PressEthic

At 5.30pm today a press conference was held by Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Ray Kelly of the NYPD and Assistant Director Mark Mershon of the FBI to reveal that a “specific threat” had been made to the New York subway system.

It was stated at the press conference that this information had been withheld from the media for two days. In this time a military operation was launched in Baghdad, based on the same intelligence that warned of the threat to the New York subway system.

The CNN coverage of this press conference created an atmosphere of tension, to the point of sensationalism. While the Mayor said the current threat was minimal and he intended on using the subway tonight and tomorrow morning, the visual images used by CNN mongered fear.

Firstly live images were broadcast from helicopter during the press conference. CNN’s cameras monitored the subway, as if any moment terrorists might strike. The live images connoted that the threat was imminent, even though it had been in existence for two days.

Furthermore images of policemen at the Subway stations, not only depicted the heightened security measures, but again created the impression that threat was immediate.

Finally during the conference live images of the Empire State Building were shown. What does the Empire State Building have to do with a threat to the subway? I can only guess that these images were an allusion to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The reminder of these previous terrorist attacks heightened fear in an audience already extremely sensitive to terrorist action.

The urgency of the CNN coverage almost created the impression that a terrorist attack had occurred. The ‘breaking news’ and ‘live’ aspects of the coverage made it seem that something was about to unfold any second. In reality nothing had occurred, except a press conference.