| geert lovink on Thu, 13 Sep 2001 17:06:24 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> media grok: reporting the unthinkable |
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THE INDUSTRY STANDARD'S
M E D I A G R O K
What the Press Is Reporting and Why
=====================================================================
| http://www.thestandard.com |
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
TOP GROKS:
* Reporting the Unthinkable
* Gridlock
* Reluctantly, the Economic Angle
MORE NEWS:
* World Trade Center Towers Destroyed
* European Markets Mixed in Aftermath
* Companies Urged to Prepare for Cyberterrorism
* Networks Hit, But Telecom Stays Operational
/=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=
To subscribe to Media Grok, visit http://thestandard.com/newsletters
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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=/
TOP GROKS
~~~~~~~~~
Reporting the Unthinkable
"Until people grasp the magnitude of it all, all we can do is tell
individual stories until they add up." That wisdom comes from
TheStreet.com's George Mannes, one of the many business reporters and Wall
Street workers to describe a situation far outside his - or anyone's - usual
realm of expertise.
Fifty thousand people worked at the World Trade Center. "Maybe people I
knew. Certainly people who people I knew knew," said Salon's Amy Reiter,
summing up the thoughts of many. Fortune's Andy Serwer called his friends
who worked in the twin towers, and "remarkably none of them were there" on
Tuesday.
MSNBC's Martin Wolk, who was attending a business conference in the Center
when it was struck, "eventually made it up to Greenwich Village, where a man
named John Roccosalva was kind enough to let me and other survivors use the
telephone and get a glass of badly needed water in his tiny studio
apartment." Newsday's Wall Street reporter Susan Harrigan went from
interviewing witnesses, to running for her life, to doing more interviews.
NJ.com offered the eerie image of "shoes, scores of shoes abandoned by their
owners, fleeing too fast."
The Wall Street Journal said the Los Angeles staff of the finance firm
Cantor Fitzgerald was on the phone with the New York office when someone
said, "I think a plane just hit us." The company had offices on the 101st,
103rd, 104th and 105th floors. TheStreet's Herb Greenberg wrote that Cantor
Fitzgerald analyst and TheStreet contributor Bill Meehan, "the greatest guy
on earth, was on the 105th floor of the North tower."
Toronto-based information services company Thomson Corp. spent late Tuesday
trying to locate 200 employees who worked in the WTC, said the Globe and
Mail, and one Thomson employee had a reservation on the crashed American
Airlines Flight 11. There was some "good" news: The AP listed companies
whose employees appear to have escaped unscathed, including Morgan Stanley
and Citigroup.
The casualties are likely to be staggering, and the numbers probably won't
be fully known for days. But reports enabling us to put faces and names to
the event are starting to trickle in. Akamai co-founder and CTO Daniel Lewin
was on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade
Center, reported Reuters and others. He leaves a wife and two sons.
Bloomberg reported that the CFO of MRV Communications, 41-year-old Edmund
Glazer, was also on the plane. The individual stories Mannes referred to are
starting to add up fast. - Jen Muehlbauer
World Trade Center Towers Destroyed After Terrorist Attack; Four Planes
Hijacked
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,28942,00.html
Code of Silence: The Unspeakable Horror
http://www.thestreet.com/tech/georgemannes/10001001.html
NYC's worst nightmare comes true
http://www.msnbc.com/news/627064.asp
Kindness, bravery amid the horror
http://www.msnbc.com/news/627166.asp
Chaos erupts
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/11/reports/index.html
The quiet time of international tragedy
http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/dispatch/mc091201.htm
Cantor Fitzgerald Staff Listened as Terror Unfolded
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB1000246114198289824.htm
(Paid subscription required.)
>From the Heart
http://www.thestreet.com/markets/marketfeatures/10000994.html
The World Trade Center Tragedy: An eyewitness account
http://www.nj.com/terror/index.ssf?/terror/eyewitness.html
'I Thought I Was Going to Die'
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-wtceyewitness.story?coll=ny%2Dt
op%2Dheadlines
Terrorism's Pearl Harbor
http://www.fortune.com/sitelets/wtc/wtc.html
Akamai founder, CTO killed in WTC jet crash (Reuters)
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/11/akamai.htm
MRV Communications CFO Dies in Flight That Struck Trade Center
http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?ptitle=Technology%20News&s1=blk&tp=ad_t
opright_tech&T=markets_bfgcgi_content99.ht&s2=ad_right1_technology&bt=ad_pos
ition1_technology&middle=ad_frame2_technology&s=AO56BPRXOTVJWIENv
-------------------------------
Gridlock
Do we even have to tell you that phones jammed and Web sites crashed, and
that e-mail never looked so good?
