I was asked by a PR firm working for CNN to remind y’all that CNN’s website will feature the coverage from 9/11/2001 tomorrow:
Dear Mr. Hunt,
Tomorrow is going to be a rough day — the fifth anniversary
of the attacks of September 11, 2001. As an education writer and observer, you know the value of a “teachable
moment” — and that it must be used properly. Tributes and recollections will appear everywhere, filtered through the
eyes of analysts, journalists, bloggers, politicians and every other American
with access to a podium – in print, on a street corner, on the air or
online. But five years can muddy
recollections – and for many students, five years ago is an eternity.There is a great resource available for free that can
help. CNN Pipeline – CNN.com’s premium
video news service — will replay, without charge, CNN’s coverage from that day
precisely as happened five years ago, beginning at 8:30 a.m. (ET), minutes
before the first news reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center in New
York City.CNN Pipeline is comprised of four separate feeds. Through them the rebroadcast will supplement
its coverage with live reports from memorial services in New York City,
Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.One more thing: To be sensitive to those online users who do
not wish to see the replay, CNN Pipeline requires those who want to see the
footage to click on Pipe 4 to launch the program.The people who frequent Bud the Teacher care about
education and are tech-savvy and culturally aware. They’ll appreciate knowing that this opportunity exists. On behalf of CNN, we hope you’ll tell them.
I’m getting more and more of these press release-type e-mails, although I don’t usually respond to them. (Maybe that’s a session for a future conference — Blogger as PR Target: Responding to the Corporate Press Machine.) This one, though, is likely worth passing on. I was glued to CNN for a few weeks during/after 9/11. It was a pretty scary time. And, yes, I know that’s a pretty United Statesian-centric worldview. But it was. Scary.
I probably won’t be using this tool in my classroom — I wasn’t planning a very long remembrance. Our school-wide daily writing prompt tomorrow is "Remember." It’s open ended because I know that some students won’t want to think about 9/11 — and I’m not sure it’s my place to force them to. Then again, it might be, but that’s a post for another day.
I will check in with the coverage with my journalism students — but that’s all. I’m not sure that I like the idea that this footage is being reused, in part, as a promotional tool for a new web-based news service. I do, agree, though, that seeing the original footage has some educational value.
2 responses so far ↓
Doug Noon // Sep 11th 2006 at 12:32 am
Here’s a bit of an article by Alfie Kohn that I’d like to share:
…But our broader obligation is to address what writer Martin Amis recently described as Americans’ chronic “deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away.” Schools should help children locate themselves in widening circles of care that extend beyond self, beyond country, to all humanity.
Likewise, education must be about developing the skills and disposition to question the official story, to view with skepticism the stark us-against-them (or us good, them bad) portrait of the world and the accompanying dehumanization of others that helps to explain that empathy deficit. Students should also be able to recognize dark historical parallels in the President’s rhetoric, and to notice what is not being said or shown on the news.
It seems to me that we have no better opportunity to showcase the power of social media for bringing people around the world together, as well as the need for critical media literacy, than by exploring questions like, “Who’s a terrorist?”
The Alfie Kohn article came from a special Rethinking Schools report on Sept. 11, which also contains a pretty well thought-out lesson by Bill Bigelow.
Boyhowdy // Sep 12th 2006 at 6:48 pm
Though I appreciate CNN’s efforts, so much of their coverage that day was not news, but spectacle — the same images over and over again, like every other news outlet. Great for a media literacy class, I suppose. But hardly a great day for television, given that the newsworthiness was not the full day’s coverage, but the surprisingly short event, the aftermath of months (not a day), and a few images we were left with afterwards.
I did a presentation in 2002 at a prep school on the subject, in fact, discussing the place of each type of medium in the presence and aftermath of national crisis, which went into significant detail on this. The thrust of the television part of my talk, though, was exactly that — that in the hours of aftermath and constant replay, television, truly, magnifies a moment like this in ways which may be neither healthy nor the best use of television. TV has a great place in society, I say — but this wasn’t it.
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