Buzz Bissinger on 9-11 overkill

And for that, I am quite thankful. I reached the overkill point well before Sunday. It's really hard to care about something when it's drilled into your head repeatedly, and yes, I was as numb to it as Bissinger writes in his column. I lived through it, but I really don't feel like I lived through it because it feels so long ago to me. Ten years is a long time, and it honestly felt like that attack happened on September 11, 1901 to me.

That's what oversaturation does, and I say that as someone who was a history minor and normally loves reading/hearing about the past. I was sick of this. The news networks badly overdid it because it was an easy story.

 

Dude, it's the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Grow up and have some fucking perspective.

 

Exactly, it's the 10th anniversary. Not the first, the 10th, as in it's been a full decade since it happened. Grief has a shelf-life. My perspective is just fine as it is.

 

He's too busy being a rude yahoo on Twitter.

 

I spent weeks working on our massive 9/11 advance copy, and now that I've had nearly a week off, my opinion is pretty much where I started with it. When I got the assignment, I was telling a friend about it and she said, "I lived through it, why the fuck would I want to read about it?" I said, well, if we do too little, some people will be pissed, and we do too much, some people will be pissed.

We did a lot, but with some understatement on the tone. That was decided above me, and I have to say I am proud of the management here. I didn't like some of what I saw from other papers on the Newseum website, and in some cases I really disliked it a lot -- thought it was an unseemly attempt at building a portfolio. I watched none of the TV coverage because I was too fried/busy with work. There were some 60- to 180-inchers that I read six or seven times each. My wife's comment after reading one particular story in the paper was, "How can you read this six times and not be depressed?" The answer is, I thought my newspaper was doing it the right way, for good reasons, and that tasteful writing and presentation carry a lot of weight in making me feel good about what we do. We worked very hard at tone. One of the AMEs and I sweated even the refers to the online stuff every night, trying hard to hit that narrow space between directing people to the videos without coming off like pimps. I know how much conscience went into it. Every decision we made was carefully dissected, to the degree that I felt slapped silly every night. But I am deeply proud of the results. I hope you are with yours.

 

I was fine with most of it.

Our local NBC affiliate, however, put together as part of its coverage a 5-minute segment where it talked to its own reporters and anchors about how the day affected them, nevermind that we're several hundred miles from anywhere that was hit, and that those anchors and reporters were either (a) still in high school/college (we're a smaller market) or (b) didn't do much that day anyway because it was all national coverage.

It was embarrassing, navel-gazing drivel.