/11 address that still managed to rhetorically connect Iraq and 9/11 multiple times. What’s worse, all of this emotional remembrance masqueraded as “non-political.” Bush placing a wreath on a memorial makes the cover of a hundred dailies on Sept. 12, yet none of them bother to offer analysis of his increasingly irrational 9/11-draped rhetoric. Not contesting his stale, untrue accusations about 9/11’s significance proves Americans are happy with a nihilistic foreign policy that only breeds more hate, terror and death.

So we remember 9/11, but we’ve happily forgotten Saddam’s supposed ties to bin Laden, those hidden WMDs, the torture at Abu Ghraib and the word “blowback.” LAA