Images of 9/11--Some Comfort Too

The anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is looming as an overwhelming media event, with many TV and radio stations promising blanket coverage over several days, much of it uninterrupted by commercials.

Now, one New York TV outlet, itself planning to be a big contributor to the airwave saturation, is gearing up to help viewers cope with the mental health issues that it expects will result.

NY1 News, an all-news channel owned by Time Warner Cable, said that during the week preceding the anniversary, it will bring back a popular, daily call-in show for New Yorkers to talk through their fears with mental health counselors.

The one-hour program first aired a few days after the attacks and continued through mid-December, when viewers finally seemed to have exhausted their need for on-air counseling and the volume of calls tapered off. In its first weeks, producers fielded dozens of highly charged calls each day from viewers who had lost friends and family, were afraid to leave their homes or didn’t know what to tell their children.

The anniversary will likely “open a lot of old wounds,” said Steve Paulus, senior vice president and general manager of NY1. City agencies are planning to make counselors available for their personnel, he said, “so we figured, if it’s going to be provided for the uniformed services, why not for the millions of people out there who lived through it? There certainly are enough people who don’t have anyone to talk to.”

NY1, which will also have a psychologist on hand the day of the anniversary to take calls during breaks in coverage of memorial events, isn’t the only network anticipating mental health issues. NBC News has hired a child psychiatrist as an on-air consultant and behind-the-scenes advisor for its own coverage, and will air public service announcements to help parents guide their children through the day.

The state of New Yorkers’ mental health in the aftermath of the attacks has already been a topic of much discussion, speculation and research. One study, released in May, suggested that more than 400,000 city residents had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder since Sept. 11. The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that there are 90,000 people living south of 110th Street in New York City who are suffering from depression as a result of the attacks. Other studies have documented increased alcohol and drug use.

“The original event had a massive effect on the mental health of New Yorkers, and with that background, you would expect that the anniversary of the event would regenerate some of the feelings that people experienced,” said Ezra Susser, chairman of the Epidemiology Department at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a department head at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

He said one school of thought argues that it is harmful for the media to keep repeating the frightening pictures and dwelling on the topic, but Susser disagrees: “This is something that New Yorkers experienced in common and it generated quite a bit of social cohesion.” Sharing the event through public forums and in the media, he said, “is helpful for dealing with it, and it could be a very helpful thing to focus on the anniversary.”

The coverage is inevitable, he said, and so it’s key is shaping the media event. Neglected during the aftermath of the attacks were New York’s Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, who “didn’t feel a part of what everyone else felt, the common experience,” Susser said, adding that “one really useful thing would be to somehow incorporate them into this.”

Revisiting the traumatic events will be hard to escape on television and radio, as well as in newspapers, many of which are preparing special coverage. CNN is getting a jump on the commemoration process with a two-part documentary, “America Remembers,” on Aug. 17 and 24. In the days leading up to the anniversary, CBS plans to rebroadcast its film about firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center site, PBS plans a week of related documentaries and Discovery Communications’ five cable networks will air 14 hours dubbed “Faces of 9/11.” On the actual anniversary, many networks plan nonstop coverage. That night, NBC will air a “Concert for America.”

NY1 News, which still programs one hour per night related to the aftermath of the attacks, itself will contribute heavily to the media coverage. The channel plans weekly town hall meetings through August, vignettes on how city life has changed, profiles of victims, a minute-by-minute look at what happened, and, on Sept. 13, a 2 1/2-hour reading of every victim’s name, conducted by celebrities including Cynthia Nixon of HBO’s “Sex and the City” and Ben Vereen.

With so much coverage on so many channels, “It’s going to be tough to watch,” said Paulus, but he added that his channel has no choice: “We’re a New York station, and this is such a big story.... We have to cover it; we’re going to cover it.”