"People trapped in buildings in Manhattan in the wake of the attacks on the
World Trade Center are finding that e-mail and instant messaging are the
best ways to contact their friends and loved ones," reported Farhad Manjoo
of Wired News. If you're wired enough to read this, you probably sent some
e-mail to New York yourself on Tuesday.
Media everywhere noted this trend, and many articles quoted hurried messages
from eyewitness New Yorkers. "A lot of people don't realize that the
Internet was originally created to manage communication in such an instance
of attack as this," Earthlink president Michael McQuarty told the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.
Phone lines overloaded. The New York Times interviewed one woman who tried
to call her sister in Manhattan about 75 times in five hours. Verizon made
its Manhattan pay phones free of charge; lines stretched down the block.
Local radio and television stations with transmitters at the World Trade
Center were knocked off the air for those without cable TV, said the Times,
but "some were able to switch to backup sites, primarily on the Empire State
Building."
Major U.S. sites such as CNN stripped out ads, video and other
bandwidth-suckers in an attempt to stay accessible. Reuters reports that
European news sites also suffered outages. Google.com urged users to log out
and watch TV or listen to the radio instead. Wired reported that tech sites
such as Slashdot went off-topic to pick up the slack, and Mike Wendland of
the Detroit Free Press said "the Internet failed miserably" in providing
information during the crisis.
News.com said "The Web sites of the airlines whose planes were hijacked were
also swarmed with traffic," as were the FBI and Pentagon sites. Federal
Computer Week reported that for a few hours after the disaster, "virtually
all official government Web sites remained silent on the unfolding
disaster." We forgive them for having other things on their minds.
In addition to other as-yet-incalculable losses, some lost the false feeling
of omniscience that the Internet can provide. On Salon, tech writer Andrew
Leonard's father, John, described working at his computer Tuesday morning,
unable to get online and check e-mail. "Until the phone rings and my
stepdaughter downtown tells me that maybe I should be watching television
because it is like the worst sort of TV movie, and I don't know what she's
talking about," wrote Leonard. "I will try to fax this to San Francisco and
then go back to being wired to the gills and stupider than ever." - Jen
Muehlbauer
Networks Hit, But Telecom Stays Operational
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,28948,00.html
Families and Friends Hoping for Reassurance Find Frustration and Anguish
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/nyregion/12MISS.html
(Paid subscription required.)
A Flood of Anxious Phone Calls Clog Lines, and TV Channels Go Off the Air
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/national/12PHON.html
(Paid subscription required.)
Fed Web sites silent as New York, Washington burn (Federal Computer Week)
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/fcw2.htm
Net offers lifeline amid tragedy
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7132246.html
Internet Performs Global Role, Supplementing TV
http://ojr.usc.edu/content/story.cfm?request=637
Scrambling for News (Reuters)
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/WTC_internet010911.html
Web flooded as people seek info on attacks
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7129241.html
News Sites Trim Down To Handle Traffic Load
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169980.html
Net fails key test during clamor for information
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/terror2001/mwend12_20010912.htm
Internet traffic slows, news sites jammed following attacks (AP)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/tech/035245.htm
Trapped and Chatting in NYC
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46715,00.html
Tech Sites Pick up the News
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46716,00.html
E-mail indispensable as phone systems jam
http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/terrorism/atlanta/0911email.html
Chaos Erupts
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/11/reports/index2.html
-------------------------------
Reluctantly, the Economic Angle
With New York's financial market in ruins and the world economy in doubt,
even an economist sounded sick at heart to cast the tragedy as financial
news. It's "primarily a humanitarian issue and a security issue for the
U.S.," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted HSBC chief economist Dr. John
Edwards as saying. "A terrorist attack is a ... terrible human tragedy but
not a sustained conflict. Accordingly the economic aspect is the least
important."
But it's an aspect the media had to cover, however reluctantly. With dual
headlines that the effect on financial markets would be "impossible to
predict" and that a global recession was "highly likely," USA Today's
Web-based coverage was emblematic of the media's struggle to report the
financial ramifications of Tuesday's devastation. London's Guardian
cautioned restraint in using epithets such as "meltdown" and "collapse" to
describe post-attack economic conditions. "We've just seen what the real
thing looks like," Larry Elliott wrote.
Worries about equity values, industrial output and rising unemployment have
become "utterly futile," shrugged BBC business editor Jeff Randall. Another
BBC News Online filing quoted a stock historian who described trying to
gauge the economic fallout of the attacks as impossible: "There never has
been a shock like this for the financial markets."
Many international outlets, however, were quick to report expectations of a
hard, fast downturn. Reuters reported that a global economic contraction was
"almost certain," and the International Herald Tribune said the attacks
heightened the prospect of a U.S. recession, which would be sure to cause
already faltering Asian and European economies to slide more.
