[Tall_Texan]

As someone who has a degeree in Broadcast Journalism (Univ. of Texas, 1979), I am fascinated with multiple media coverage of the same live unscripted event. It is rare to see them cover something as dramatic and unpredictable as the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks (the assassination of JFK and the near assassinations of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul are the only ones I can recall where you could see them follow a story as it happened).

It is, in a sense, too bad that the archive picks Washington DC affiliates who, of course, were more inclined to cover the events at the Pentagon and the rumors swirling around Washington with local reporters than to stay with the national folks but this archive allows me to see and study much more than I ever expected to review.

While I'm still reviewing them, the one thing I find striking is how quickly Fox reporters identified this as an act of terrorism when nobody else was using "t" word for much of anything until Bush, himself, identified it as a act of terrorism.

CNN appeared to be the hardest ones to convince that it was a deliberate act, endlessly exploring ideas that pilots were just flying off course or that something might have tampered with the radar. They really looked foolish.

Then, viewing the reactions of those who saw the first tower fall. Even hardened reporters don't often get to see 100-story buildings full of people collapse on live television. Even then, some of the anchors seemed very confused about what they were watching and had to rely on folks over the phone to tell them what had happened. The more distant they were from the scene, the more puzzled they were - indicating they weren't watching closely.

At some point, I'll get around to putting a report card on this thread of highs and lows of each network's coverage as I saw it.

[I still care]

Years ago I made a tape - I can't find it, I have been looking for it - of newsworthy events as they happened. I have Chernobyl, Tianamin Square, a stock market crash, etc. It is truly amazing to see how off base the news anchors and networks are. I had often wondered why they don't do more retrospectives "as it happened" - that tape illustrates why. It is because they are so clueless and so wrong on facts that it is almost laughable afterwards to watch. Baseless speculation seems to be much more of a staple of news coverage than it should be.

I, too, was struck by the dense attitude of the CNN reporters. I kept thinking that it must be orders from on high, do not make any guesses about what you see happening, because they all seem uniformly unwilling or unaware of what was going on. Also, how long it took them to get people in the street. So much of the coverage was just watching burning buildings from a distance. Shepard Smith did make a comment about that (I remember from the day, not the tapes) about the reason for that was the coverage was too upsetting, "not suitable" he called it. And I was mad when he said that, because I felt the news should be shown as it happened, not predigested. I don't want to see guts everywhere, but neither do I want it sanitized to death so no true impact of what happened gets through.