The last issue of The Skyline View was distributed around campus on September 11, the seventh anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center. There was no front-page, above-the-fold treatment. All to be found inside the issue was a short, student-reaction article on the tragedy halfway through the issue.
A poll was conducted on The Skyline View website the same day, asking readers whether or not they felt that the lack of 9/11 coverage was disrespectful. A small handful of people said no. 224 people said yes.
There is speculation that somebody messed with the poll. There is no security on the website to prohibit one person from voting over and over again as many times as they’d like. Still, if that was the case, someone felt strongly enough to do so, and so the issue must be addressed.
Last issue’s editorial was meant to serve as an explanation for the lack of coverage on the 9/11 anniversary, but it may not have been enough. The majority of our staff felt that devoting too much of our issue to 9/11 was unnecessary. Although coverage was brief, it was still present. We didn’t want to ignore the tragedy, but we didn’t want to overdo it either.
It would be wrong to assume that our staff is a group of monsters who seek to blot out the remembrance of an American tragedy, heartless animals who wish to desecrate the names of those we lost and those whose lives will never be the same. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Rewind to the spring of 2002 in New York City, only six months after the 9/11 attacks. A narrow wooden ramp had been constructed a few hundred yards away from Ground Zero, a divided walkway with only enough space for foot traffic in both directions, and a viewing platform at the top of the ramp with space for only a handful of people to look down at the site where the Twin Towers once stood. But they couldn’t look long; there was a line behind them extending beyond the foot of the ramp and around the corner.
Next to the ramp stood an old church with an iron fence around its property. The fence was covered from end to end with homemade posters and flowers and candles and American flags, tributes to those who were lost during the tragedy. People stood around the fence, holding each other, weeping, looking at photographs of the countless faces of deceased Americans.
I was there. I stood at the top of that ramp and looked down at the giant hole that was left in the ground. I stood there and watched firemen discover a body deep in the rubble. All workers stopped for a moment of silence while holding their helmets at their hearts, faces to the ground.
That image will never leave my brain, and the fact that bodies were still being pulled from the wreckage six months later (and beyond that) will haunt me forever.
A lot of people have similar, if not more tragic, memories. Other members of this staff have their own stories and accounts of things they saw and emotions they felt at the time and still feel to this day. It’s important to relive memories such as these, no matter how painful they may be.
However, I don’t believe it was disrespectful of us to exclude a massive 9/11 tribute from our last issue. As a newspaper, we had to make the decision to focus our issue on stories that were more current and campus related, as we are only a bi-weekly paper and only put out about 8 issues a semester. But we do apologize to those who voiced their feelings of disrespect on our poll, whether it was actually 200 different people or just one or two passionate Americans.
