Media focus on humanity

By David Bauder

Associated Press

NEW YORK – The sorrow sinking in, television networks subtly downshifted from frenzied coverage of the plane crashes at the World Trade Center and Pentagon to compelling accounts of the human misery they brought.

ABC, CBS, NBC and the cable news networks stayed on the story full-time into Thursday, eschewing commercials. Broadcast veterans said they couldn’t recall such uninterrupted coverage of a story since the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Wednesday night’s sad pictures included a candlelight vigil in Washington, D.C.

Fox News Channel interviewed a woman who came into New York City as an intermediary for wives searching for their husbands’ names on a “safe list.” NBC showed relatives, clutching pictures of missing loved ones, massed outside a hospital – a heartbreaking scene Americans are used to seeing in foreign countries, not in New York.

Anchor Tom Brokaw noted the “psychological toll on all Americans as they see the same scenes again and again.”

Television ratings began to show how many millions of Americans turned to TV as the “national campfire,” in the words of ABC anchor Peter Jennings.

An estimated 60.5 million people watched the attack coverage in prime-time Tuesday night on NBC (22.4 million), ABC (17.6 million), CBS (14.4 million) and Fox (6.1 million), according to Nielsen Media Research. Viewership on those four networks was up 47 percent over Sept. 11, 2000.

The three cable news networks also drew big audiences in prime-time: 7.7 million for CNN, 4.4 million for Fox News Channel and 2.4 million for MSNBC, Nielsen said.

It still may be difficult to determine how many people were watching overall because cable networks that don’t normally carry news – ESPN, TNT, VH1 and others – beamed coverage of the attack from other networks, and their ratings were not immediately available.

By going commercial-free, the networks were likely losing millions of dollars in revenue. They may not have had much choice: Most advertisers aren’t eager to have their products plugged during such a horrific event.

Newspapers across the country also devoted most of Wednesday’s editions to coverage of the attack, with headlines like “Day of Evil” in California’s Orange County Register and “Day of Death” in the Indianapolis Star.

Time and Newsweek both rushed out special editions.

CNN used videophone technology – jittery pictures normally reserved for reports from faraway locales – from downtown Manhattan because the loss of transmitters on the World Trade Center made live reports there difficult.

“You feel a mix of sadness, anger and outrage, while professionally you’re trying to tell the story and do it justice,” said Eric Shawn, a Fox News Channel correspondent reporting from near the collapsed towers.

NBC’s Anne Thompson noted the grimness of the rescue effort.

“You watch the firefighters come out and see the look of hopelessness on their faces,” she said.

Hundreds of times Tuesday, networks aired footage of the jetliner piercing the south tower of the World Trade Center as the north tower burned from a previous attack. In the overnight hours, a film clip of the first strike also emerged.