Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 21/01) - It happened on live television, a terrorist attack. As fast as events unfolded, images were sent around the world.

Ryan Chenkie and Randi O'Brien took in the images of the terrorist attacks in America last week. They and their friends say these images will always stay with them. - Michele LeTourneau/NNSL photo

"I think that's probably the first time that kind of thing has happened," says CBC Northbeat/Igalaaq senior producer Keith MacNeill.

"There's cameras everywhere, you can send pictures over phone lines, you can send pictures over the Internet, there's satellite communications everywhere."

Arnold Krause, who teaches media studies at Sir John Franklin high school, agrees. The images are coming from people everywhere, not just professionals, he says.

"A professional usually goes to something that is planned. The disasters that we see like the planes crashing into the ocean and planes hitting towers are the unexpected. The Rodney King beating is another example. Now anybody with a handycam is becoming somebody that provides information for everybody else," says Krause.

Reporters faltered and broke down on the screen, changing the nature of news and removing the objective distance.

"Most of the time, 99 per cent of the time, when you see a newsperson on TV, whatever the story is, they've had a chance to chew on it for a while and internalize it and get used to whatever might be there that may be shocking and horrifying," explains MacNeill.

"In this kind of case you don't because so much of what was happening was live. And so much of the reporting was happening live. That reflects the state of the technology today. I remember seeing some stuff on CNN that was videophones, where people were actually sending pictures through a telephone line. Three, four, five years ago that technology didn't exist."

MacNeill also says that, unlike the Gulf War where the media coverage was orchestrated by the military, the coverage quickly took place without obstruction.

"This was a completely different thing, where if anyone had wanted to shut down or control the way it was reported, there was absolutely no way they could have done it. People were finding stuff out then turning to the camera and saying this is what I just found out."

Linda Millar, director of education for Concerned Children's Advertisers based in Ottawa, agrees.

"I think this is a case where they're reporting and they don't have a lot of time for editing. A lot of what we're seeing is raw footage," she says.

She's worried about the impact of these images on young people.

"What we're seeing are the real images of devastation, destruction, the faces of anger and the faces of war, and the officials talking war and all those kinds of things that are frightening to children. And the distorted faces of the people who are grieving. The piles of rubble. All those things that are so devastating," says Millar.

And these images, so similar to those seen in films and video games over and over again, are very real.

"It's not something where we can just say to the kids, 'You know what? That was just put together so that it could make you feel uncomfortable, or it could frighten you or it was a good story.' This time we look at it and say, 'You know what? That's real. That is happening. That did happen.' This is what's so frightening for the kids."

In Krause's media class students asked themselves the question: Would they have been affected as deeply had they merely heard a reporter tell of it?

"The kids said absolutely not, there's no way. The images were worth way more than the words. The kids were saying when they first heard it on the way to school, friends were telling them and it was all hearsay.

"Until you actually see it, it's not reality. But they said the minute they saw it on the TVs, the plane actually hitting, they knew that this was really happening."

A plane crashing into the World Trade Center, that's the first image that centred the consciousness of students Randi O'Brien, Ryan Chenkie, Amber Jeanotte and Brendan Matthews.

"I got up out of bed and went downstairs, and my dad had the TV on. It actually froze on one of the towers. I really didn't think anything of it. But when I got to school, oh my God, that's what was frozen on TV," says O'Brien.

"Oh my God, all those people," was her first thought. She spent the rest of the day, with the rest of the school, watching the events on television.

Chenkie heard about it on the bus on the way to school. Like O'Brien, he didn't think much of it.

"I got to school and turned on the TV, and I saw pictures of the plane going into the building. At the beginning they didn't have a really good shot of it, but as the day went on they got a lot more angles of it from people videotaping it. I remember one, it was from behind the plane, as the plane went into the building."

Chenkie says he didn't react with fear until the next day, when what he had seen sunk in. And when he saw his own father frightened.

"I've never seen him so shocked. When I saw my dad scared it scared me even more."

"I didn't believe it," says Jeanotte of what she saw. "I couldn't believe it. I couldn't see someone being able to do something like that."

Matthews says he thought it was either an old newscast or something fake, anything for it not to be real.

Will they forget what they saw? Matthews lowers his eyes, quietly mouths the word no, and shakes his head. His friends echo the fact that they will never forget.

"It's one of the most horrific images I've ever seen," says Chenkie.