Media memorials – opportunism, or value?
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Like many others, I just waited for the wave of September 11 observances in the media to build, climax and ebb. Now that it’s pretty much all over, I’m simply glad.
Altogether, it wasn’t as bad – and I mean either mawkish or tendentious – as it could have been.
Occasionally the core communications issue (at least for me) came up sharply – the issue, that is, of commercial or even political opportunism versus genuine public value. There was, for instance, ABC’s ridiculous notion they could get away with their miniseries “The Path to 9/11” that flat-out faked critical events during the Clinton Administration.
Did ABC not know, I wonder, that the show’s main writer is an avowed conservative and evidently a friend of Rush Limbaugh? Like they apparently didn’t know that Mel Gibson (well before his drunken diatribe on the matter) held some highly suspect views, expressed more fully and openly by his Tridentine-worshipping father and Holocaust-denying father, about Jews - and yet still commissioned Mel to make a series on, of all things, the Holocaust.
Make, if you will, a comparison of this meretricious piece of TV with some work in a completely different medium. The work I mean presents the official 9/11 Commission’s report as a comic book, and it’s called simply “The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation”. It’s by comic-strip veterans Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon and comes from publishers Hill and Wang.
It may seem like a wacky idea, but it represents clear and demonstrable value, and stands as the very opposite of political or commercial opportunism. My colleague Nicholas Wapshott, formerly of London ’s The Times has rightly summed it up as “a triumph of popular journalism” that works in the best democratic interests to “encourage even those who do not read books or serious newspapers to come to terms with the report's findings”. What a contrast with ABC’s grubby effort.
I also found myself inescapably comparing two brand-new 9/11 photographic books that arrived on my desk, both portraying the World Trade Center site after the attacks. It was hard not to compare them - they both have the same title, simply "Aftermath".
So I decided upon an experiment. I deliberately sank myself into both books while knowing virtually nothing about them except their shared title. I declined to interview the book’s creators, unlike my common practice of seeking authors out.
One Aftermath, by photographer Joel Meyerowitz, struck me as noble, unquestionably real and deeply affecting. The other, by John Botte, gave me a discomforting, intrusive sense of the photographer’s own presence and of sometimes strained, almost prurient efforts to achieve an effect.
I later learned that Meyerowitz has been a photographer since 1962, with a background before that in painting and medical illustration. His work, using both 35mm and large-format, has hung in the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York . He was inspired by the Farm Security Administration’s photographic program to document for the public record the effects of the 1930s’ Depression.
On the other hand, Botte turns out to have been a cop – though a crime scene photographer too. He gained his chance to record the WTC destruction when sent in at the request of then Police Commissioner (now a disgraced civilian and failed Homeland Security Secretary nominee) Bernard Kerik.
Meyerowitz’s book is published by Phaidon, the long-hailed international purveyor of high quality art catalogues and scholarly studies. They began producing their signature books of large-plate illustrations in 1936 with works by Van Gogh and Botticelli.
Botte’s book is published by Regan Books, more generally known for works by Rush Limbaugh, Neil Cavuto, Sean Hannity, and oh yes, by Bernard Kerik. The imprint was founded twelve years ago by Judith Regan, who’s been noted for the label “destroyer of souls" - in Vanity Fair, a publication that knows whereof it speaks, I guess - and for, oh yes, her tawdry entanglement with the aforesaid Bernard Kerik, involving recourse over several weeks to an apartment set aside for NYPD use overlooking Ground Zero.
(On the purely publishing side of things, Mr Kerik also took royalties amounting to over $75,000 for his contribution – an entire 11 sentences - to “In the Line of Duty”, a book intended to raise funds for the families of police officers killed on 9/11, and published of course by Regan.)
My assessment of the two Aftermath books was, I hasten to say, just one reader’s experiment, and a very unscientific test at that. But it may - just may - say something about opportunism versus value.