September 11, 2001 was a day that I truly will never forget. It was my 17th birthday and the beginning of my senior year in high school. After hearing about the attack in school, one of the first things that came to my mind was all the footage and pictures that the media was and already had released. Would it be graphic or censored? Certainly they would never show video of the planes exploding or the towers falling...right? When I got home from school and was watching the news I was shocked and horrified at what I saw. The planes crashing and the buildings falling was hard to watch but knowing that there were people inside them made it even harder. The next day, all the New York newspapers, and all the papers around the world, were covering the attacks. The chapter in this book specifically mentions the New York Times from September 12, 2001. I have that newspaper and I remember getting chills reading it. Just trying to absorb the events was horrific but reliving it over and over through the media was like a never-ending nightmare. I also felt so badly for the loved ones of the passengers on those planes and of the people in the building; knowing that they had to relive their loved ones death over and over again. It was so cruel.
There were a lot of times that I was angry with the media for replaying and publishing the gruesome images over and over again. I was getting used to seeing the planes crashing and the buildings falling but I was not prepared for seeing the people jumping to their deaths from the top floors of the burning towers. One picture is of a man falling upside down to his death. That morning, that man, and literally HUNDREDS of others trapped high in the towers made the decision to jump to their death rather than suffering and burning in a 2000 degree farenheit fire. I could not even put myself in that man's situation. Knowing all the thoughts that must have went through his mind during that fall is too horrific to think about. Again, that's when I thought, is it really necessary for us to see this? What good is this going to do for us to see these violent and disturbing images/videos? I later realized that these images/videos showed us how much our enemies hate us and what lengths they will go to to make Americans suffer.
New York Times newspaper September 12, 2001
After 9/11, the United States, and the world, was trying to understand why this happened. Why did people hate us so much that they would cause this much destruction? Many people had their own theories, as expressed in the chapter of this book, but the one that disturbs me is Susan Sontag's claim that our alliances and actions are the reason for the attack. 150 newspapers in the United States voiced their outrage at her comment. Two journalists, Peter Carlson and Charles Krauthammer, both said how offended they were by her comment and labeled it, "Un-American" and "...disgusting". I completely agree. In my opinion, the only people we can truly blame are the hijackers and the people who masterminded this attack. The last sentence of this chapter says that, "the news media failed the public in their coverage of 9/11." I disagree with this statement. Even though the papers were not able to give us a definite why to the answer of why we were attacked, they also refrained from printing false motives. Yes, some people were looking for a reason why but the media can't always answer such complex questions when the public wants them to. In my opinion, printing false information that would later be retracted was more beneficial than giving us a temporary "answer" until the real one is discovered. And although I was against showing the violent photos/videos, it needed to be shown. We needed to truly understand how heinous this attack was to motivate us from preventing it from ever happening again.
Peter Hanson, his wife Sue, and their 2 year-old daughter Christine (the youngest victim of 9/11) were all passengers aboard Flight 175.
"The Falling Man" documentary about the above picture of WTC victim falling to his death.
- Flight 175 picture
- Newspaper photos taken by me
- Hanson family portrait courtesy of Eunice Hanson
- "The Falling Man" documentary
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