Monday is the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on World Trade Centre in the United States. The MaltaMedia Online Network is remembering the day with a series of podcasts in the Maltese language including eye witness accounts from New York, as well as with a special feature.
Five years on, MaltaMedia’s founding and creative director Toni Sant recalls the “sheer horror of it all” while watching the tragedy unfold before his eyes. At the time, Toni Sant was living in New York.
The podcast series consists of 24 podcasts, each one being made available daily. Toni Sant's participation in the Bed-In for Peace organized by Amy Burk and Andy Cox in New Zealand is the theme of a podcast released on September 11, 2006. One may click here to access the podcasts.
The podcasts were originally webcasts, which were in August 2005 repackaged into a series of 24. This podcasting series was originally released as the world's first Maltese language podcasting series.
The attacks in themselves were horrific; however the aftermath of the events were equally unsettling especially on citizens’ personal terms. Toni Sant explains that “9/11 made it uncomfortable for me and countless others to live in America. New York is a very different place than it was before 2001. There are too many suspicious eyes looking at people with even the mildest of Middle Eastern features. Not to mention the fact that at certain times the city feels like a police state.” Toni Sant has also thinks that “things are worse now than they were before 2001 in terms of personal safety, freedom and liberty. If there's a lesson to be leant from all this it’s how effective terrorism can be when the response is not directed towards the actual source of the terrror.”
In turn, MaltaMedia played a key role in the reporting of the September 11 tragedy from a Maltese perspective. “MaltaMedia recognized the potential of the internet and other new media to provide an immediate news and information service to people around the world interested in global events from a local perspective,” says Toni Sant. This led to the creation of MaltaMedia’s special feature on the September 11 attacks.
Editorial director Martin Debattista and Darrell Pace, who was the main content producer for the MaltaMedia Online Network at that time, made the best of the unique resources to produce the extensive feature. In this regard, Toni Sant adds that “MaltaMedia showed its best qualities on 9/11 and in the ensuing weeks. We were on the forefront of local media reporting these world-changing events from a Maltese perspective. We were lucky, if that's the right word, to have direct audio reports from New York simply because I lived there at the time.”
USA President George W. Bush visited the four sites targeted by terrorists, namely Ground Zero where the World Trade Centre towers stood, the Pentagon, as well as Pennsylvania, where one of the hijacked airplanes crashed.
In turn, relatives of the 2,973 people who died in the attacks will gather in New York to read out the names of the victims.
© Copyright 2006 - MaltaMedia Online Network
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