tp22.xml

tp22.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-02-24

September 11: One Year On Thats Entertainment

The day that sent shockwaves around the world. The BBC marks the anniversary of September 11 with a series of special reports and commemorative broadcasts from across the globe.


BBC Programme Information 7-13 September 2002

As the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 approaches, broadcasters are preparing to go toe to toe to see who will win the broadcasting war of attrition which will mean wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks on America.

The BBC - like almost every other large broadcast and media concern this side of Washington - is preparing to commemorate the anniversary of what has glibly been called ëGround Zero with round-the-clock coverage across its radio and television stations. Gathered together under a suitably bathetic. The day that sent shockwaves around the world banner, BBC coverage will go into overdrive in a way not seen since the actual coverage of September 11 (although BBC World Service did also devote a week of programming to the six month anniversary of the attacks).

BBC Radio 4, Radio Five Live and the World Service will run extensive commemorative programmes to complement coverage on the terrestrial and digital television stations. BBC1 will also premiere 9/11, a documentary filmed in and around the World Trade Centre when the two hijacked planes struck New Yorks twin towers.





The only other recent equivalent precedents in British broadcasting history

are the deaths of the Princess of Wales and the Queen Mother respectively

which ñ rightly or wrongly ñ were always going to be subject to a ëwar chest

programming strategy. In a BBC press release issued in April of this year, acting Director General Mark Byford praised all BBC staff for their efforts in securing overnight figures for the BBC coverage of the Queen Mothers funeral: We should feel very proud of our coverage in providing programmes of real quality, depth and distinction. It was a very big team effort. Our professionalism, skill and outstanding creativity shone through in capturing the events so magnificently for audiences across the country and the world. We are gratified that the large majority of viewers turned to the BBC to witness yesterdays historic funeral service.

The BBC celebrated an audience peak of 7.1 million viewers and a 58.2% audience share in contrast to ITVs 3.3 million and 27.1% of audience share. The BBCs outside broadcast of the occasion pulled together more staff and equipment than the combined studios of Television Centre. A team of more than 350 people, 100 cameras, 15 television mobile control vehicles plus 100 trucks, ten large mobile radio studios and approximately 1,000 miles of cable were used to ensure the successful live BBC broadcast of the procession to Lying-in-State and
the funeral service. Requisite television gravitas was lent to the proceedings by the BBCs resident man-at-arms David Dimbleby, while Fergal Keane was whiskedaway from less pressing business in Lebanon to commentate on events for BBC radio.

It is this sort of infrastructural and logistical muscle which will allow
BBC Radio 5s Five Live Breakfast to be broadcast from New York. Former BBC Radio One DJ Simon Mayo also presents from New York while the afternoon show presented by Peter Allen and Jane Garvey will be co-presented in Washington and Jerusalem respectively. The BBCs pop music station, Radio 1, will carry live reports from Ground Zero in its Newbeat programme throughout the day.

More cynical minds might question the value of sending breakfast radio show teams and broadcasters more familiar with the back catalogues of Britney Spears and the Spice Girls half way across the world to broadcast the days latest hits mixed with on-the-spot interviews with grieving New Yorkers. As if that really wasnt enough, add to that list a specially developed website ( <http://www.bbc.co.uk/september11>
http://www.bbc.co.uk/september11 which promises to carry archive material, news and information, international views and historical background to help put the events of the past year into context. Live webcasts from Ground Zero are also promised.

The surfeit of coverage has of course nothing to do with constant speculation regarding the licence fee nor the criticisms levelled at the BBCs rolling news service BBC 24 (annual budget of 50 millions pound sterling compared to SKYs 20 million operating costs) which is caught in a three-way dog-fight between CNN and SKY.

The BBC is proud of the way it handled its September 11 coverage last year - it won a clutch of journalism awards including the Foreign Event Special Award from the FPA as well as the George Polk Journalism Award for its authoritative, wide-ranging accounts of the attacks on America and the war in Afghanistan - pointing to the fact that it was able to take advantage of its international bureaux to bring immediate on-the-spot eyewitness reports. Not ones to normally crow, the BBC (in a report submitted to the Culture Secretary in December 2001 in support of the current independent review of BBC News 24) stresses the strength in depth of BBC reporting: Our newsgathering strength has been in evidence throughout the conflict with experienced reporters on both sides of the front line, including the first Western reporters into Kabul. BBC News 24 also managed to find a diverse range of contributors, benefiting from its close connection with BBC World, as were more able to persuade news-makers to appear in the knowledge that they would be heard across the world as well as in the UK (including Madeleine
Allbright, General Musharaf, Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Netanyahu).

Just as was the case with their exhaustive and exhausting royal funerals

coverage, the BBCs coverage was a logistical and technical triumph (though whether the rogues gallery of interviewees listed truly deserves the epithet diverse is certainly questionable).

But more problematic still is the use of a slick linguistic casuistry more
commonly associated with hack advertising copywriters and feature film trailer writers - ëThe day the world changed, ëThe day the world changed forever and other tired variations of the same theme - which presupposes an agreed consensual agenda and shared historical marking of the day.

Similarly emotionally charged appeals to some imagined wider public sentiment were expressed in BBC World's 'The Shrine' (31/08/02), a documentary marking the fifth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana as part of the channel's 'Modern Times' series:

'A powerful and moving account of the astonishing late summer days that
saw a normally genteel Royal park transformed into a site of fervent devotion.

