It was with 9/11 that I came to fully appreciate and embrace NPR's irreplaceability as a sanity preserver, its unique virtues as first responder on the burning scene.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As much as I disagreed with every second of 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' the fact that it is out made me jump for joy.
Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.
There are terrible, terrible memories of September 11th, things that I saw, people that I lost, the devastation, the identification of bodies. I mean, all these memories come back to you at different times. And then the other side of it this tremendous response with the firefighters and the police officers saving people, the rescue workers.
The DC 9/11: Time of Crisis film was hard to get the part; I had to audition three times. It was very serious and very sobering. We studied and tried to re-create all the stuff that we all saw that day.
The critical importance of honest journalism and a free flowing, respectful national conversation needs to be had in our country. But it is being buried as collateral damage in a war whose battles include political correctness and ideological orthodoxy.
I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, 'Well, I've had it with humanity.' But I was wrong.
September 11 awoke us to the threat of terrorism. It was forever bookmarked in our history as the day when life as Americans knew it, changed forever.
I have been an unabashed fan of NPR for many years, and have stolen untold excellent ideas from its programming.
But with 9/11, we found that people tended to come back to the networks and the people who had been our core viewers in the past came back and they have stayed with us.
My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.