Anguish on the Airwaves: Television was our electronic hearth, uniting us when tragedy pulled us apart.(World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks)(The Fallout)(Brief Article)

Television has always had a way of searing the most horrifying images into our national psyche. Corpses piled up in a Vietnamese village. A masked kidnapper waving a gun out a window at the Munich Olympics. The midair explosion of the Challenger. But television has never shown us anything like an airliner slamming into the tallest building in New York City--at the instant it happens. And then, almost before we can comprehend what we're seeing, scenes almost as terrifying: the Pentagon smashed like a fallen souffle, terrified employees sprinting out of the White House, one building of the World Trade Center collapsing into itself, followed quickly by the second. Television doesn't always get tragedy right. A slow-speed car chase will preoccupy it for hours, and it will linger morbidly over almost any murder. But the media's work on the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington did something that seemed nearly impossible after the disastrous coverage of election night 2000 and the Gary Condit feeding frenzy. It showed that television can not only provide a public service. At the very worst of times, it can gather the country together under an enormous electronic blanket and bring it together again.

It was a week filled with familiar sights in unfamiliar places. This was the first time since the assassination of President Kennedy that the networks pre-empted all their programming--including commercials--in favor of four nonstop days of news. By and large, the media got the story right, in quantity, content and tone. In large part, that may have been because so many journalists found themselves in the middle of the tragedy as it unfolded. ABC's John McWethy was at work in the Pentagon when the plane crashed. CNBC anchor Ron Insana showed up at the NBC studios with soot still on his head to tell about life in the Wall Street area. Some of the most powerful reporting came from MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield, who more than anyone else was the eyes and ears in the grim shadow of the World Trade Center. She told a dramatic tale of being engulfed in a cloud of debris so thick that she had to kick in two glass doors to an apartment building just to keep from suffocating. On some days, stories like that might seem like reportorial muscle-flexing. In her case and countless others, it humanized the journalists, and the horrifying stories they told.

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