From today's New York Daily News...

"Fox News chief Roger Ailes says in David Friend's new 9/11 book, Watching the World Change that 'When the end of the world comes, we'll be able to cover it live until the last camera goes out.' But who'll be around to to check the Nielsens?"

I detailed this passage, in full, in my October 4 entry:

For a section on 9/11’s impact on television, I interviewed Roger Ailes, head of FOX News, which celebrates its 10th anniversary today. What was the significance, I asked him, of two billion people being able to watch the same thing at the same time on September 11? His response was somewhat chilling. The passage:

“There were deeper and more disturbing repercussions, geopolitically and, to many, spiritually [about so many people watching the events simultaneously]. ‘The implications from a television standpoint,’ says Roger Ailes, chairman of FOX News and FOX Television Stations, ‘are simply that: When the end of the world comes, we’ll be able to cover it live until the last camera goes out. I believe I mean it literally. If you can witness something like [9/11] by two billion people, live, then there’s nothing that can’t be covered. And if we get into a world war, with nuclear weapons, I assume we’ll be covering it live.’

“Ailes, recognizing TV’s corporeal-world role, as it were, at the right hand of omniscience, speaks with a preacher’s reassurance and without an iota of irony when pondering the ultimate news story – a real-time Apocalypse Now: ‘It’s horrifying to think about. But maybe God set it up that way. You can either figure out how to live in freedom…and hope, or you can watch yourselves burn to death. Nine-eleven is a warning shot that says: Look, this can go either way. It’s your choice, folks.”

The religious implications of his statements were profound. Many Americans (I would go so far as to say a not insignificant portion of FOX News’s viewership) believe that the current battle against Islamist extremism and the wider conflict in Middle East somehow presage the coming of the End Times, when a global Savior will emerge out of the apocalyptic violence.

Not quite believing my ears, I was careful to ask him if he was discussing real-time coverage of a nuclear war in a figurative or literal way. Did he really mean that in the worst of worst-case scenarios, we’d be watching the End, live, on television? His response: “I believe I mean it literally.”

Today Editor & Publisher ran a piece about the connections between Clint Eastwood's new feature, Flags of Our Fathers (based on Joe Rosenthal's iconic Iwo Jima photo, from World War II), and my book's last chapter, which contains the definitive account of the 9/11 flag-raising photo, shot by Thomas Franklin, of the Bergen Record. CLICK HERE to read the piece.

Also note the piece in today's Columbia (University) Spectator on last night's panel on photojournalism in a post-9/11 age.

More reactions to Watching the World Change...

From Matt McCue, New York City:

I was born on 9/11/82 in Iowa, so for the past five years that day has always been an interesting one for me. Since it happened I've had no desire to jump into the deep end of stories from the event that will probably define my generation. However, your book offers a jumping off point and I again, thank you for it.

From Kelly McMasters, New York City:

My husband [took] photographs … that morning from the windows of his Williamsburg painting studio--he caught the entire morning on film from just after the first crash to the clouds of smoke after the last implosion. I was also at the WTC that morning, and had a very difficult time over the past years finding my experience--seeing the jumpers--within the images available in the press. I wanted to share with you an essay I wrote recently about this.
Thank you again for the important work you are doing.

Library Journal writes:
[Starred review] "Friend...presents intensely personal and poignant stories of the photographers who captured these often harrowing images.... This is an imporant book. It will be an asset to any library collection."

And Booklist weighs in:
"Compelling...demonstrat[ing] power and pathos."

This month marks another watershed in the ubiquity of the camera in modern life.

First off, Google acquired YouTube (and its 100 million daily "video views") for a tidy $1.7 billion. Theirs was a marriage of the Internet Search gold standard with the new darling of visual dross, a juggernaut that has built its business model on swiping thousands upon thousands of videos from legitimate content providers and disseminating them for bupkes. YouTube's appealing twenty-something C.E.O.s, Chad Hurley and Steve Chin, promptly posted a meta-PR video on their site, both celebrating their windfall and mocking their impulse to hype it. (Astute as ever, cultural observer David Hajdu wrote about the acquisition in yesterday's Times, noting that the deal was consummated on the 50th anniversary of the advent of videotape, in 1956.)

