Politics
Media Assigns Live Blog To Ceremony Where The News Is That Nothing New Happened
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks killed 2,977 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the American media apparatus gathered to do the one thing it has perfected in the intervening decades: cover grief as though it might resolve differently this time.
The ceremonies on Friday were, by design, identical to the ceremonies held every year. Names were read. Bells rang. Flowers were placed. Public officials stood at microphones and said the word "never" more times than any speechwriter originally intended. None of this was new, because the entire institutional logic of a memorial is that it is supposed to be the same, which is what makes it a memorial and not a press conference.
This did not stop CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC, the Associated Press, Reuters, and approximately thirty-seven local affiliates from launching live-update blogs at 6 a.m. Eastern, staffed by correspondents instructed to file something every five minutes regardless of whether anything had occurred.
"We are committed to bringing our audience real-time coverage of this moment as it unfolds," said a network spokesperson, in a sentence that contains three words that do not apply to a situation that unfolded in 2001.
Among the updates filed between 8 and 10 a.m.: "Ceremony has begun." "Bell has rung." "Second bell has rung." "Family members are present." "Reading of names continues." One outlet filed an update reading "moment of silence observed," which, if you think about it for four seconds, is the news equivalent of a photograph of someone not talking.
The update marked BREAKING, filed at 8:46 a.m. to coincide with the exact minute the first plane struck the North Tower, read: "It has been 25 years." This is true. It was also true yesterday and will be true tomorrow, but yesterday there was no opportunity for a countdown graphic.
Donald Trump, attending the ceremony at Ground Zero alongside New York officials, told reporters the country was "stronger than ever" and that he had "always loved" the site, a sentiment that landed with the specific warmth of a man who once called a New York radio station on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, to mention that his building on Wall Street was now one of the tallest in lower Manhattan, which it was not.
Elsewhere, morning anchors described the mood as "somber" and "reflective" before cutting to commercials for prescription medications and a regional mattress chain running a September sale.
In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 went down after passengers attempted to retake the plane, a memorial service was held at a site that receives roughly 400,000 visitors a year, each of whom arrives knowing exactly what happened there. The National Park Service, to its credit, did not file a live blog.
Family members who have attended every ceremony for twenty-five years were described in multiple headlines as "emotional," which is the press's way of noting that people whose relatives were killed continue to have feelings about it, and treating this as mildly surprising.
The most-engaged update across platforms, by a significant margin, was a video of a woman placing her hand on a name etched in stone. It received 2.3 million views. The caption read: "Powerful moment at Ground Zero." Forty thousand people shared it. No one appeared to find the framing strange.
By noon, most of the live blogs had switched to a recap format, summarizing the morning's events for readers who had not followed the live blog, which summarized events for readers who had not watched the ceremony, which commemorated events that every American has been aware of for a quarter century.
The bells stopped ringing. The names were all read. The news cycle moved on by 2 p.m.
The next update is scheduled for 2026.
The story we are making fun of: https://abcnews.com/US/live-updates/911-25th-anniversary-live-updates-families-gather-ceremonies/?id=136027765