First, gaping black holes in a skyscraper, then a large airliner swinging round from the right, disappearing from view, next a huge orange ball of flame to the left; shift to scenes of wild confusion, debris flying, billowing smoke; now the rectangular head of a skyscraper obscured by smoke, faltering, then collapsing in on itself as if in a controlled demolition. Create a video loop out of these images and show them again, again, again, while an anchorwoman calls in reporters, witnesses, whose faces appear in another section of the screen to the right of the loop.

This is what could be seen on BBC TV on the afternoon of September 11; it was still there in the early evening - the loop repeated until the images lost all contact with reality and numbed the mind. It could as well have been a computer simulation for a super disaster movie, with plot elements taken from Towering Inferno, Airport, and Independence Day.

That was Tuesday. By Thursday the media could report the gist of several mobile phone calls from the airliners, from people who realised they were going to die, and one from a stewardess that was recorded on an ansaphone. Sitting in easy chairs, the whole world could listen in to this woman's last message to her husband, her voice full of fear and anguish.

There hadn't been a MediaFeast like this since The Death of Diana, and the media who are always prepared for the unexpected, the incalculable disaster, didn't disappoint. If only there'd been an amateur video camera or CCTV operating on one of the airliners and that images could somehow have been transmitted to earth - then the media's huge excitement at a big story breaking, and our frisson of disbelief and fascinated horror would have been complete. The technology's not in place yet, but no doubt someone is working on it.

On Wednesday, it was the press's turn, with page after page of photographs, reports, eye witness accounts, instant opinion. The Feast went on and on.

These attacks were horrific, the huge loss of life a tragedy for the American people, yet for almost everyone in the Western world, even in the United States, the sequence of events was a mediatized tragedy, an endless projection of pixels on a screen. It merged with all the disaster movies we've ever seen, with the American fascination with technology and the potential for technology to go horribly wrong, for the very thing we depend on to be turned against us in a massively destructive way. The disaster movies of the Seventies were manuals for worst case scenarios that we knew eventually must happen, handbooks for our imagining of the future.

Because of this, there is no hard line between media reporting of the real, and the endless screening of fictionalised violence and disaster. There are the gaping holes, there's the airliner, there's the orange ball of flame, the collapse of the building. We absorb the images in repetition until we are unable to respond to them as a sequence of real events; the endless replay creates a "faction" out of what actually happened.

The numbing of our sensibility by the media is turning us into voyeurs who are not ashamed to pry into the minutest detail of other people's lives. In fact we expect people in crisis to bare to us their fear, their hurt, whether it's the parents of a missing girl who is almost certainly raped and dead, produced by the police for a press conference appeal, or the air hostess who made that last desperate call to her loved ones. (Did money change hands for that ansaphone tape? Was the husband cajoled by the media to give it up? Or did he offer it freely, seduced by the appetite for what might be called mass intimacy?) We expect such revelations now as a right, and feel cheated when someone refuses to play the game.

The broadcasting of that call was the most tasteless and shameful moment in the Feast. But never mind, it was whirled away like the debris from the exploding planes, as the media moved on…