Metropol

Oh dear lord, Sky news are really going for it today. Kay Burley tries to sound all sincere but yet she still manages to sound false.

What were you doing when you heard the news of the attacks on the WTC?

I was at work and heard it on Newsbeat. I went home for lunch to catch the news. I was absouletly speechless, and then the first tower collapsed. I never made it back to work that day. I was glued to the news for the rest of the day in a kind of morbid fascination and shock.

I don't remember much interesting happening on the 9th of November that year. So I don't know where I was.

marksi wrote:I don't remember much interesting happening on the 9th of November that year.

Well said!

I still reckon Bliar organised the London bombings on July 7th, just so there'd be no argument over which way round the date was written.

It was gripping television on the day.

I'm sick to death of hearing about it though - how soon will the day become known as "whine-eleven"?

Of course, they don't want us to forget about it. It is a useful tool for bombing the brains out of Muslim children.

I'm a little miffed by this point because if I'm not mistaken, it's getting more airtime on the news channels than things like the marking of the end of WWII. Sky are really overdoing it.

I almost forgot about the anniversary of September the 11th but I do agree that 9/11 can be misleading. When I first saw that abbreviation I thought they were IQ/football results from an American event.

When the disaster first happened I was in school at the time and someone I knew said a plane crashed into the twin towers. After school my Dad was watching the plane on the news crashing into the buildings and making black smoke.

It was only a few months after that I realised the Simpsons episode where Homer goes to New York was banned because it obviously featured the twin towers before being shown on Sky One again 4 years later.

Daniel B wrote:It was only a few months after that I realised the Simpsons episode where Homer goes to New York was banned because it obviously featured the twin towers before being shown on Sky One again 4 years later.

And in the end, that's the real tragedy here.

Sput wrote:

Daniel B wrote:It was only a few months after that I realised the Simpsons episode where Homer goes to New York was banned because it obviously featured the twin towers before being shown on Sky One again 4 years later.

And in the end, that's the real tragedy here.

ROFL. Very dry, Sputty.

I was at a trade show at Earls Court. When a colleague said a plane had hit the tower, I assumed he meant a *small* jet that rich people own. I couldn't work out why he was so visibly shaken.

Hundreds of people moved towards a small glass-sided room at the entrance of the exhibition hall to watch it on a plasma screen showing Sky News. It was crammed tight with people and there was no way I could see. In a fit of pique, I gave up and went back to our 'stand' and attempted to get back to work.

Some people carried on as normal (having come a long way to do some important business), whilst others were distressed and shaken. There were many, many Americans at this show, and their expressions ranged from dumbstruck to actually wailing. Some may have passed out - I saw medics passing by at one point.

We carried on til the show closed at 6, and only then did I actually start to get to grips with what had happened, and how dreadful it was. I was due to fly home the next morning, but instead I hopped a lift with one of the bosses and came up to Edinburgh by car.

I've never understood why the British media decides, on our behalf, that the blood of an American is so much more valuable than that of an Iraqi, or a Chinaman or a Russian.

The British and US forces have killed ten times as many innocent civilians in Iraq than the number who died on 9/11. But we're not bombarded with stories of personal misery from Iraq, we don't get to see the faces of the orphaned children with missing limbs, or pictures of coalition bombs landing on populated buildings (even though the media do have access to these pictures).

Putting wars aside, the air crash in Kentucky a fortnight ago received massive coverage from the BBC and Sky. At one point there was blanket coverage of the unfolding events for 2 hours solid on Sky News. About 50 people died in the Kentucky crash. Yet a week before that, a Russian passenger plane crashed in Ukraine, killing 170. It only got a fraction of the news coverage - just a cursory 2 minute report and none of the "Breaking News" hysteria.

It always reminds me of the classic sketch on Not The Nine O'Clock News, when the newsreader says: "Two Britons were killed when a plane crashed today. The other victims, in order of importance, were 4 Americans, 10 French, 17 Germans and 203 Africans."

That sketch is such an devastatingly accurate observation on how our media treats loss of life on the grounds of nationality. They really do have a ratio system in place which determines the importance of human life in news terms. It's something along the lines of: 1 Briton = 5 Americans = 20 Russians = 50 Arabs = 300 Africans = 1000 Chinese.

The only difference being they never utter the magic words "in order of importance", but the sentiment is always there.

I can understand a British broadcaster placing extra emphasis on the life of a Briton; that seems only logical. But why should Americans matter so bloody much to us?

Indeed. Remember this story?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle ... 678352.stm

Around 1400 people died. But they were Egyptian, so the Six O'Clock News led the bulletin that day with a *proposed* change to the children's immunisation programme.