Every year, on the days surrounding September 11, American television programming revisits the horror of 2001 with documentaries, docudramas and replayed coverage of the terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington DC. This annual obsession with reliving that tragic event, as if we need to be reminded of the details, is touted as a public service, an acknowledgement that terrorism still stalks the globe and a means to honor those who died in the carnage.
Yet, like all television programming, it is served up with the primary purpose of attracting viewers and, as media executives know, humans are perversely attracted to the specter of tragic events. Just as crowds gather to watch a jumper on a ledge or tune in to learn every detail about a mass shooting, they long to hear desperate phone calls from the Twin Towers and, for the hundredth time, to watch airliners slam into the World Trade Center.
Do we honor the dead with this programming or do we merely satisfy the sadistic voyeurism of the human animal? Can we not commemorate the historic tragedy without injecting it with the morbid curiosity of those who gawk at the plight of its victims? We have already used that horrific event to justify eleven years of senseless combat which has taken many more innocent lives; need we also be entertained by the suffering and death of the September 11 attacks?
