Responses in The News Media
The first member of the news media to arrive was Chester Panzer of WRC-TV. He and a crew member, returning from another story, had been stuck in traffic in their news vehicle on the George Washington Parkway when the plane crashed within a few hundred yards of them. Minutes later, they were shooting video footage of the crash scene, showing wreckage and survivors in the water along with the arrival of first responders. Chester captured Lenny Skutnik's memorable plunge to pull Priscilla Tirado from the icy water. His work earned him 1983 Pulitzer Prize finalist honors for spot news photography.
John Goldsmith covered the rescue, for WUSA 9.
News media outlets followed the story with diligence. Notably, The Washington Post published a story about the then-unidentified survivor of the crash, Arland D. Williams Jr., who handed the lifeline to others and drowned before he could be rescued:
He was about 50 years old, one of half a dozen survivors clinging to twisted wreckage bobbing in the icy Potomac when the first helicopter arrived. To the copter's two-man Park Police crew he seemed the most alert. Life vests were dropped, then a flotation ball. The man passed them to the others. On two occasions, the crew recalled last night, he handed away a lifeline from the hovering machine that could have dragged him to safety. The helicopter crew who rescued five people, the only persons who survived from the jetliner, lifted a woman to the riverbank, then dragged three more persons across the ice to safety. Then the lifeline saved a woman who was trying to swim away from the sinking wreckage and the helicopter pilot, Donald W. Usher, returned to the scene but the man was gone.
Read more about this topic: Air Florida Flight 90
Famous quotes containing the words responses, news and/or media:
“Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)
“Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescent hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)