Columns:: ‘A mediated version of horror’

since 12/15/98

Columns::October 15, 2001

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‘A mediated version of horror’

By Horace Newcomb

I remember the way the air felt against my skin the day John Kennedy was killed, the anguish following the death of Robert Kennedy, the anger and alarm erupting when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. On the night John Lennon was shot I spoke to my children, then young, of the hope that their lives would not be so filled with loss. Recent events have wrecked my hope.
As I spoke to them I looked over their heads at the television set where news of Lennon’s death was being announced. In many ways television still weaves the tapestry of these events in my memory and, I would venture, the collective memory so many share.
Now my concerns turn to the tasks awaiting the board of the Peabody Awards program, a group which must deal with media responses to Sept. 11 at their next meetings. Since joining the Peabody program I have often recalled my own term as a member of that board. Our work was characterized by grand, tough discussions of the place and power of media in contemporary experience. And in almost every year some terrible event came before us in electronic form. In darkened studios we talked, argued, debated--struggling to separate necessity from exploitation, opportunism from information. Nothing in those years matches what we viewed on Sept. 11 and in the days since.

Horace Newcomb

Alerted to the initial events, our office staff gathered around a television monitor--and witnessed the second crash as it occurred. Throughout that day and days following, the set stayed on. Like others, we needed it. Again, a mediated version of horror had become a touchstone--informing, terrifying, comforting, distracting. The event has become another marker in a shared past. But the event itself must also be marked, and by more than quick emotion or eerie resemblance to Hollywood constructions.
In the coming months the Peabody board and the faculty-student selection committees will struggle again while reviewing submissions related to the attack, examples that will come from major and minor organizations. The board will proceed as it always has, deliberately, with a sense of responsibility not only to viewers, but to the media industries themselves. The Peabody Awards hold those industries to high standards; indeed, help set them. Each year “excellence,” the fundamental characteristic of the awards, is defined in varying ways, acknowledging the richness of electronic media. This year may again modify that definition. Or the board may decide that the media industries have, after all, done essentially what they are always supposed to do.
We, too, will do what we are supposed to do. We will do it with the yet unspoiled hope that even--especially--in the face of agony and danger electronic media, among the central social and cultural institutions assisting us in times of need, can truly rise to the occasion. We will continue to believe they have the capacity to forge memories that honor those who are lost, and the will to enhance rather than diminish our collective experience as citizens.

Horace Newcomb is Lambdin Kay Distinguished Professor for the Peabody Awards and director of the awards program.

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