September 10, 2006

• Wait: you're telling me that other than whites were killed by the Osama/Saddam cocktail on 9/11? Why would the media, whom I trust with my very grip on reality, misrepresent the facts? Agenda? What? Who's ethnocentric? Wait, I can't answer all of your questions at the same...yes, of course Saddam and Osama are good buddies! It stands to reason that...no WMD? Are you sure? Did you look under the bed? You know how you're always losing stuff under the...that's a good question, Maury, and I'll have to get back to you on that...we're going to wrap this up with some cake and punch in the lobby. Thanks for coming.
• cake?
• That is the exact cake my press secretary ordered, but the decorator obviously forgot to add the people leaping to their deaths. Perhaps the white frosting of the falling white people wouldn't have shown up well against the white background?
• Um, we had a documentary on TV the other night with a black lady, a black man and an Asian-American guy (played by that guy who delivers the orientation films in Lost) featured in it and loads of black firemen shown, plus interviews with Italian-American firemen. I never really thought about how the media showed it, I just assumed that those killed included a range of 'ethnicities'. It was New York, FFS, capital of the world. I'm not disagreeing with the post, but just saying that any half-thinking and watching person must surely be aware that all kinds of different people from different cultures died that day. There might well be a point about media representation, but it's not really made it home to me.
• Perhaps I'm not clear. I'm not asking about awareness of people dying I"m asking about the fact that all the coverage I have seen has only had white people in it. "So is this poor reporting or have I just not been paying attention?" So the question isn't that I thought that all the people who died were white or that it was news to me that they weren't. The question is are they just interviewing white people? Regarding the show you saw, was it a documentary or was it a docudrama? Because it seems that a documentary wouldn't have actors unless it was for dramatisations and I don't see the guy from Lost being desperate enough for work to do a dramatization. My cynical self would say that a docudrama would try to equally represent the races of the people who died, but that the sunday news programs or things like 48 Hours wouldn't go that far and would just go for the weepy white women.
• Right during the time of the event, I remember lots of coverage of minorities. I saw several stories about the multi-ethnic staff of the restaurant at the top of one of the towers, as well as interviews with families. I think maybe some news outlets might focus on the white victims, but definitely not all.
• Of all of the coverage of the "widows of 9/11," I've only seen white women interviewed. This could be because a) the most "famous" widows were married to stock brokers and the like, the white-collar workers in the towers who are predominantly white and b) two groups of white widows just wrote competing books that were just released.
• I've been avoid the 9/11 coverage as much as possible, but maybe another interesting question to ask is about the social class of the people the coverage tends to focus on.
• To be honest, I'm only watching stuff to make myself go 'Fucking Hell!' and not forget what a spectacular and terrifying day that was. I'm sure that there could be a media bias towards rich whitey, but that was never what it was about for me, to be honest it's always been a mixture of 'Oh those poor bastards' and 'I'm watching the defining moment of the 21st century'. Regardless of the whys and wherefores, and all the shit that went before or came after, those are really only the two defining emotions that go with watching the footage of that day. I shall now bow gracefully out of this thread. Godspeed!
• To be honest, I'm not watching any of it. Bush has had all this years since to make an absolute circus of it, why do I need more of that crap from the media? 9/11 .
• what GramMa said. .
• I have to watch, think, discuss. It was a profound and awesome (as in awful, to bypass any confusion in interpretation) event, and it seems important to go through some kind of ritual to mark its anniversary. And by the way I've seen people with brown skin interviewed in recent days, though I think the FPP is on to something and interesting.
• I have absolutely not watched any of the recent "anniversary" coverage. And I'm really sickened by the proliferation of movies, both big Hollywood and cable documentaries. I still feel like it's too soon for this to be entertainment. But, as I said, I do remember lots of non-white families interviewed back in 2001.
• The coverage right then was a lot better and more honest than the stuff that has followed in the intervening years. Nobody had time to spin any stories; they were out there in the street while it was happening.
• I'm generally not a big consumer of news programs, but I did catch a little bit of the ABC news show tonight (9/10) and they went thru several different people in interviews and the two widows I remember them talking to were both african-american. I was only watching for a short time though...
• Hey, will you shut up about your minor military defeats, already!
• I've only really watched one anniversary show (the documentary on the Falling Man), so I haven't noticed any non-white bias. However, then as now, I am struck by the fact that all of the dead were supposedly terrific people. They were just people, ordinary people at work. I'm sure that there were a fair number of assholes among the dead -- people who were cheating on their spouses, people who didn't say 'good morning' to the black guy in the elevator, but did say it to the white lady, whatever. Given the number of A-types in high-end finance or law working up there, I'm sure there were a couple of real jerks who ended up among the dead, too. Not that they deserved what they got, but being killed in such a spectacular way doesn't elevate anyone to sainthood. But you wouldn't know that from what you see on tv.
• All the minorities were busy looting... oh wait, wrong disaster.
• They were just people, ordinary people at work. I think it says something good about humans, about the indomitability of human love, that we remember those we've lost primarily by their positive attributes.
• If I may be so bold (attention, petebest), I believe that in the best cases this can be just the kind of thing that TV can do very well: bring people together, make them feel bonds with their brothers and sisters across their country or around the world, merely by virtue of seeing the same thing at the same time as those brothers and sisters.
• It's a very very fine line though HWingo. As someone mentioned previously the best parts came mostly from the networks' unreadiness and immediacy. These "tribute" shows and faux-docu-drama-reality warps are wrong, wrong wrong. Using the undoubted positive moments or angles from that time is not acceptable as a reason for them. The tributes have been made, the immediate lessons taught (if not learned) and the long-term lessons are in jeopardy because of these "tribute" genre shows (and Presidential references, I might add). $0.02.
• I'm tired of hearing about 9-11. The fact that the coverage is crappy is a level of nuance I am no longer capable of worrying about. The outrage meter is pegged off-scale high, there's no room left for more.
• $0.02. Is that $0.02 USD or $0.02 CAD?
• Which one gets me more gas for my Hummer?
• Is that $0.02 USD or $0.02 CAD? Which one gets me more gas for my Hummer? Your insouciance makes baby 9/11 cry.
• I'm tired of hearing about 9-11. Yeah. I agree with Mord here. And, to my recollection, never before in history has so much money been made on the deaths of so few. Correct me if I'm wrong.
• Including that Jeebus guy?
• Naw. That guy was CGI.
• Happy birthday, me!
• Thanks, buddy!
• I wonder what's going on today, pal?
• Hay, STAFOO! Peepl wan 2 chat? about 911? today?
• Spam much?
• Shove it. I'm going home.
• I said it first.
• I said shove it, boss
• The ABC 9/11 Docudrama's Right-Wing Roots
• Saw an hour or so tonight, and interestingly the primary message at the end was how piss-poor the government's response has been to the 9/11 Commission's recommendations.
• *wipes flop sweat from bee-brow*
• But when ABC ran The Path to 9/11 most viewers opted for a football game. Stuck in the middle of the final episode was a speech by President Bush, who said America's safety depended on the outcome of the battle for Baghdad, a none-too-subtle plug for the republicans in the forthcoming congressional elections. "Then we cut back to The Path to 9/11," says Blumenthal. "This is an incredible blurring of the lines between fact, fiction and propaganda." When Truth is Stranger Than Fiction