Richard Alwyns film catches the vigil like atmosphere outside the Palace in the hours before the funeral, the anguish in Hyde Park during the ceremony, and the tranquillity of the night times spent in sleeping bags around fires.'

Having waded through acres of adjective and the sort of tired prose Hallmark greetings card writers kill for, we learn that Dianas death changed the [British] people. True, blue rinsed pensioners and flags and banners monarchists did weep and wail, but there certainly wasnt the extraordinary outburst of national grief that has been claimed: an extraordinary outburst of media

coverage yes; but whether the two are mutually exclusive is debatable. We are invited to believe that Dianas death re-framed Britain in much the same way that Ground Zero is Year Zero for world history. The death of a jet-setting royal and the events of September 11 brook no comparison ñ one is the stuff of OK! Magazine specials, the other a tragedy on a grand scale ñ but the framing of both in absolutist terms demands further examination.

Not only are the invariably starsntrite sentiments attached to 11/09 anniversary coverage bogus; but the need to dress them up in neatly trailed packages withsolemn snatches of music playing beneath suitably reverential tones servesonly to silence debate and to privilege a false new world order discourse decreed from on high in Washington.

Worse still, as Michael Goldberg writing in Salon (09/07/02) observes, in
a media glutted world, September 11 couldnt help but become the ultimate reality show. So enamoured were we of its rare shocking authenticity that we replicated its image into infinity and leached it of its meaning. September 11, he argues, has become the political sledgehammer that the US administration can now take to any nut. Radio and television ñ wittingly or not - provide the dramatic narrative exigencies required to support the risible war noises emanating from Washington and London.

Of course, the BBC is not alone in its use of extra-diagetic music and sundry other dramatic devices to hook the audience - this is symptomatic of a cultural sea-change in news and factual broadcasting which is now regrettably the norm from CNN to Channel 4.

Nor should it be singled out for its planned September 11 coverage: again, this is demonstrably the case across the board - whether you are in Bermondsey or Baltimore.

Nonetheless, the rationale behind the decision to film a British Bank Holiday special (27/08/02) of the gardening makeover programme Ground Force in New York must be questioned (you can probably imagine the scene as the allusive penny slowly drops in some bright spark editors head ñ I know! Why dont we).

In what must be the worst known case of what the satirical British magazine Private Eye calls WarBalls ñ the linking of anything and everything to September 11 on the flimsiest of pretexts - the Ground Force team of celebrity gardenersundertook its mission to help by rejuvenating a small area for a local communityof New Yorkers who have been deeply affected by the tragedy. In a three dayproject the Ground Force team flew over to New York to surprise actress BetteMidler and the local people of Lower East Side, Manhattan with a garden in recognition of what the people of New York have been through.

Writing in The Mirror (28/07/02), Jim Shelley commented on the opening scenes of the programme where regular presenter Charlie Dimmock looking at her NewYork holiday snaps ñ replete with twin towers ñ as bearing ëthe unmistakable stench of blatant exploitation. BBC America viewers hopefully wont be quite so squeamish. But why so much coverage? To paraphrase the much maligned Noam Chomsky, the crimes of September 11 are indeed a historic turning point ñ not because of the scale but rather because of the choice of target.

That, as the New Statesman argued in its leader of 24/09/01, is the reason why British sympathies are perceived as being almost wholly concerned with the sufferings of ordinary Americans because they are ëpeople like us as opposed to ordinary people in the third world (or now, Afghanistan and very possibly Iraq). These are sentiments which would seem to be shared by commissioning editors the length and breadth of Europe.

There is no question that the terrorist attacks on the twin towers deserve
to be comprehensively covered, and indeed, deserve to be fittingly marked in tribute to the dead and to the hundreds and thousands of Americans whose lives were irrevocably changed by the events of September 11. Whether September 11 has proved to be the turning point in recent modern history as is so often claimed is a completely different question. Certainly, the events of September 11 have left an indelible mark on the global collective conscious which will not and cannot be easily erased.

September 11 is without question a day for mourning and reflection on what has passed and what might yet still come to pass. Let us respect the tragedy of last year without turning it once more into a rolling media jamboree more concerned with audience share, overnight figures and the repetition of febrile unchallenged half truths about the threat posed by Saddam to western capitals.

Constant media raking over of the ashes in the guise of tribute might ultimately prove to be as disingenuous in spirit as the dollar hungry ghouls who tout Ground Zero DVDs and Osama Bin Laden toilet paper on the streets surrounding the site where the World Trade Centre once stood. It is impossible to forget the cleaners, firemen, janitors and office workers who lost their lives on that fateful day last year, but nor should we forget the ordinary lives which have already been thrown into turmoil in Afghanistan (and very probably Iraq if messrs Bush and Rumsfeld continue to militate for war against their former favourite despot).

Only this month, the World Food Programme announced that rations to millions of Afghans are to be cut as a result of international donors failure to honour promises to help re-build the stricken country. UN figures calculate that some six million Afghans still need food aid over the next year, but a $90 million shortfall of required aid- or 200,000 tonnes of food- means that the money required for the most basic levels of subsistence is already beginning to run out as Washington and Brussels continue to squabble over who should pay what. Whether the eyes and ears of the BBC and CNN will be on the ground in Kabul - or Baghdad should push come to shove - in quite such numbers when that corner of the worlds anniversaries come around remains to be seen. As is so often the case, out of sight is very much out of mind.

Perhaps George Orwell was only partially wrong when he wrote that if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever. He should of course have said a video loop of two jets crashing into the World Trade Centre.