By ignoring the wider context of the event, and attempting to personalize it in the way they did, CBS committed an egregious act of irresponsibility. Either they should have shown the raw footage and let it speak for itself, or they should have shown some different contexts. Instead, CBS doused the raw footage in music, voice-overs, and protection values that put the story in comforting contexts that allow the middle classes to wallow in their illusions. What viewers of 9/11 got was neither the raw, unmediated experience of the WTC tragedy nor a sense of how that tragedy is part of a larger global picture.

In case the general motivations of the musical score weren't enough, one of the firemen and the two French brothers provided voiceovers for the film. They were perhaps designed to help us understand about brotherhood. Or maybe what was happening. The risible use of cliched lines like "It was the night of September 10th" "I knew this would be the worst day of my life as a firefighter" "It's the 11th every day for me" "Would Tony be ready" "If it was still standing, it would be their best way out." didn't even seem to acknowledge their pitiful inadequacy. As if we didn't understand the day. As if the explanations had any force of meaning in the face of the event.

A huge number of television programs and films have prepared us for the possibility of parallel timelines. If CBS had been honest they'd have just broadcast the footage of the two cameras side by side for the two hours. Every non-diegetic sound that they added compromised the integrity of their transmission.

We are so inured against noticing music in film that even non-diegetic music acts almost subliminally. The sparing use of plaintive piano and violin music, the bagpipes echoing the funerals and the cantorial-sounding songs that preceded the climactic Danny Boy they were all not-so-subtle attempts to make, coerce, the viewer into a point of view. If the cost of accessibility is being told what to feel, it is a price not worth paying.

Until viewers understand how they are being manipulated, until US citizens understand the ideology that permeates every second of national television, they will not be able to understand how other countries might think in a way other than them. Until the functionaries of government understand how effective their own propaganda is they will never understand how effective the propaganda of other countries can be-the crude, hateful, almost laughable lies of the Saudi and Egyptian governments, to name two of the most obvious examples.

Tony didn't become a man. He lived through a traumatic time. His actions at the time were childish and remained so. In the aftermath of 9/11, Tony's story reports that both he and a colleague had learnt to want to kill. His colleague said that he now believed something that he had long tried to repress; he now believed in 'evil.' The mistaken simplicity of these observations (They are evil. We must kill.) are dangerous and a direct consequence of the type of competent but misguided broadcasting that tells us what to think and tells us that everything's OK and human. It's not.

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