To appreciate the degree of premeditated evil that went into the attack on America last September 11, you have to consider how the hijackers used the American media as part of their plan. By 9 a.m. in New York City you’ve got drive-time traffic copters in the air, and on the ground the staffs of all three major networks’ national morning news shows are at the ready; meanwhile 24-hour news channels like CNN are still reaching people whose workday is just getting started. Yet it’s not so early that the World Trade Center isn’t up and running at full capacity.

It would be hard to pick a better time of day to mount such an attack. Furthermore, the terrorists didn’t just fly the two planes one after the other into the World Trade Center. No, they left enough time after the first collision for mobile news crews and choppers to arrive on the scene and be in place to report live when the second plane hit. Just enough time for rescue workers to arrive and put themselves in harm’s way. And just enough time for friends to call friends to call friends to tell them to turn on the TV. Not only was it an attack designed to take as many lives as possible, it was an attack orchestrated to ensure that as many Americans as possible would witness first-hand a giant airliner slam into a building full of people whose only " crime " was to show up for work. Terrorism is the business of sowing fear in the hearts of your enemies. And what better way to do that than to ensure that they all witness the atrocity you’re perpetrating?

So it’s no surprise that Osama bin Laden and whoever else was behind the attack got the kind of shocking coverage most terrorists only dream of. Not that the Murray Federal Building explosion in Oklahoma City was ignored by the media — but nobody had video footage of the event, and a motionless shot of a building torn in half isn’t going to hold the public’s attention for very long. Footage of a plane slamming into one of the biggest structures in the world, on the other hand, will never grow old. As we approach the first anniversary of that horrible day, we’ve all had those World Trade Center images embedded in our minds. By comparison, the Pentagon attack didn’t get much air time after a week or two, even though plenty of people lost their lives there, too.

In aftermath of September 11, the media saturated us with coverage, from commercials selling patriotic American-flag kits to 20/20 and 48 Hours news-magazine interviews with survivors, firefighters and rescue workers, and the families of those killed. They milked every tear-jerking angle, covered every press conference as if fresh information were going to be disclosed each time the president or one of his cronies made a patriotic speech. But until very recently, not one network showed footage of persons dangling from the windows of the World Trade Center before jumping to their death. And no one broadcast pictures of the body parts or burned corpses that littered the area around Ground Zero. It was a rare media show of decency and restraint.

Now that the anniversary of the tragedy is upon us, all kinds of television specials are in the works. You can bet that the major networks will be rehashing what they’ve already shown and reported, as well as revisiting the survivors. It’s PBS, which doesn’t have to worry as much about ratings, that’s come up with some new ways of looking back through the lens of the September 11 attack.

The centerpiece of PBS’s coverage is the three-hour Frontline special Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (September 3 at 9 p.m. on WGBH 2). This documentary aims to explore the ways in which our faith in God and religion has been affected by September 11, to ask difficult questions like, " If these horrible acts were committed in the name of God, then how has that left us feeling about religion in the modern age? " And Faith and Doubt takes a big risk right up front by showing people jumping. If there’s any September 11 footage that still has the power to shock, this is it. One observer points out that at first the people on the videotape looked like birds and that he only slowly realized that these were people who were choosing to take their own lives rather than burn alive.

The visceral experience of watching these persons make that choice invariably leads you to wonder what you’d have done, and that energizes what might otherwise be a dry discussion about the nature of religion and faith. We all would like to think that if we’d been at the World Trade Center, we’d have acted like the level-headed heroes — but of course, you never really know how you’d behave in a crisis. On the other hand, it’s not difficult to relate to someone’s decision to jump to his or her death. And faced with such a decision, you wonder what role your spiritual beliefs would play.

PBS has four other September 11 documentaries scheduled. America Rebuilds (September 14 at 9 p.m. on WGBH 44) is a 90-minute report on two issues that haven’t gotten so much attention. One involves the clean-up of the site; though it doesn’t go into as much technical detail as it might have, it goes a lot farther than most news outlets have in terms of getting down into Ground Zero and showing how the enormous piles of wreckage were first sorted through and then carted away to a landfill. The second issue concerns the future of the World Trade Center site. Many neighborhood residents, survivors, and victims’ relatives and friends want it to be a memorial park. The business interests in Manhattan, including the individual who owns the lease on the property, want to see their office and commercial space restored. Both sides have compelling arguments, and already they’ve come to verbal blows in town-hall-style meetings; no clear solution is in sight.

Two other PBS productions examine the peripheral effects of the attack. Caught in the Crossfire: Arab Americans in Wartime (September 9 at 9 p.m. on WGBH 44) looks at the now difficult lives of Arab-Americans. Osama bin Laden acted in the name of the same God these people pray to every day; yet they think of themselves as supporters of America and the American way of life. They’ve been listening hard to discussions involving racial profiling at airports because they’re obviously wary of becoming second-class citizens in their own country. Caught in the Crossfire is sympathetic to their plight, but it doesn’t really address the problem of how America can protect itself from terrorist attacks — Arab or otherwise — without using every means available.

Afghanistan Year 1380 (September 9 at 10 p.m. on WGBH 44) is a P.O.V. independent film by Fabrizio Lazzaretti, Alberto Vendemmiati, and Giuseppe Pettito that looks at the war raging in Afghanistan and the brutal civilian casualties that have been incurred. This is another touchy issue, especially since it seems our military has tried to avoid collateral civilian damage by using smart-weapons technology. As the filmmakers point out, however, there’s no such thing as a perfect war, and their documentary is full of images of women, children, and old men who have been maimed by bombings and other military actions. What Afghanistan Year 1380 doesn’t show is our side of the issue; you’re left to wonder how Americans — military and civilian — might respond.

Finally: WNET/Channel 13 in New York has put together Heroes of Ground Zero: New York’s Bravest (September 11 at 8 p.m. on WGBH 2), a documentary that follows two fire companies — one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan — through the weeks and months following the attacks. The film is dedicated to the memory of the 343 firefighters who died, but it focuses on the struggles of those firefighters who survived as they try to rebuild their lives and their companies. There’s nothing much new here, since the networks have been checking in on New York City fire departments regularly for the past year — it’s one of those stories that’s there to fill space. And ultimately, that’s the problem confronting any news organization or filmmaker who wants to observe the first anniversary of September 11: the story’s already been covered, over and over and over. Even the most visionary documentarian is left picking at bones.