Dialogue: All that breaking news could break us instead

By DAVID AARONOVITCH

If I had a deity (and thank the Lord I don't) I would pray to it for just one thing - that we could go back to September 10. Those were the days when plane crashes were lamentable accidents and carried with them no requirement for anything other than a down-bulletin call to a local fire officer and the request that he describe what he could see from where he was standing.

At 3 o'clock yesterday I turned to the images on the silent TV next to my computer and felt sick to see that the screen had split (small presenter upper right, large flames lower left, white doomy words wiping on and off below the heading "Breaking news").

Now even accidents "wipe out" whole areas of cities, and - of course - those areas turn out to be full of firefighters.

We've been damaged by the original New York attack, and only a delicacy of feeling about the sufferings of those killed or bereaved from Manhattan to Mazar-i-Sharif stops us from analysing this harm. And I don't mean by this merely the enhanced knowledge of the extreme contingency of our lives, but the way in which everything combines to make us mad. Things you always wondered about (but discounted) become true.

Like me, you might have looked down recently from a landing plane and asked yourself what would happen if a plane fell on a crowded suburb. Now we are beginning to find out.

Is breaking news so called because it is in danger of breaking us? Minutes after American Airlines 587 went down you could sense the director in his darkened gallery feeling for the definitive images of the day.

Was it the street on fire in Rockaway Beach? The charred bushes and the firefighters? Or the fallen engine, lying beside the Texaco forecourt? Or perhaps the incoherent witness who barely had the saliva available to allow his tongue to work?

"Possibly this could have been sabotage. Possibly it could have been mechanical failure," said one presenter. "Was this a shot, or was this an accident?" asked another. "Radio contact was lost four minutes after take-off," a radio reporter told us pointedly.

Yes, you think, well, it crashed just after take-off, so it would be.

How do engines fall off planes? I looked out over one just last Tuesday, taking off from Phoenix, and wondered how well it was stuck on. Was it an explosion? An explosion in the engine or around the engine? Or in the plane itself, which then hit the engine? We don't know. We can't know. Eventually we will know. So why ask?

Full marks then to Tony Blair for telling the cameras, within the hour, that "I don't think it is sensible to speculate any further". Not just not sensible - it was mad to speculate further. Worse, it was madness-provoking to speculate further. So we speculated further and got madder.

Ever since CNN's Peter Arnett hit the screens minutes after the cruise missiles hit Baghdad in 1991 we have had instant access to pictures and - too often - delayed access to intelligence.

Media mythologies are created in seconds and new journalistic orthodoxies are constructed every day. Internet freelancers contribute by spreading absurd conspiracy theories about Mossad, about "faked" CNN pictures (it is astonishing the rubbish that some "intelligent" people will permit themselves to believe) and almost anything you can think of.

There is a whole industry out there devoted to (forgive me) scaring us all shitless.

The anthrax scare has paralysed the US postal system, but is almost certainly the work of a uni-powderer. As indeed the most impressive expert on the subject said - on day one - that it was. Anthrax jitters have led to some staff at the BBC's World Service being hosed down naked in a central London carpark. And then they have the cheek to suggest that the Yanks are all a bit scaredy-cat. I'm told that the corporation's post is now all vetted - well, you don't get that at the robust Independent.

Then there was the fortnight of the invincible Taleban, now being succeeded by the equally improbable amazing collapsing Taleban.

From 10-year war to "over by Christmas" in just two orthodoxies. Pakistan is about to implode. Whoops, it didn't. Indonesia will go up in flames. Not yet. Hundreds of British Muslims are fighting in Afghanistan, but we can find only one loud-mouth Mancunian in downtown Quetta.

This relentless media competition, that sends reporters over the Afghan border on donkeys, is driving us insane. We have some amazingly brave journalists in Afghanistan, but by God some of them don't half grandstand.

Of course some of us have learned things we had to know. We have found out about the Taleban, the drought and what happened to the Afghans the West abandoned in 1989. We know a lot more about Islam and its complexities (though we still know less than we think). We see the world as an interdependent place if we never did before. And we hope that our leaders have learned lessons, too.

But here the picture is unclear. They say that George Bush has discovered the limits of unilateralism and the need for cooperation. I hope that's true, since no decent world order can be built without his fabulous, infuriating nation. At home in the US, however, critics are appearing who support the war but believe that Mr Bush is failing to understand its domestic meaning.

Robert Reich, writing in the New York Times, revealed that 439,000 private-sector jobs had been lost in October alone. "Minority workers, with a disproportionate share of low-wage service jobs, have been especially hard hit," wrote Reich. "Unemployment among blacks rose to 9.7 per cent last month, a full percentage point higher than in September and up 2.3 points from a year ago. Unemployment among Hispanics is 2.2 percentage points higher than it was last year at this time."

And what has the Bush Administration done? Along with the House Republicans, put together a $200 billion "stimulus" package composed of tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Some $671 million will go to General Electric and $1.4 billion to IBM.

None of this, as has been pointed out in the US, will benefit firefighters, police officers or the citizens of Rockaway Beach. Solidarity has been demanded of the average American, but solidarity has not been shown with the average American.

We must do better than this. The New York Times' quote of the day yesterday came from a 19-year-old man who had just joined the forces. "When something like September 11th happens," said Kirk Evans, "you feel helpless. I had to fix that."

I am beginning to feel the same. We must shut our collective eyes. Take a deep breath. Turn off the television and shut out the noise. Pause. Think. Then talk seriously about how to order things in a fairer, more rational way. Let's break the news ourselves. And God save us from dramatic pictures. Enough already.

- INDEPENDENT