TV, Making 9-11 Its Business
After Showing Life-Changing Events, The Medium Buys In to the New Order

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 30, 2001; Page G02

Of too many things has it been said that nothing would "ever be the same" after they occurred. And then in 2001, sitting at our television sets, we saw a horrific tragedy that actually justifies using the cliche. What indeed would be the same now? Even gazing up at a bright, clear blue sky can bring the memory back: Why look, it's the kind of sky, it's the kind of day, when hijacked airplanes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and Americans gaped in mournful disbelief.

And much of it unfolded on live TV. The daytime nightmare imprinted terrible images on our consciousness. We witnessed it in the company of friends: the hosts of network morning shows and, later, network anchors and correspondents. The pictures played over and over and at some point we could no longer remain in denial, we had to admit to ourselves it had really happened and we had virtually been there to witness it.

Having watched, with everyone else, this real-life drama on television, the idea of sitting down now and compiling a list of the year's best made-up dramas -- or comedies or game or "reality" shows -- seems ridiculous. There were stirring and stunning TV moments that had nothing to do with the terrorism of Sept. 11, but they appear inconsequential by comparison. The Trade Center towers cast long twin shadows, not only over things that came after, but even over things that came before.

This was a total eclipse.

We go through the motions now, obedient consumers. We still watch "Friends," and in fact people watch it more than they have in years, perhaps for the sense of home and community it imparts. We line up for "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and we take in the perpetual procession of hype that precedes, sometimes by months, the other new blockbuster movies and television shows. The suspicion that all of it's quite meaningless lurks in the background, which is where the economics of entertainment would probably like to keep it.

Maybe we bounced back too soon. Maybe we tried too quickly to return to "normal." The producers of NBC's "West Wing," a fatuous series about life in a fictional White House, threw together a special post-terrorism edition that basically preached at viewers not to hate their Arab neighbors for what extreme Islamic extremists had wrought. "West Wing" tried to make the matter all tidy and manageable and even tried to make it seem over, as if this token gesture from Hollywood in prime time freed us all to go back to our beloved frivolous diversions and unreal realities.

There were side effects. Projects in early stages of production that now seemed in bad taste were canceled. But while it was expected NBC would dump its lowbrow gross-out attraction "Fear Factor" on the grounds that fear was no longer anything to joke about, the network instead brought it back, sooner than was proper, guided only by the Profit Principle. Then again, hadn't President Bush urged Americans to get back to "business" in one of his first public pronouncements after the tragedy? Not life or love or striving or thinking, but "business."

We were being asked to bounce back in the name of commerce. Somehow running out and buying stuff or suffering through TV's increasingly excessive commercials would serve as a rebuke to Osama bin Laden and all those who had helped perpetrate the atrocities. It didn't quite scan, but as part of the new patriotism, we complied. The new patriotism itself became an industry, as entrepreneurs cranked out American flags in various sizes and shapes, CDs of patriotic songs, tokens and totems meant to commemorate the catastrophe and supposedly honor the dead and injured.

For days immediately following the attack, the shattering images of airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers, followed by the towers' thunderous collapse to the ground, were replayed on TV newscasts, both national and local. And then, phfft, gone. It was somewhere decreed that we had seen enough of the suffering. Indeed, shots of people leaping to certain doom from the windows were censored out early in the coverage and almost never shown again.

The crisis didn't go away, though. It was repackaged as a series -- a whole genre of television program, really. Cable news networks that had talked trash all summer with their fixation on the Gary Condit matter suddenly sobered up and presented seminars on international affairs, albeit seminars in which shouting and screaming were encouraged. And the broadcast-network newscasts were forced to do what critics had been imploring them to do for years: include foreign news in their glib nightly 22-minute wrap-ups. Some newsmen even covertly conceded that their isolationist myopia had been shameful. How sad, it was said (quietly), that it took such a disaster to correct that condition.

There was other programming fallout. The press briefings conducted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld became a TV series, too, and "fans" tuned in loyally. Rumsfeld appears in these sessions to be that rarest of bureaucrats, a straight-shooting plain-talker. His give-and-take with reporters is entertaining and even edifying. He does not pull punches and isn't afraid to argue a point with correspondents or call their questions silly or unfounded. He's, ironically perhaps, a joy to watch.

Meanwhile the cable news networks, and broadcast networks, too, decided there was now just too much news to be contained in newscasts and conveyed through the traditional means of correspondents reporting from the field. Thus did extreme clutter become part of the fateful fallout. The TV screen was divided up into little sections and ticker-tape crawls began racing along the bottom of the screen, splattering out news tidbits that most likely would not be covered in any more depth than that -- even on all-news outlets like the ailing CNN and the punchy, aggressive Fox News Channel.

Of course, neither network is really "all news." CNN stops cold in its tracks for what seems like hours every afternoon for an insipid "Talk Back" show from its Atlanta studios, and airs hours of sports and entertainment fluff weekly. Fox dedicates hours each day to such snarlingly pugnacious pit bulls as Bill O'Reilly, America's demagogue du jour.

Meanwhile, the crawls at the bottom of the screen keep coming, like the advance ground troops in a massive new informational assault. The crawl could easily creep its way into entertainment programming as well, so that the top seven-eighths of the screen might be "ER" or "CSI" and the bottom eighth the ubiquitous, all-knowing (but not all-telling) crawl space -- containing not just news but commercials, too.

Emboldened by public acceptance of the news crawls, networks daily add new visual clutter to the screen, violating the frame that was once held sacrosanct for unfettered program content. No more. Cable and broadcast networks irritatingly parade animated logos and graphics in various corners of the screen and, in a practice getting increasingly popular, slide in a cheerful but annoying graphic to tell you what show is coming up next, perhaps a way of assuring viewers that no matter what, something indeed is coming up next.

What's sacred to broadcasters and cablecasters is not the programming but the commercials. Rarely if ever, then, do networks continue their crawls across space that has been bought and paid for -- although if there's a way to do that for added profit, it might some day become common. Perhaps General Motors could buy only a part of the screen and Ford Motor Co. another part. The TV picture is turning into a collection of animated billboards, with viewers challenged to ferret out actual information as it vies for space with ads and promos and visual junk.

We're not just back to business-as-usual. We've gone on to business-with-a-vengeance.

Giant-size TV screens that hang on the wall like paintings are still much too expensive for most Americans, but perhaps the average 30-inch screen will soon look so crowded that the public will start splurging on wall-hanging models just so they can see their favorite shows clearly through all the obstacles and intrusions.

It is, obviously, commerce -- and not "the show" -- that "must go on." Commerce demands perpetual motion. And commerce tends to crowd unpleasant, depressing material off the screen or relegate it to some remote nook or cranny. In fact, videotaped images of the horror from Sept. 11 are rarely shown at length now. Is this out of concern for the sensibilities of viewers or victims, or rather because showing such pictures is bad for business? Is it in fact commerce rather than compassion that has locked the pictures away, safe from view?

A modest proposal for year-in-review observances: Show the pictures again. Perhaps even set aside one day on one channel to relive the whole ordeal as it happened, in real time, the way C-SPAN once attempted to replicate the day President Kennedy was shot with continuous coverage preserved on tape from 1963.

It would be painful to see it again, of course. It would be troubling. It would be hard to watch, certainly, and should be. But the alternative to watching and remembering is, all too obviously, ignoring and forgetting. There's something wrong even with trying to forget, isn't there? At least at this point? Forgetting makes us vulnerable to enemies, but more appallingly it insults and demeans those who suffered, those who struggled, those who died.

The world will never be the same, like the cliche says. But then in a case like this, the world should never be the same, and we shouldn't allow it to be.