At 9:50 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a crowd of New Yorkers stared up in shock as the 110-story south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. Photograph by Patrick Witty

I want to start by discussing how the media covered the events of September 11 and how the public perceived those events through the eyes of the media. Many people watched at least some of the events of 9/11 live on television. Others saw the many replays broadcast in the hours and days thereafter. However we watched what happened on that day in New York and Washington, the images on the screen were not terribly new. Most of us had seen these images before. We had seen terrorists attacking a skyscraper. We had seen a skyscraper engulfed in flames. We had seen a plane crashing into a building. We had seen a federal building in Washington blown to pieces. We had seen Manhattan under siege. We had seen a nuclear type of cityscape. We had seen all of these images in various disaster movies over the past few years.

On September 11, many people were not certain whether they were watching reality or a disaster movie.

John Updike, the novelist, watched the destruction of the World Trade Center from his tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn. He said, "The destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception." Many people who joined the newscasts in progress thought they were watching a promotional clip for one of the many disaster movies scheduled to be released later in the fall.