So ever present are cameras in urban society that it was revealed this week that:

(1) a closed-circuit security camera, in the hours before the murder, may have actually taped the killer of the crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the 48-year-old critic of the Kremlin, who was shot in her Moscow apartment. (Politkovskaya had purportedly amassed videotapes showing evidence of torture and kidnappings in Chechnya.)

(2) a Coast Guard camera may have actually taped the moment of impact of last week's collision of a small plane with a residential Manhattan highrise, an accident in which Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle died. (Last Monday, over dinner at Elaine's, I made a bet with photographer Jonathan Becker that within the week a videotape of the actual crash would come to light due to the fact that so many cameras were always trained on the various stretches of the city.)

And this Friday, two important works will debut, each committed to the power of the still photograph. October 20 marks the opening of Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005. The show's companion book, from Random House, is a stunning achievement. (I have not seen the exhibition.) The book's juxtaposition of Public Image (celebrity iconography for magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue) with pictures from the photographer's Private Life--showing illness, death, family gatherings, nudity, reflective moments, baby pictures--serves to capture the artist in the parallel processes of expressing (and perhaps even coming to terms with) the most intimate stages of her life while simultaneously crafting her own image (by choosing to make public certain private and unbearably painful moments). It is, simply, one of the most compelling photography books of this generation. [NOTE: I'm having a tough time linking to the Random House site. Sorry there's no link.]

Also on Friday, Clint Eastwood's film Flags of Our Fathers will premiere--an entire motion picture based on a single image snared during 1/400th of a second 61 years ago: Joe Rosenthal's iconic shot of six men raising the American flag on Iwo Jima during one of the final battles of World War II. (Watching the World Change discusses the many parallels between this image and its modern-day equivalent: the three firemen lofting the colors on September 11.)

Talk about the acceleration of 24/7 news since September 11. On that day, we were not yet addicted to wi-fi or to perpetually checking our handheld devices for news updates. As yet, there were no picture phones in existence; today, there are an estimated 50 million camera-equipped cell phones in the U.S. (My friend, French journalist Alain Genestar, notes that if 9/11 had happened in 2006, some of the occupants of the twin towers would have photographed the unfolding events inside the buildings and then posted them on the Internet for all of us to see in relatively "real time.")

Now comes word (reported by Lost Remote and Jeff Jarvis, at Buzzmachine.com) that a Fox News photographer used his pocket Treo to broadcast live from the scene of last week's small plane crash on New York's Upper East Side. As much as we associate CNN with breaking news coverage, and Fox with televised bombast, it was the local Fox affiliate Fox-5 (WNYW), not CNN, that was the first to report the attacks of 9/11. (See page 25 of Watching the World Change.)

Spoke with Carmen Taylor, my gregarious host of the Arkansas leg of this ongoing book tour.

On 9/11, Carmen, a tourist on her first trip to New York City, was waiting in line to board the State Island Ferry for a tour of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. A couple standing in front of her mentioned that their nephew worked in the north Trade Center tower. "Just as she points up there," Carmen recalled, the upper floors of the building seemed to erupt in light and smoke "like sparklers." The first plane, which they could not see because of their position south of the buildings, had just collided with the north tower. "We thought it was an internal explosion, [as if] a Xerox machine went off or something. None of the people in my group thought [it was] anything [serious]."

To occupy her time and her mind while the other tourists spoke among themselves, Carmen took out her digital camera and focused on the buildings around her. Soon, she spotted a plane, which she took to be some kind of military aircraft. She turned her lens toward it and caught the plane at the very instant it entered the south tower.

"Nobody's ever going to believe this," she kept repeating under her breath. Immediately, she felt she had shot something historic and that she needed to share her sequence of images with friends back home in Arkansas. So she approached people in the street, hoping to find someone who might help her upload her photos onto the Web. A complete stranger, Doug Haluza, offered her his office computer. "We were lucky enough to get a phone and an Internet conection," she recalled. Within 15 to 20 minutes of the second plane's attack, she e-mailed her series of images--the plane's approach, the plane suspended a split-second before impact, the resulting fireball--to her favorite morning television program, "40/29" on KHOG-TV, the local ABC/Hearst affiliate near her home in northwest Arkansas.

The news team at KHOG, after asking Carmen numerous questions to confirm the authenticity of the photographs, decided to air her tail-view shot of the aircraft, left wing cocked skyward, the instant before it disappeared into the south tower's facade. Throughout the day, requests from media organizations and wire services would come in from across the country--to the TV station, to her New York hotel room, to her home phone in Arkansas, where her husband, Lynn handled the inquiries. Many of the callers wanted exclusive rights to publish or to "represent" Carmen's pictures. "We're just down-home rural people," he averred. After hours of fielding calls, Lynn hired an attorney to assess the offers and the rights issues. He deferred to his wife, respecting her admonition: "Just don't profit off this."

After Carmen answered what she described as overly "pushy" calls from one newsweekly and one upstart picture agency, she chose to partner with the Associated Press, which promised to syndicate her work in a dignified manner. AP sealed the deal by dispatching a man on a bicycle who, she remembered, arrived at her hotel and asked her to scrawl out her consent, in long-hand, on a stray piece of paper.

Carmen's image would appear on television and on Web sites, and in newspapers and magazines around the world. Over the next two or three years, she would visit Arkansas schools and stand before civic groups, showing her photos and explaining what she had witnessed. But she would soon become disgruntled when listeners seemed disinterested in the events of 9/11. New York, al-Qaeda, urban terror attacks--these topics seemed irrelevant to many of her neighbors living relatively secure lives on the Oklahoma border. "I've spoken to a 20-year-old recently," she noted, "who said, 'What is Ground Zero?'" In response to attitudes like these, she decided to organize and curate an exhibition of pictures about September 11 and its aftermath by two dozen amateur and professional photgraphers. Her show, "Five Years From Ground Zero," opened last month at the University of Arkansas in her hometown of Fort Smith.

Carmen Taylor is now hoping to raise funds to travel the exhibition to other learning institutions in smaller towns so as to inform less-informed Americans about what she calls "the truth of the events."

On Thursday Vanity Fair organized a lively and generous gathering for the book at New York's International Center of Photography (ICP). The magazine's new publisher, Edward Menicheschi, graciously hosted. Editor Graydon Carter was on hand to greet fleets of photographers (too numerous to mention) and journalists (Sebastian Junger and Clyde Haberman, Time Inc.'s Jim Kelly and Paris Match's new editor Olivier Royant, among them) and artists such as Robert Longo and Francios-Marie Banier. Two of my mentors met -- novelist Robert Stone and photographer Harry Benson -- before being introduced to Internet columnists Rachel Sklar (of Slate) and Jessica Coen (newly moving from Gawker to vanityfair.com). And attorney-cum-author Scott Turow, a family friend for decades, showed up straight from a taping of Celebrity Jeopardy. (Turow's opponents: actress Susan Lucci and bandleader Paul Schaeffer.) Cafe Society on the March!

For me, the most stirring part of the evening, apart from the tremendous crush of friends, colleagues, and family, came while looking across the museum's galleries to see no less than 15 photographers who had courageously photographed on the morning of September 11, many in the shadow of the World Trade Center and several surviving the collapse of one or both towers, cameras in hand and lives intact.

Also at the ICP were two dozen people who, despite having had painfully intimate connections to the attacks -- in some cases having lost close relatives -- nonetheless agreed to be interviewed for the book and entrusted me with their stories. (Readers of the book would be familiar with five in attendance who lost their spouses on September 11: Wendy Doremus, Monica Iken, Robbie Morrell, Nikki Stern, and Lisa Palazzo. The mother and sister of firefighter Tommy Foley were also on hand.)

Many thanks to Edward and Graydon, along with Audra Asencio, Phil Block, Jessica Flint, Elizabeth Garriga, Marisa Giordano, Patrick McMullan (and Neil), Jeff Seroy, Sarita Varma, and the incomparable teams from Vanity Fair, the ICP, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

To view images of the event, please visit PatrickMcMullan.com (along with a second batch also posted on that site).

On Friday, at a book-signing at the Book Stall in Winnetka, Illinois (near my childhood hometown of Highland Park), the bold-faced names were Mrs. Ireland (my third-grade homeroom teacher), Mr. Butts (my eighth-grade math teacher), and Rita Turow (Scott's mother -- and, it so happens, my Aunt Muriel's best friend). Granted, there were also many old, dear friends and family members providing a rousing, warm reception. The festivities continued into the night at several bars in Highwood, including Bertucci's, a nightclub-poolhall-music venue and a bowling alley.

Hats off to Ira Sapir, Mike Fisher, Julie Roberts, Sue and Chadd Berkun, and the HPHS gang.

Below, old friends at Thursday's ICP event: yours truly, Scott Turow, and my wife, Nancy Paulsen.

Late yesterday, the Huffington Post put up a generous piece about the book and the blog. Most notably, they focused on one controversial passage (page 90-91) that has escaped others’ attention. For a section on 9/11’s impact on television, I interviewed Roger Ailes, head of FOX News, which celebrates its 10th anniversary today. What was the significance, I asked him, of two billion people being able to watch the same thing at the same time on September 11? His response was somewhat chilling. The passage:

“There were deeper and more disturbing repercussions, geopolitically and, to many, spiritually [about so many people watching the events simultaneously]. ‘The implications from a television standpoint,’ says Roger Ailes, chairman of FOX News and FOX Television Stations, ‘are simply that: When the end of the world comes, we’ll be able to cover it live until the last camera goes out. I believe I mean it literally. If you can witness something like [9/11] by two billion people, live, then there’s nothing that can’t be covered. And if we get into a world war, with nuclear weapons, I assume we’ll be covering it live.’

“Ailes, recognizing TV’s corporeal-world role, as it were, at the right hand of omniscience, speaks with a preacher’s reassurance and without an iota of irony when pondering the ultimate news story – a real-time Apocalypse Now: ‘It’s horrifying to think about. But maybe God set it up that way. You can either figure out how to live in freedom…and hope, or you can watch yourselves burn to death. Nine-eleven is a warning shot that says: Look, this can go either way. It’s your choice, folks.”

The religious implications of his statements were profound. Many Americans (I would go so far as to say a not insignificant portion of FOX News’s viewership) believe that the current battle against Islamist extremism and the wider conflict in Middle East somehow presage the coming of the End Times, when a global Savior will emerge out of the apocalyptic violence.

Not quite believing my ears, I was careful to ask him if he was discussing real-time coverage of a nuclear war in a figurative or literal way. Did he really mean that in the worst of worst-case scenarios, we’d be watching the End, live, on television? His response: “I believe I mean it literally.”

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE BOOK TOUR…

Dozens of pre-teen girls, in town for a Junior Miss convention, scurried from room to room at the Fort Smith, Arkansas, Holiday Inn. Their giggles and footfalls echoed across the lobby’s vaulting atrium. Outside, at the hotel entrance, bikers in bandanas gathered; thousands were en route to a weekend gathering in nearby Fayettevile: Bikes, Blues & Bar-B-Que.

Welcome to Arkansas, Land of the Lost Book Signing.

On Saturday at the university bookstore, 55 books went in two hours. Each purchaser lingered, sharing a story, unsolicited, about September 11, as I inscribed each copy. On Sunday, at Books-A-Million, I had to noodge and wheedle to sign nine over the course of two long hours. Not that the store hadn’t set me up grandly, placing piles of books, and yours truly, at a polished display table, front and center. But it was a pristine Sunday, a day of rest, and even though the foot traffic was brisk, the patrons couldn’t be bothered with a man peddling 9/11.

“I only read the Bible,” said a self-described rock-quarry crusher, passing by the table. “No!” glowered a bearded young man in a T-shirt. “I was there. I worked down there.” One woman, upon seeing the book’s subtitle, merely raised her hand to shield her eyes, as she turned away, grimacing.

The glowerer would return a few minutes later to apologize. He just didn’t want to be reminded of September 11 – not on a quiet Sunday in out-of-the-way Fort Smith. He had been with the National Guard in 2001, he said. After having first been deployed to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, near the site where United 93 met its end, he was sent to Ground Zero to deal with security and crowd control. “People shouldn’t have to see what I saw,” he explained.

Before he turned to leave, he said that he had lost several friends in Iraq.