May 6, 1937 is a day that is seared into the public consciousness. At 7:25 p.m. the airship, LZ 129 Hindenburg, erupted in flames as it attempted to land at the Lakehurst, NJ Naval Air Station. Of the 97 people on board, there were 36 fatalities, including one death among the ground crew. This was the deadliest civilian airship disaster in history.
The Hindenburg had been aloft for three days on a voyage that began in Frankfurt, Germany. It had just completed a run between Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Frankfurt. The Hindenburg made 17 round trips across the Atlantic Ocean in 1936, with 10 trips to the United States and seven to Brazil. By May 1937, it had been in service just over 14 months.
It was the pinnacle of luxury air travel, with a lounge and dinning room done in an elegant modern style. The sleek finishing was the design work of Fritz August Breuhaus, who was also known for his Pullman coaches, ocean liners, and German naval vessels.
The event was brought to life by two compelling media accounts. Heavy publicity about the first transatlantic passenger flight of the year by Zeppelin to the U.S. attracted a heavy contingent of journalists. The two most enduring archives of the Hindenburg crash were newsreel film footage and the plaintive horror of Herbert Morrison’s radio narration for station WLS in Chicago.
Morrison’s description is arguably among the most well-known radio broadcasts in history. Interestingly, the now familiar dialogue, including his famous exclamation, “Oh, the humanity!” isn’t quite true to the occasion of the moment. One of the reasons Morrison’s voice is so compelling has to do with a minor technological sleight of hand. His commentary was recorded a little slower than normal speech. Therefore when played back, it comes across as higher-pitched, more clipped and urgent. To the same point, we almost always hear Morrison’s voiceover set against the aforementioned newsreel footage, which gives the impression that they were recorded together. They weren’t — at least not as a coordinated effort of cameraman and reporter.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
To be sure, Morrison doubtless felt every scintilla of the urgency and emotion we now impart to the famed recording, but knowing it to be (ever so slightly) nuanced, gives us pause to think about the crafting and presentation of media images. Last year, a minor furor erupted in the halls of journalistic ethics when photographer Damon Winter used his iPhone and a program called Hipstamatic to compose shots of soldiers in Afghanistan. For those who are unfamiliar, Hipstamatic allows the user to apply a variety of frames, filters and lighting effects to a scene… much in the way a photographer might choose a particular lens, shutter speed or aperture. Even so, critics derided Winter’s images as being inauthentic. They argued he had manipulated the “reality” of the scenes through the artifice of Hipstamatic technology.
Of course, these arguments betray the fact that all media representation is a subjective venture, only superficially clad in the ideal of objectivity. By virtue of deciding — what to photograph, what subjects to report, which remarks to quote — the press in effect decides what is “newsworthy” and by extension “real.”
This is a disquieting notion to people who prefer to think of reality as having an objective substance. Were it only so.
It is a trite example, but the case of four people watching the same traffic accident, each from a different corner, will have four unique experiences (and perspectives) about the same “objective” phenomenon. They may all agree on the gross points of the event, but each will have a subtly different construction of what “really” happened. As such, four different “realities” attach to one objective event.
Critics will denounce this as fuzzy post-modern obfuscation. Perhaps they have a point. Even so, it holds the seeds of a larger lesson: regard all you are shown with a critical eye and analytical mind. In so doing, you can better beat back the flames of sensationalism.