Looking for Context in Coverage

“America Rebuilds.” “America Remembers.” “The Day America Changed.” “The Day That Changed America.”

If the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks shocked the nation to its core, the one-year anniversary of that day, at least on television, is being carried out as an all-day exercise in tribute-paying and meaning-gleaning. To an extent, the coverage is understandable, given that for most of the nation, Sept. 11 unfolded as a TV event.

But there is so much coverage planned--from MTV to Court TV, from ABC to A&E--that; the documentaries and specials, however poignant and well-researched, run the risk of canceling out each other, until all that emerges is a sense that the TV industry will be attending a funeral, and everyone will be dressed appropriately in black.

ABC, CBS and NBC are giving their airwaves over to news programs--morning, noon and night, in most cases--as the respective networks roll out their star anchors and commentators for wall-to-wall anniversary coverage.

On the surface, it appears that TV viewers will be deluged with what author and cultural critic Todd Gitlin, writing in the New York Observer in 1994 about the 25th anniversary of the Woodstock festival, referred to as “the standard, once-over-moistly anniversary piece [that] is a ritual of national self-celebration.”

The broadcast networks’ decision to give prime-time over to news is a little less beneficent given that the anniversary happens to fall at the tail end of network prime-time’s rerun season, before the new programs are launched. Advertisers, too, have indicated reluctance about being on the air.

Across the dial, the themes are sure to overlap: Updates on the families of victims. Homeland security discussions. Talking heads, and the question, “How has America changed?” posed over and over.

“Anniversaries are rituals, and they are rituals that for people have meaning,” said Betsy West, senior vice president of prime-time for CBS News. “Like it or not, 9/11 is a day that will forever be charged with meaning for most Americans.”

Asked what new information her network will impart, West pointed to Scott Pelley’s exclusive interview with President Bush, airing on “60 Minutes II.” Pelley has already interviewed Bush on Air Force One; next week, he’ll sit down with Bush in the Oval Office. Though Bush’s movements in the hours after the attacks have been chronicled in print, West argued that, on television, “We have not heard the story of what happened minute-to-minute. It’s an oral history of what went on that day.”

In prime-time, CBS also will re-air the documentary “9/11,” with footage captured by two French filmmakers who happened to be chronicling the day in the life of a firefighter on Sept. 11.

NBC will have the “Concert for America,” featuring performances by such artists as Placido Domingo, Aretha Franklin, Gloria Estefan and Josh Groban, and hosted by Tom Brokaw (who does a town meeting earlier in the day). The concert, which will be taped Sept. 9 at Washington’s Kennedy Center, was organized by the network in collaboration with the Bush White House.

On ABC, Peter Jennings gets his own town hall, a follow-up to a previous special, “Answering Children’s Questions,” while in prime-time, “Good Morning America” co-host Charles Gibson does a comprehensive reconstruction of the attacks.

From 9 to 11 p.m., Fox will air “The Day America Changed,” a documentary produced by Fox News Channel, which will also be offering feeds of its news coverage to Fox affiliates all day.

Fox News Channel, says senior producer Thom Bird, will attend to the anniversary from several angles--covering the memorials that day in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa., reconstructing the day of the attacks, and examining the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But Bird, whose network has risen to the top of the cable news ratings pile via a brash, talk-radio approach to 24-hour news, says Fox News Channel won’t shrink from that mandate on Sept. 11.

“Whereas other channels will focus more on the sorrow and bereavement part, Fox is more take-charge, kick-butt kind of thinking,” Bird said.

At the other end of the spectrum is PBS and its investigative series “Frontline.” Several weeks after the terrorist attacks, documentary filmmaker Helen Whitney began working on the project that would become “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.” The two-hour documentary, told in four acts, is an examination of what the events that day did to the big theodicy questions, including “Is there a God?”

“I didn’t sense there was a big stampede to cover these questions,” said Whitney, who spoke to some 370 people; the 20-odd interviews in the film range from novelist Ian McEwan and opera singer Renee Fleming to loved ones of the dead and survivors of the World Trade towers’ collapse.

Perhaps because the answers are uncomfortable and belie resolution, spiritual ambiguity in the wake of Sept. 11 remains fertile territory for a storyteller. “I have been surprised for a long while that given that we’re one of the most religious countries in the world, that the networks and other cable stations don’t dig more deeply into that area,” Whitney said.

PBS has also taped public service announcements, with “Mr. Rogers” creator Fred Rogers offering parents advice on how to comfort their kids, said Alice Myatt, PBS’ senior vice president of programming. While the children’s show “Zoom” will feature a 9/11-themed special, other programming won’t be preempted or changed, said Myatt, because PBS wants to provide kids a “safe haven” from the blanket coverage elsewhere.

At the cable networks, Sid Bedingfield, executive editor of the CNN News Group, said CNN will air footage that “was crowded out by events of the day,” including video of the press corps that was covering Bush that day.

“I do think there are details that got lost,” Bedingfield added. “There are details about what the intelligence agencies knew and the effort to connect the dots, where they succeeded and where they failed. There are details about what happened in Washington when it was considered that the White House may be a target.

“What we want to get beyond is merely marking the day, remembering what happened, and move forward to actual reporting on what’s coming next,” he said. “What do we know about what happened that’s new and fresh? Sometimes it’s going back and pulling together the threads of the story that puts it in context.”

Meanwhile, even the niche outlets are striving to pay homage. Cable’s Food Network (as well as other Scripps Network-owned home-improvement channels), plans to go dark from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, playing what a network representative described as “tasteful, mellow, instrumental music that’s appropriate for the day.”

If there isn’t a Food Network show that can neatly conform to the anniversary of the attacks, other niche and general interest cable networks are bending their programming brands to fit the occasion, both on Sept. 11 and in the days leading up to the anniversary.

The pay-cable network Showtime will offer “Reflections From Ground Zero,” hosted by filmmaker Spike Lee, a mini-festival of nine short films around the theme of Sept. 11 from New York University film students. MTV says it will offer consoling music videos, “video postcards” in which artists share their thoughts and experiences, and a special one-hour live forum Sept. 11 to be hosted by Carson Daly of the popular “TRL.”

The Discovery Channel’s “Portraits of Grief” special is based on the New York Times’ exhaustive, award-winning “Portraits of Grief” snapshots of the thousands who perished in the World Trade Center towers. The financial news network CNBC will offer what it calls “thoughtful and comprehensive programming tailored to the financial community.”

Context is not something at which broadcast news excels, critics have long contended. According to Gitlin, most recently author of the book “Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives,” people in the news business used to have a name for a story that was too obscure or complicated to sell to the public. They would call it “Afghanistan.”

That was then, this is now. Networks plan to check in with correspondents around the globe, but media watchdogs are anticipating that the reflexive coverage will fall short. The less telegenic issues, they say--the post-9/11 effect on civil liberties, here and abroad, the aftermath on the ground of U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan--won’t be able to compete with the emotional stories networks will sell all day.

“I can’t imagine, a year after the actual trauma, [that] this industry is capable of doing a good job of accounting for its emotional impact and telling us the truth about what happened and what may happen,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University and the author of “Boxed In: The Culture of TV.”

“TV is really bad at giving us background.... You know they’re going to heat up this big bath of emotionalism, and urge us all to jump in.”