History Recorded by Amateurs
They reacted in an instant. A tourist stepping onto a ferry. Another on his way to the Statue of Liberty. A guy from Brooklyn who wondered why his radio station just went dead. Grabbing video cameras. Pointing. Clicking. Recording. Last Tuesday, ordinary people became America’s unexpected historians.
While live television gave America its first shocking look at the destruction of the World Trade Center, it has been amateur video that has filled in the horrifying details. The scenes captured by amateurs are among the most viewed images of the terrorist attack on New York.
Countless professionals had their cameras trained on the World Trade Center, yet several of the most seen video clips of Tuesday’s attack on New York came from people like Park Foreman, an Internet security analyst who lives in Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River from Manhattan. He caught the second plane’s approach and impact on his 8-millimeter digital video camera.
Foreman’s is typical of the stories that come with the clips deluging network and cable news operations. He’d gone to his roof, taping what he thought was just a fire. When a neighbor said, “What the heck is that?” Foreman panned, following the second plane, only to watch it slam into the south tower.
“I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch it on camera,” he wrote in an e-mail interview with The Times. “Sometimes I wish I weren’t.”
Within hours, Foreman had sold his footage to CNN, and by about 2 p.m. EST, he was watching it on television.
“You can put all the TV network cameras together and maybe you get a few hundred cameras,” said Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN. “But there are millions of cameras across the United States, and hundreds of thousands in New York alone. The odds are that the average person, not the network TV professional, is going to get the image in a situation like this. And that certainly was the case with the two planes flying into the World Trade Center.”
TV viewers have come to expect home videos of disasters, said Bill Shine, Fox News executive producer. The graininess, the shakiness of the hand-held camera, he added, “lend kind of credibility to it, the sense of something ... as it happened.”
Networks Sifting Through Submissions
Even at the end of the week, network news departments reported being swamped. Hundreds of people have tried to walk in with videotapes at Fox News. At CBS, a national editor said, “the word ‘deluged’ would be appropriate.” At MSNBC, like most of the networks, the staff has been sifting through tapes almost nonstop.
All the networks agreed Tuesday to share everything without regard to rights or permission, so those clips--as well as others found by NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox News--were quickly broadcast on every station. What became critical were the views from the south, like Foreman’s, in which the second plane was visible up to the point of impact. Although none of the networks have disclosed what they’ve paid for the right to use a piece of video, estimates for the crash footage range from a few thousand dollars to six-figure payouts.
One man on a National Park Service boat to the Statue of Liberty got what Jordan believes is the most close-up version. That footage, or some like it, will probably become the Sept. 11 parallel to Abraham Zapruder’s 8-millimeter film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, or the photo of the firefighter carrying a child out of the wreckage in Oklahoma City.
CNN also bought from Gamma Press, a French agency, one of the only shots of the first attack to surface so far: A videographer working on a training video for firefighters caught a distant image of the first hijacked airliner as it hit the north tower.
‘I Hope I Live... It’s Coming Down on Me’
Another tape that wound up on CNN was taken by Dr. Mark Heath, a cardiac anesthesiologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital who had walked into the crash site to aid victims. He wound up getting caught up in the second crash and the collapse of the buildings.
Heath’s fear during those moments struck home. “I hope I live. I hope I live. It’s coming down on me,” he said, crouching behind a car as a building tumbled, his camera recording the whole time.
Although home videos of disasters have become common on television, the volume this time is unprecedented. With technology getting better and equipment getting cheaper, it’s not surprising that so many had video cameras within reach.
Video cameras are “not quite the Brownie camera yet, but so many people have them and use them,” said Joan Deppa, the primary author of the 1994 book “The Media and Disasters: Pan Am 103.”
Since then, home videos have shaped the nation’s perception of many events, she said, with the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles as a prime example.
“This time we [also] have networks and stations handing off cameras to someone who was going in to ground zero,” Deppa said. Firefighters, construction workers and rescue volunteers have all provided TV tape.
Yet as immediate as television can be, an event of the magnitude of last Tuesday’s attack still leaves TV producers aching for something, anything, that can even approximate the real scene.
“Two of my co-workers just got back from down there,” Shine said. “The first words out of their mouths were, ‘You can’t believe what it’s like. The pictures we’re showing don’t do justice to what it’s like.”’
A digital photo taken by one woman not only became one of the defining images, but also a message home to her husband.
Carmen Taylor was about to board the Staten Island ferry when the attack began. She immediately started shooting digital still pictures, said her husband, Lynn Taylor, photographing the second plane just before it hit the south tower.
Unable to get in touch with her husband, who was home in Lavaca, Ark., she e-mailed photos to KHBS-TV in nearby Fort Smith, Ark., the TV station he watches, Lynn recalled.
It was her way of letting him know she was alive.
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