Sept. 11

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Sunday September 11, 2011

9-11 10 Years Later

For all the journalistic firepower gathered to mark the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on Sunday, the small moments captured by cameras resonated most deeply.

A 21-year-old boy regretted that his father wasn’t there to help him learn how to drive a car. Young hands grasped at a name etched in a memorial as if they could touch the person himself. A young woman asked a mother no longer there if she is proud of her family.

Live coverage of somber ceremonies memorializing the attack’s victims dominated television networks on Sunday, the climax of two weeks of attention paid to the historical marker. Newspapers published special sections and websites offered their own content — Yahoo even observing a digital moment of silence.

The television coverage was centered on the annual memorial service at New York’s World Trade Center. CNN kept a timeline, occasionally flashing mileposts of what happened 10 years ago at their precise moments: as former President George W. Bush read a letter from Abraham Lincoln to the mother of five men killed in the Civil War, the screen noted that exactly 10 years ago Bush’s chief of staff was whispering to his boss that “America is under attack.”

“The images still shock, the heartbreak still hurts,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said as the network showed pictures from 2001.

Sunday’s coverage offered dozens of heart-rending moments, perhaps none more so than when Peter Negron, 21, recalled his father Pete, a project manager for environmental issues for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who died at the World Trade Center. He noted that he tried to teach his brother, aged 2 when their father died, things like throwing a baseball that dad had showed him. He regretted that his father wasn’t there to teach him how to drive, or ask a girl out on a date. (Associated Press)