You will have an image that sticks in your head, which you keep replaying in your mind. The plane hitting the second tower. People jumping to their deaths. The Twin Towers peeling away, disintegrating. The rubble pouring on New York.
This was an event that illustrated as never before the immediacy of modern television, but which overwhelmed those who relayed those pictures. Since the Gulf War, television news has geared itself towards not just being the first to get to the story, but in a sense to make the story big. Or if already big, then to make it bigger.
The Gulf War - the daddy of all 24-hour news stories - was a war hyped up, cleaned up, given special effects and then fought in your living-room. The intense coverage of Diana's death delivered anguish, even to those who had never cared much for her.
With these stories there was a certain degree of retrospective confusion, even shame over both the coverage and how we, as viewers, reacted to it. Were we right to fall for the propaganda of the Gulf War coverage? Was the death of Diana really so important to us as individuals? Are we driven by the story itself, or by how the story is told to us? They are questions that we are still reluctant to answer, and there will be events ahead, some as a direct follow-on from this week's attack, which will again test our ability to distinguish reality from "news spin".
But this was different. She was only doing her corporate duty, but the Sky News presenter who commented over the pictures of the terrorist attack on America got it right. "It's almost a surreal situation, but it's happening live." It was surreal because it was happening live. A story of unparalleled intimacy, in which all but the first explosion was carried live across the world.
Maybe it was coincidence, maybe it was planned, but those 18 minutes between the first and second planes crashing into the Twin Towers constituted an awfully long time in American news terms. That the second explosion was relayed live around the world was not a surprise as such, even if the actual sight of the plane heading for the tower hit you like a kick in the chest.
It was an attack played out uncut and unedited, in bars, offices, living-rooms, shops across the world. It ran like a bush-fire, with rumours of a plane heading towards Washington, other planes unaccounted for, pictures of Capitol Hill waiting to be struck. This was a story over which only the terrorists had any control. It was war on television in a way that even the Gulf War wasn't. Confusion, destruction and panic. Incomprehensible, unpredictable, irreversible death.
Sky News was the one that realised all that could be done was to point the camera at the scene and relay whatever information was coming in. For a channel that generally packages current affairs as if they are a production brought to you by Sky News, it was uncharacteristically restrained. Maybe because it was taking coverage from Fox News in the US, meaning that its penchant for snappy graphics and portentous music was immediately redundant. There were still moments at which the commercialisation of the news forced its way through. "The second tower has collapsed, and it happened here live on Sky," the newscaster said, as if an exclusive deal had been pre-arranged. The otherwise excellent Kirsty Young on ITV made a similar, simultaneous claim for her channel, but these were rare exceptions to a story that belonged to everybody, not one station.
The BBC, which immediately re-routed to BBC News24, became fixated on the footage of the first tower collapsing. In looping it and showing it over and over, it missed the collapse of the second tower, the spire sinking into a cloud of dust so big that when he returned to live pictures it took the BBC anchorman a full minute to realise that the tallest building on the New York skyline had actually disappeared.
Given the enormity of the story, and the confusion of the situation, the Irish channels could never hope to match the standards of the dedicated news networks. Wisely, TV3 took a live feed from CNN, and all through the evening handed itself over to the station every time there was a development. It meant that when the pictures came in from CNN of what initially appeared to be a US attack on Kabul, TV3, if by proxy, was ahead of even the BBC, ITN and Sky News.
That was also the moment when RT╔ finally relinquished control to an outside channel, it too taking the Kabul feed directly from CNN.
You may not want be too tough on RT╔, it was a difficult situation and you cannot expect miracles, but it did not come out of this too well as a news organisation. It has been a poor summer for the channel. The coverage of the Colombian arrests lagged embarrassingly behind the UK networks, and for reasons only RT╔ can explain, it did not have live pictures from outside the Holy Cross school, when you could watch it on several other channels at once. On Tuesday, RT╔ left an unfortunate Brian Dobson burdened with the job of having to fill in for the soundless pictures, talking simply for fear of the silence. And, of those pictures, you could never be sure which were live and which were not. All you wanted to know was "what is happening now?".
RT╔ needed to accept early on that it couldn't cope and hand over to a station that could. A lot of Irish television viewers view the world through RT╔, this week they were once again left only partially sighted.
BBC were not the only broadcasting organisation constantly replaying the pictures. On each station, every angle was picked up on, rewound, compared to other angles, played again, rewound, replayed. It was born not out of gratuity but a true incomprehension, of a desperate effort to understand what was going on. In that sense, it was only mirroring what was going on in the minds of those watching and, you would imagine, of those who witnessed the attacks at first hand.
The eye-witnesses who emerged from the rubble gave accounts which were often less-informed than those of the eye-witnesses sitting at home watching it. There was a real shock and a certain kind of mass post-traumatic stress that seemed to have crept up on those who watched hours of coverage from their sofas on another continent. It was a consequence of the immediacy of the tragedy, of a chain of abrupt, horrifying events of a scale never before witnessed by this generation, and certainly never witnessed on live television. A global grief arose - as much because millions of people will have felt that they experienced the attack themselves in some very tangible way, that they felt very real fear and horror as the planes kept coming in. It wasn't long before people on British and Irish streets were being interviewed about what they saw, how it had effected them. Of course, as you were watching this attack unfold 3,000 miles away, so most probably were the people responsible for it watching it from 10 or 10,000 miles away. It was a shared experience; it was unnerving to think that it may not have provoked universally shared emotions.
Our culture absorbs things so quickly. Images, events, disasters of the largest scale are assimilated into global consciousness; sometimes to serve as a warning beacon, as with the Holocaust; sometimes to return as entertainment, as with the Titanic. From the moment that the first replays were aired, that process of absorption began. The footage of two planes plunging into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan will be shown for years to come. There will be documentaries, news reports, anniversaries. There will be retrospectives at the end of the year, of the decade, of the century. Those pictures and the resonance they contain will eventually be handed on to another generation who will do with them what they will.
Right now, though, everybody has some image that they cannot forget. For me, it is the moment at which the second aeroplane speeds into view, then briefly disappears behind the tower. There is a fraction of a second before the explosion, it seems, in which anything may happen next, a moment into which everything flows. Hope. Disbelief. Fear. Life. History.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
