In addition to our usual newsletter today, we've included, at the request of several readers, our coverage of the events of last Sept. 11, which we published while we were still Media Grok. We thank International Data Group for permission to reprint excerpts from that work. And although this is not the usual day for sending out the weekly version of Media Unspun, we are sending today's issue to those subscribers.

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Maybe it's because there was some fresh, juicy news in the easy-target worlds of Martha Stewart and WorldCom. Maybe Unspun should stop looking for logic in the media. Whatever the reason, some of Sept. 11, 2002's business pages could almost pass as normal.

Surely part of the reason is that there is little to say that has not been said before -- last year, if not last week. Some outlets did manage to squeeze out a newish angle or two. The New York Post reported which authors of 9/11 books are donating proceeds to WTC relief funds. Stretching slightly, Wired News wondered why most cell-phone locations can't be pinpointed yet (say, by 911 emergency dispatchers) and why cell-phone use is still illegal on planes.

If you've been tuning out all week, don't worry, you didn't miss anything that won't be said again, somewhere. Wednesday's L.A. Times headline "Effects of Sept. 11 on Economy Likely to Prove Long-Lasting" is only new if the L.A. Times is your sole source of information. (Kudos to the outlets that restrained themselves until the actual anniversary, but we suppose the urge to get there first explains why so many started rolling out their packages last week.) Rehashes were the order of the day all over the map: The USA Patriot Act is intrusive, airlines are hurting, airports are still unsafe, it's been a rough year for lower Manhattan business and (obviously) former WTC tenants, and fighting terrorism sure is expensive.

Despite our other theories, we like to think the business page went light on anniversary stories because, despite the economic impact, this isn't a business story. As some finance writers reminded us themselves, it's a story about thousands of people who died, and it was noticeably harder for New York and Washington outlets to go about business as usual. In the most recent anniversary story posted by TheStreet.com, reporter Kevin Burke mourned his lost brother; earlier in the week, founder Jim Cramer saluted his former colleague Bill Meehan.

Today's Wall Street Journal also got personal and profiled a Sept. 11 widow, but with a financial twist: she's suing United Airlines and an airport security company. "Lawsuits have become part of the ritual of American tragedy," said the Journal. So much for "the day everything changed." - Jen Muehlbauer

Buzz: Some 9/11 Authors Stiffing WTC Charities
http://www.nypost.com/business/56749.htm

A Nation Challenged
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/nationchallenged/text-index.html

NY Daily News Business
http://www.nydailynews.com/business/

BusinessWeek Online: Daily Briefing
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/index.html

Slate Magazine
http://slate.msn.com/

Wired News
http://www.wired.com/news/

Coming Back
http://www.thestreet.com/tsc/sept11/

Aviation Security: 35 airports likely to miss bag-screening deadline (AP)
http://www.freep.com/money/business/bags11_20020911.htm

Wall Street mourns
http://money.cnn.com/2002/09/11/markets/stockswatch/index.htm

Washington Post Business
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/business/

In Today's Paper
http://online.wsj.com/page/0,,2_0133,00.html
(Paid subscription required.)

Covering the Sept. 11 Anniversary Online
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/features/911anniversarycoverage.html

Three months of effort, and bupkes to show for it -- except for the headlines, that is. That's the House Energy and Commerce Committee's tally in its investigation of possible insider trading charges against Martha Stewart and her sale of ImClone shares. The latest headlines say Congress is bumping the investigation along to the Justice Dept., but the full story requires a connect-the-dots reading of today's coverage.

For starters, what does it mean when Congress refers an investigation on to the Justice Department? The Los Angeles Times called the handoff a "rare but not unprecedented" move and a reflection of Congress' frustration at the refusal of many execs, including Stewart, to testify or cooperate in the investigations.

Also motivating committee members is that after months of futzing around, they appear to have little real evidence regarding insider trading. The handoff to the DOJ indicates that the pols now want to shift the issue to whether Stewart lied to them, according to Forbes.com's reading of the tea leaves. That suggests an obstruction of justice charge, but even that allegation is weak, several outlets noted by way of observers. The committee's official eight-page letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft holds back from sending a strong message of serious violations and sounds like a "pretty mild referral," The Street.com quoted a securities law professor as saying.

The headline-making investigation wasn't winning the committee many friends on Capitol Hill. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted Rep. Barney Frank (D, Mass.) as saying last week that the only reason to keep pursuing the Stewart matter on Capitol Hill is the "publicity to be gotten in going after Martha Stewart rather than Martha Frump." The Associated Press also reported dissent within the committee on how to proceed with the Stewart investigation.

Not surprisingly, there are Web sites for both sides of the Martha debate. Savemartha.com has had 3 million hits since July, according to the Journal-Constitution, and its operator says being against Martha is like "being against Mom and apple pie." Those of a different mind can peruse Marthastewartlivinginjail.com, which has had brisk sales of T-shirts with the words "Let Martha Fry." - Deborah Asbrand

U.S. Probe of Stewart Requested
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64220-2002Sep10.html

House Panel Seeks Federal Probe of Martha Stewart (Reuters)
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Business/reuters20020910_485.html

Lex: Martha Stewart (Financial Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT1031119222586.html

You have the right to remain silent: Martha Stewart case goes to Justice Department
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_409.shtml

Stewart inquiry moves to Justice Department
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2002-09-10-martha-congress_x.htm

Criminal Probe of Stewart Sought
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-martha11sep11.story

Justice Dept. Urged to Probe Stewart (AP)
http://www.msnbc.com/news/806006.asp

Congress To Martha: Tell It To The Feds
http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/09/10/0910marthamini.html

Stewart Case Goes to Justice
http://www.thestreet.com/markets/taleofthetape/10041630.html

Criminal inquiry sought in Stewart/ImClone scandal
http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/business/0902/11martha.html

Reno asks for extended voting hours after many problems reported in South Florida
http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/4042990.htm

Qwest delays plans (Denver Post)
http://tinyurl.com/1e5i

Mozilla Rising
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/09/10/browser_wars/index.html

"Until people grasp the magnitude of it all, all we can do is tell individual stories until they add up." That wisdom comes from TheStreet.com's George Mannes, one of the many business reporters and Wall Street workers to describe a situation far outside his -- or anyone's -- usual realm of expertise.

Fifty thousand people worked at the World Trade Center. "Maybe people I knew. Certainly people who people I knew knew," said Salon's Amy Reiter, summing up the thoughts of many. Fortune's Andy Serwer called his friends who worked in the twin towers, and "remarkably none of them were there" on Tuesday.

MSNBC's Martin Wolk, who was attending a business conference in the Center when it was struck, "eventually made it up to Greenwich Village, where a man named John Roccosalva was kind enough to let me and other survivors use the telephone and get a glass of badly needed water in his tiny studio apartment." Newsday's Wall Street reporter Susan Harrigan went from interviewing witnesses, to running for her life, to doing more interviews. NJ.com offered the eerie image of "shoes, scores of shoes abandoned by their owners, fleeing too fast."

The Wall Street Journal said the Los Angeles staff of the finance firm Cantor Fitzgerald was on the phone with the New York office when someone said, "I think a plane just hit us." The company had offices on the 101st, 103rd, 104th and 105th floors. TheStreet's Herb Greenberg wrote that Cantor Fitzgerald analyst and TheStreet contributor Bill Meehan, "the greatest guy on earth, was on the 105th floor of the North tower."

Toronto-based information services company Thomson Corp. spent late Tuesday trying to locate 200 employees who worked in the WTC, said the Globe and Mail, and one Thomson employee had a reservation on the crashed American Airlines Flight 11. There was some "good" news: The AP listed companies whose employees appear to have escaped unscathed, including Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

The casualties are likely to be staggering, and the numbers probably won't be fully known for days. But reports enabling us to put faces and names to the event are starting to trickle in. Akamai co-founder and CTO Daniel Lewin was on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center, reported Reuters and others. He leaves a wife and two sons. Bloomberg reported that the CFO of MRV Communications, 41-year-old Edmund Glazer, was also on the plane. The individual stories Mannes referred to are starting to add up fast. - Jen Muehlbauer

Do we even have to tell you that phones jammed and Web sites crashed, and that e-mail never looked so good?

"People trapped in buildings in Manhattan in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center are finding that e-mail and instant messaging are the best ways to contact their friends and loved ones," reported Farhad Manjoo of Wired News. If you're wired enough to read this, you probably sent some e-mail to New York yourself on Tuesday.

Media everywhere noted this trend, and many articles quoted hurried messages from eyewitness New Yorkers. "A lot of people don't realize that the Internet was originally created to manage communication in such an instance of attack as this," Earthlink president Michael McQuarty told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Phone lines overloaded. The New York Times interviewed one woman who tried to call her sister in Manhattan about 75 times in five hours. Verizon made its Manhattan pay phones free of charge; lines stretched down the block. Local radio and television stations with transmitters at the World Trade Center were knocked off the air for those without cable TV, said the Times, but "some were able to switch to backup sites, primarily on the Empire State Building."

Major U.S. sites such as CNN stripped out ads, video and other bandwidth-suckers in an attempt to stay accessible. Reuters reports that European news sites also suffered outages. Google.com urged users to log out and watch TV or listen to the radio instead. Wired reported that tech sites such as Slashdot went off-topic to pick up the slack, and Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press said "the Internet failed miserably" in providing information during the crisis.

News.com said "The Web sites of the airlines whose planes were hijacked were also swarmed with traffic," as were the FBI and Pentagon sites. Federal Computer Week reported that for a few hours after the disaster, "virtually all official government Web sites remained silent on the unfolding disaster." We forgive them for having other things on their minds.

In addition to other as-yet-incalculable losses, some lost the false feeling of omniscience that the Internet can provide. On Salon, tech writer Andrew Leonard's father, John, described working at his computer Tuesday morning, unable to get online and check e-mail. "Until the phone rings and my stepdaughter downtown tells me that maybe I should be watching television because it is like the worst sort of TV movie, and I don't know what she's talking about," wrote Leonard. "I will try to fax this to San Francisco and then go back to being wired to the gills and stupider than ever." - Jen Muehlbauer

With New York's financial market in ruins and the world economy in doubt, even an economist sounded sick at heart to cast the tragedy as financial news. It's "primarily a humanitarian issue and a security issue for the U.S.," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted HSBC chief economist Dr. John Edwards as saying. "A terrorist attack is a ... terrible human tragedy but not a sustained conflict. Accordingly the economic aspect is the least important."

But it's an aspect the media had to cover, however reluctantly. With dual headlines that the effect on financial markets would be "impossible to predict" and that a global recession was "highly likely," USA Today's Web-based coverage was emblematic of the media's struggle to report the financial ramifications of Tuesday's devastation. London's Guardian cautioned restraint in using epithets such as "meltdown" and "collapse" to describe post-attack economic conditions. "We've just seen what the real thing looks like," Larry Elliott wrote.

Worries about equity values, industrial output and rising unemployment have become "utterly futile," shrugged BBC business editor Jeff Randall. Another BBC News Online filing quoted a stock historian who described trying to gauge the economic fallout of the attacks as impossible: "There never has been a shock like this for the financial markets."

Many international outlets, however, were quick to report expectations of a hard, fast downturn. Reuters reported that a global economic contraction was "almost certain," and the International Herald Tribune said the attacks heightened the prospect of a U.S. recession, which would be sure to cause already faltering Asian and European economies to slide more.

The London Times reported that central banks on both sides of the Atlantic were on alert last night to flood financial markets with emergency funds to counter the turbulence in worldwide financial markets. By early Wednesday morning, Bloomberg said, the money-pumping had begun, with the European Central Bank loaning $63 billion - about the same amount as it typically hands out over a two-week period at its weekly auctions - and the Bank of Japan kicking $17 billion into money markets. As for the U.S. Federal Reserve's fixation on the tweaking of short-term interest rates as an anti-recession tool, the Financial Times' Lex column warned that it'll be no match for the now-rattled U.S. psyche: "A new element, beyond the Fed's control, has entered the confidence equation."

As of early Wednesday morning, the BBC was reporting that major stock indexes in London and Frankfurt had settled in positive territory, and Paris shares were trading well above early lows. Oil prices had stabilized. But as one senior equities trader told the London Times, "I have not got a brain big enough to contemplate the ramifications of this. But every way you look, it only gets worse." - Deborah Asbrand

Copyedited by Jim Duffy (jimduffy86@yahoo.com).

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Copyright 2002 Media Unspun, Inc., and The Vineyard Group, Inc.
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