The London Times reported that central banks on both sides of the Atlantic
were on alert last night to flood financial markets with emergency funds to
counter the turbulence in worldwide financial markets. By early Wednesday
morning, Bloomberg said, the money-pumping had begun, with the European
Central Bank loaning $63 billion - about the same amount as it typically
hands out over a two-week period at its weekly auctions - and the Bank of
Japan kicking $17 billion into money markets. As for the U.S. Federal
Reserve's fixation on the tweaking of short-term interest rates as an
anti-recession tool, the Financial Times' Lex column warned that it'll be no
match for the now-rattled U.S. psyche: "A new element, beyond the Fed's
control, has entered the confidence equation."
As of early Wednesday morning, the BBC was reporting that major stock
indexes in London and Frankfurt had settled in positive territory, and Paris
shares were trading well above early lows. Oil prices had stabilized. But as
one senior equities trader told the London Times, "I have not got a brain
big enough to contemplate the ramifications of this. But every way you look,
it only gets worse." - Deborah Asbrand
Attacks Herald Global Recession
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0109/12/world/world54.html
Effect on financial markets impossible to predict
http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/2001-09-11-market-outlook.htm
Full Global Recession 'Highly Likely'
http://usatoday.com/money/economy/2001-09-12-attacks-recession.htm
A Direct Strike at the Very Heart of Global Capitalism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,550505,00.html
Why the Killers Threaten World Prosperity
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_1538000/1538958.stm
European Markets Volatile After Asian Fall
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3CMH0TIRC&liv
e=true&useoverridetemplate=ZZZ99ZVV70C&tagid=IXLYK5HZ8CC
Lex: Day of infamy
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT305LP3IRC&liv
e=true
Dollar Drops Sharply
http://www.iht.com/articles/32218.html
Terrorist Attacks Send the World's Markets Plunging
http://www.iht.com/articles/32260.html
Attacks May Bring Global Recession (Reuters)
http://www.scmp.com/toppage/ZZZIYGE79RC.html
(Free registration required.)
Central Banks Stand By With Funding
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,5-2001314626,00.html
Financial Markets Close after Attack
http://www.thestreet.com/markets/hotnews/10000988.html
Fed Moves to Assure Liquidity
http://www.thestreet.com/markets/hotnews/10000990.html
Trade Center chaos shuts down markets (AP)
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-7130769.html
World Markets Plunge On U.S. Terrorist Attacks
http://www.internetnews.com/fina-news/article/0,,5_882301,00.html
US attacks leave markets reeling
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3UTKXQHRC&liv
e=true&useoverridetemplate=ZZZ99ZVV70C&tagid=IXLYK5HZ8CC
Amid the Chaos, What's Next for the Markets?
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/sep2001/pi20010911_3013.htm
Pandemonium on Wall Street
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/sep2001/pi20010911_4982.htm
World Markets In Turmoil
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169981.html
Terrorist Attacks Halt Trading in U.S., Roil Markets Abroad
http://interactive.wsj.com/pages/money.htm
(Paid subscription required.)
Cantor Fitzgerald Staff Listened as Terror Unfolded
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB1000246114198289824.htm
(Paid subscription required.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
MORE NEWS AT THESTANDARD.COM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
World Trade Center Towers Destroyed
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,28942,00.html?nl=mg
European Markets Mixed in Aftermath
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,28949,00.html?nl=mg
Companies Urged to Prepare for Cyberterrorism
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,28947,00.html?nl=mg
Networks Hit, But Telecom Stays Operational
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,28948,00.html?nl=mg
---------------------------------------------------------------------
MORE LINKS
~~~~~~~~~~
State Department technology lagging
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7132563.html
Where To Call
http://www.msnbc.com/news/627095_asp.htm
The World Trade Center website, cached by Google
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:__giFglSV3I:www.wtca.org/view.html+worl
d+trade+center+new+york&hl=en
A chronology of today's breaking-news bulletins
http://jd.manilasites.com/2001/09/11#terrorism
World Trade Center Tenants
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/articles/tower1.html
Pentagon Locator
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-091101pentagonbomb-graphic
.graphic
STAFF
~~~~~
Written by Deborah Asbrand (dasbrand@world.std.com), Michaela
Cavallaro (mcavalla@maine.rr.com), Keith Dawson (dawson@world.std.com),
Jen Muehlbauer (jen@englishmajor.com) and David Sims
(davesims@sonic.net).
Copyedited and produced by Jim Duffy (jimduffy86@yahoo.com).
Edited by Jimmy Guterman (guterman@vineyard.com).
Media Grok is produced by The Vineyard Group Inc., for Standard Media
International. For more information on Media Grok, please visit
http://guterman.com.
Copyright 2001 Standard Media International
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