Already, the video footage and photos of two hijacked airliners smacking into the World Trade Center on Tuesday morning have created a new global icon for terrorism.
On TV screens we’ve seen these dreadful images, from every angle and vantage point, repeated endlessly. Even in slow motion.
Blue sky. Shining towers. Orange fireballs. Black smoke.
Like scratchy film footage of the Hindenberg airship exploding over Lakehurst, N.J. in 1937, the dreadful pictures recorded on Sept. 11, 2001, are imprinted in history. They are now convenient shorthand for the event itself.
Ironically, perhaps, these new symbols of human evil are striking for their lack of human content.
Again and again, we see airborne marvels of human engineering turned into deadly bombs. We see human monuments of concrete, steel and glass cruelly reduced to rubble.
Soon translated into the medium of print, the frozen-in-time photos of the suicide attacks initially caused shock and even disbelief.
When Star readers saw the image in Tuesday’s extra edition, many may have hoped it was all just nightmarish Hollywood special effects.
But no reader called to protest until Wednesday when new and more disturbing images began appearing in The Star and other newspapers.
On Page A3, three tiny figures plummeted head-first to the ground, arms outstretched. They looked like mannequins. But they were real people, framed by sky and skyscraper bathed in golden sunlight.
A second photo, inside a special section on the terrorist attack, showed several doomed people, leaning from broken windows.
In all, perhaps a dozen readers phoned or e-mailed to say The Star had strayed into unacceptable territory. Variously, they described the photos as “insensitive . . . tasteless . . . terrible . . . tabloid sensationalism.”
“I have to wonder if the editor would have made the decision to print those photos if a member of his family, or a friend, had been killed in the tragedy,” said L. Dawn Elliott by e-mail. “Good journalism is not about making money. These photos are in poor taste and show a horrific lack of respect both for the victims and all survivors throughout the world. Why stop there? What is next? Perhaps body parts lying on the streets.”
Wrote Todd Snyder: “Without exception, every person I spoke to said that the picture (of the humans leaping to their deaths) went too far . . . some things are off limits, even in today’s new, tell-all world.”
One caller, Frank Simpson, declared: “From the thousands of pictures available, I thought this one was a little tasteless. It’s bad enough to read about this without seeing people jumping out of windows.”
One reader said she had snipped out Page A3 to spare her 18- and 14-year-old children. “Your reporters told the story well enough in words. We didn’t need the pictures.”
The ombud doesn’t know how all the TV networks handled the issue. But at one point CNN did show bodies falling to the pavement.
The Star’s photo director, Hans Deryk, participated in the decision to run the photos, and defended it.
He said it wasn’t “frivolous sensationalism at an accident scene. . . these telling images brought home the magnitude of this extraordinary international news story as words could not. They hit us all in the gut.”
To me, there was ample reason to run these wrenching pictures, thankfully not on the front page: they told an awful truth.
When I saw them in print, tears finally came. No longer was it metal hitting metal. It was the human dimension hitting home. Hard.
