This was a picture story, when we fed our disbelief on endless slow-motion replays on TV and double-page photo spreads in the newspapers. This week, midweek, words were not enough.
No one, indeed, proved this better than the US president, who merely by opening his mouth managed to snatch banality from the jaws of one of the most dramatic events the world has ever witnessed.
All the same, radio wasted millions of words into the ether, from talk radio in New York, where callers bitched about price-gouging petrol stations, to state radio in Iraq, where that government's grotesque words of celebration could be heard. (Although perhaps an Iraqi whose child was dying due to US-led sanctions would not have found the statement quite so grotesque.)
As for radio in Ireland: as well as constantly demonstrating just how close this island lies to that thin one that sits off New Jersey, the coverage was also one of those occasional outbursts in the Irish media of dogged independence from the US line. The brilliant Bob Fisk of the London Independent could be heard everywhere and even Noam Chomsky turned up on Five Seven Live (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
More than that this column probably shouldn't comment upon. I have the privilege of origins in that beautiful, beloved city (will the rest of the US now learn to love New York?), and this turned me briefly into an invited word-waster on two programmes. It would be invidious for me to comment on them or on indeed on any of their competitors.
Anyway, I got more information with the telephone to my ear than with the radio on, and the shocked, grieving, bewildered and reflective city and country I heard there was unrecognisable from the wanna-kick-some-ass caricature that emerged in some media reports. And the comments I gathered by phone about a president who is still widely regarded as the illegitimate holder of that office, as well as a national embarrassment, couldn't appear in a family newspaper. (Incidentally, the media environment of some of my US correspondents was at least temporarily shattered by this unspeakably horrific attack: many New York radio and TV stations transmitted from the roof of the north tower, and so were knocked off the air.)
Readers of this column have the dubious privilege of two more days' developments to absorb after my Thursday deadline. So I'll abandon the US here before I risk more of my own embarrassment on being overtaken by events.
The wider human frame in which such events occur is the subject of the latest six-part Essential Guide series on the World Service, Workers Without Frontiers (BBC World Service, Friday, with repeats today, Monday and Tuesday). Producer Neil Koenig's programmes span three continents to tell the story of the millions of workers - perhaps 150 million in all - who have often left their families as well as their countries behind to take up work in the more developed world.
They were described here by Nigel Cassidy as "these new global nomads", though Irish listeners will take some convincing about the novelty of economic migration and remittances posted home. The scale of such migration has clearly increased, to roughly double what it was in 1965 - a rate of increase, however, that is surely dwarfed by the rise in the mobility of capital.
You would have thought, to listen to some of this programme, that migration of workers from the developing world is widely regarded as an unproblematic and indeed welcome consequence of globalised capitalism. Maybe that's true in Taiwan, where Filipino workers offer companies their best hope of partially maintaining their low-wage "competitiveness", but it doesn't sound much like the rhetoric that comes out of fortress Europe.
The European Union, it seems, had better wise up and accept that it needs outsiders. As one of this programme's academic talking heads observed: "You can't empty the dustbins of Munich in Istanbul." If there's a more appalling summation of the unequal power relations that govern even Europe itself, I haven't heard it yet.
This first episode of Workers Without Frontiers wasn't all talking heads by any means. Workers had a bit of their own say too. "Going abroad," one Filipina said, "is like an addiction. You can never stop." A more vivid inside account of genuine addiction could be heard amid the rubble of the schedule on RT╔ Radio 1. Rebel Angel (RT╔ Radio 1, Wednesday) was producer Susan Dennehy's extremely up-close-and-personal account of the way of life of an HIV-positive Dublin heroin addict - a woman labelled "Sue" in an intriguing authorial touch by Dennehy.
Rebel Angel, utterly without "authoritative" talking heads, relied entirely and respectfully on the authority of Sue herself, along with her mother, in particular, and her daughter and partner. In choosing such a course for a 42-minute documentary, Dennehy risked presenting us with something quite unbearable.
That's not least because of the way heroin addiction can drain much of the life and character from a user's voice. Sue shares with countless other Dublin addicts that flat, nasal drone, so that half her sentences sounded like an exhausted whinge. With that voice on her, you could nearly see the plastic bottle of Coke hanging from her hand, and Sue herself completed the picture at the start of the programme with a description of her tattoos: "I know people say they're real trashy . . . but I just wanted them . . . and they're my arms . . . do you know what I mean?"
The voice notwithstanding, this was a deeply poignant declaration of ownership of her own arms from a woman who has been injecting heroin into them for most of the last 12 years. And Rebel Angel was itself a powerful declaration that a life so often reduced to the quest for the next fix is, nonetheless, not a reduced life.
Alongside the horrors of the addict's need - for prescription anti-depressants and tranquillisers, as well as "gear" - the social and physical attractions of heroin were revealed quietly but clearly in Sue's story. Even for her young daughter, there was a certain extra freedom when her mother was using the drug. "Ciara, don't come in, I'm taking a message," Sue would tell her child.
But Ciara soon copped that these "messages" left her mother drowsy and unconcerned, so when she craved some freedom at bedtime, the girl would entreat Sue: "Ma, would you not take a message?"
Typical? Who knows. Unique? To be sure.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie