given this, of course the script for terror events changed. the public now expected such displays of force, or at least the politicians and the police expected them to expect it: overwhelming response must follow overwhelming feeling.

subsequent terror events paid tribute to the definitive work in the genre. fresh attacks were not only — perhaps not even principally — terrifying in themselves, but functioned as allusions to the terror felt by so many on that morning in september.

the fact that the event was so essential to the history of television; the fact that it occurred just as the febrile and variegated media ecosystem of cable television was reaching something approaching its mature form — all this feels essential to what came after.

the fact that the horror of that single moment — where a captive audience saw a second plane hit the towers and realised in an instant that this was deliberate, that they were under attack — could be revisited again and again through television;

if you don’t mind me asking, what’s your definition of “meaning” here?