No Man Is An Island

As a radio news bulletin editor for a national network here in New Zealand, I’ve covered the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington in detail for days on end. I have had all the facts at my finger tips: the number who died, the number who survived, the number of countries which lost citizens, the number of suspects, and so on and so on. I’ve written new angles on the story every hour on the hour for, at the time of writing, the best part of two weeks. And like, I suspect, many journalists reporting the story I’ve found the facts easy – it’s been the emotions that have been hard. On the first day, there were moments when I know I felt almost overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the tragedy. As the days wore on, we all became used to the always-repeating TV images of the airliners crashing into the twin towers. Then some new amateur footage would be discovered by one of the networks, a survivor would reveal some act of heroism by a rescuer, a relative would release details of a last, frantic, heartbreaking phone call from a loved one, and the horror would resurface.

The media are accused of de-sensitising the soul, because of the unending stream of violent images on our TV and cinema screens, the brutal images in our newspaper, the uncensored hate occasionally heard on talkback radio. And yet nobody seemed to have been desensitised to the events of September 11th in any way. We all knew what those terrifying shots of a gout of flame erupting from halfway up the twin towers meant – that hundreds of people had died in a split second and that thousands more were condemned to die in their wake. Grief stalked the world that Tuesday, and it still does.

There will be in years to come, no doubt, learned academics and popular pundits who will all pick over how we, the media, handled this story of a lifetime. On a personal note, I have been, at different times, horror-stricken, angry, immensely sad, and worried for all our futures. By the end of most shifts on duty, I have felt tired, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. These are not easy stories to write, even from the other side of the world. My respect and admiration for the journalists at ‘ground zero’ who held it together and reported the facts for a waiting world knows no bounds. They have had to carry out the toughest job they will probably ever have to do. I hope those future critics who will say we could have been more objective, and less emotional will never have to find out for themselves how hard it is to report on such a terrifying story as it breaks around you.

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