Disaster Media

GYUMRI, ARMENIA, September 19, 2001 - You have to hand it to the American news media. While the rest of the world was engaging itself in reflection and mourning in the wake of the September 11 tragedy, the tabloid press kept its nose to the grindstone.

CNN appeared to score the first journalistic coup shortly after the attacks. As everybody knows, Cable News Network is THE world authority on wartime events. And so, with an audience stretched from the Afghan hills to Air Force One, the network sought expert analysis from best-selling right wing author Tom Clancy. As Henry Kissinger apparently waited on hold, Clancy waxed eloquent for CNN on life imitating art. Meanwhile, Russian PTP had decided that this was not really news and switched to live reaction from President Vladimir Putin. CNN must have feared that the pasty white Putin, standing against an austere makeshift backdrop, would send American viewers grabbing for the clicker.

Commentators waited breathlessly for the President Bush speech that would come later that night. Would he bumble his words? Would he shift his eyes? Most importantly, what color tie would he wear? As it turns out, the president’s address was less than extraordinary. But VOA acted as if this were news. Alan Lichtman, the bombastic presidential analyst whose words reach millions via short wave, scooped the story that Bush doesn’t have the rhetorical skills of FDR. Another pundit lamented in the Washington Post that the president’s speech was merely “adequate.” She said that times like these demand more than adequacy.

Then this morning, a report came across the Gyumri wire that journalists had begun combing the ranks of American football for insight. New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe said he’s glad NFL games have been postponed, because he would have a “very hard time competing against a fellow American.” With professional sporting events on hold, you can almost anticipate the restless sportswriters’ next move: “And now, we go live to New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter who will put Tuesday’s events in historical perspective.”

None of this comes as a surprise. The media has been gearing up for such asinine reportage for years, putting yoga on the cover of Time magazine, airing the dirty laundry of charismatic politicians and creating theme music for every news story from Columbine to Conditgate. My friends in the States say that you can’t watch two minutes of television these days without seeing a replay of the doomed airliner’s final seconds. The footage is used as a lead-in for every newsbreak as if viewers need to be drawn in to the story, as if anybody has forgotten the image of those towers coming down.

It is a measure of public ennui over the past decade that news and entertainment have become so mixed. Just last week, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan told the Italian daily La Repubblica that Americans are living “in a science-fiction world where Disney and Disney’s science-fiction have won.” Aside from the irony of citing a musician’s assessment of world affairs, Dylan’s words now seem chillingly prescient as Americans watch ABC news coverage mostly unaware that the network is owned by an amusement park driven conglomerate.

Of course, those of us living in Armenia know that Pax Americana has not fully spread around the globe. The people here are still reeling from genocide, domination, natural catastrophe and economic collapse. Though the Armenians I know are deeply saddened by the events in New York and Washington, they are hardly shocked. They are used to the numb feeling that comes when people are held hostage by fear. If Americans now feel that nobody is safe, then perhaps we are coming around to the general mood that grips most of the world.

And this would be the most important development that can rise from the World Trade Center’s devastating ashes. After this tragedy sinks in, after the mourning has subsided, after we have adjusted to this new age of terrorism, then perhaps Americans will begin to notice when terror ravages the rest of the world. Maybe we will feel that an attack against colored foreign people is an attack against us. And then CBS won’t have to lead its nightly news with the promise of exclusive interviews with scandal-ridden celebrities.

If so, we can again look to the prophetic words of that iconic hippie-era commentator: the times, they are a-changin’.