September 11 attacks | 9/11 in the media: Description of the indescribable

The world was still in order back then: Peter Kloeppel (left) as an RTL correspondent in New York in 1992. Photo: imago/teutopress It is well known that everyone, absolutely every citizen of the world, knows exactly where he/she/it was on the afternoon of September 11, 2001 - that is how deeply the worst terrorist attack of our time has been engraved in the collective memory. While the locations of the media's first encounter with the burning Twin Towers in New York vary from the assembly line to the train compartment to the hospital bed, what everyone stared at from now on for hours, even days, is almost identical: screens of every size, shape and color.

When RTL became the first German station to interrupt its program 25 years ago at 3:09 p.m., half the world was glued to the television. “Apparently there has been an attack on the Word Trade Center (WTC),” a young news anchor named Peter Kloeppel calmly reports. Before that, however, he politely apologizes for interrupting a program whose title, in retrospect, sounds downright satirical: “The Weakest Flies.” Sonja Zietlow's game show is soon history. “9/11,” on the other hand, becomes the catchphrase of an ongoing era and its equally unprecedented reporting.

"Terrorism does not only depend on the number of dead or injured, but also on the length of the special programs and the size of the headlines."

Only since January 16, 1991, when US reporters broadcast George Bush's "Operation Desert Storm," which attacked Saddam Hussein's Iraq, live and in neon green night vision equipment around the entire globe, has the start of an armed conflict been broadcast in real time. All media worldwide, unfiltered and without gaps, are dealing persistently with the attack and its consequences. And because millions upon millions of people in this country are following him in public, communications scientist Stephan Weichert speaks of the “public viewing” of a “live broadcast Armageddon.”

The fact that there are initially hardly any running pictures of this revelation does not stop Kloeppel's colleagues from constantly showing the same ones. Although there were no smartphones in 2001, over the next four or five days Ground Zero would become the most filmed, most recorded, most photographed crime scene in world history. Initially, however, there was a glaring lack of news material. The RTL presenter is still on the air for seven hours and allows something unheard of to happen: When the towers collapse, he struggles with tears - similar to "Tagesthemen" presenter Ulrich Wickert the following evening.

Despite this emotional state, constantly maintaining a professional distance: This journalistic masterpiece soon brought the former US correspondent the Grimme Prize and his ill-reputed employer (almost even more valuable for RTL) a touch of public service respectability. Anyone who looks at live images on YouTube from that time is not only irritated by the young faces of Thomas Kausch or Steffen Seibert, but also by how composed and yet human they remain.

"We don't know what the cause of this accident or this attack was," says ZDF reporter Claus Kleber in front of the smoking WTC in a first telephone call from New York. In the face of a purgatory of almost biblical proportions, this is a sentence straight out of a journalistic textbook. So the exact opposite of what Springer-Verlag makes of it. “Great God, help us!” begs the “Bild” newspaper on a half-page spread the next day, joining the chorus of religiously awakened chroniclers.

The British magazine "Daily Mail", for example, recognizes in the thick smoke of the burning city nothing less than an "apocalypse", which the "Spiegel" dims to a "terrorist attack", but bathes its cover in apocalyptic black. A decade and a half before the algorithms of the digital apocalypse almost exclusively ennoble destructive energies with attention, the indescribable is described here in an astonishingly matter-of-fact way in many places.

“Terrorists hijack 4 planes, destroy World Trade Center, hit Pentagon,” headlines the state-sponsored “Washington Post” in the tone of an official announcement and subtly calculates: “Hundreds dead.” An understatement to which the local “Times” added the addition “Day of Terror”. Germany's quality press also sounds so sober on page 1. "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and "FAZ", for example, announce in rare unity an "attack on America", which the "Taz" declares as the "end of invulnerability", which, according to "Neues Deutschland", correctly estimated, resulted in "thousands of deaths".

Even Kai Diekmann, head of “Bild” responsible for hatred and agitation, commented comparatively discreetly on September 12th: “Nothing will be the same again.” This also applies to reporting that shows far too little skepticism towards George Bush's warlike, sometimes illegal retaliation policy in the coming months. At the same time, however, the event causes journalistic vigilance. The destructive consequences of Al-Qaeda, writes Stefan Weichert on the tenth anniversary in “Stern,” have “raised the expectability of drastic events to a maximum.”

The speed with which the Hamburg terrorist cell around Mohammed Atta was identified as the mastermind 25 years ago is still very impressive today. However, since the state of emergency became the norm, well-staffed editorial teams are less likely to be surprised by it - and act more responsibly. Since 9/11, renowned terrorism researcher Julia Ebner said on Deutschlandfunk in 2021, at least serious media have shifted their focus from the perpetrators to the victims - in order not to glorify the former and to respect the latter.

But there is one fact that no amount of professional ethics can change: terrorism, says investigative journalist Georg Mascolo, "does not depend solely on the number of dead or injured, but also on the length of the special programs and the size of the headlines." In this respect, Nine Eleven was "the perfect terrorist attack." Especially since, from the point of view of the then permanent reporter Elmar Theveßen from ZDF, he managed to draw everyone's attention to himself - that is, away from the other danger to life, limb and democracy.

"Because many editorial teams focused on Islamism, right-wing extremism was neglected," complains today's US correspondent. "You can see the consequences in the NSU's series of murders." Seen in this way, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not only directly responsible for 2,996 deaths, but also indirectly for the rise of Trump, Orbán and the AfD.

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