what little of it i watched seemed to me was a fairly matter of fact account...though i must admit i watched very little of it...never saw DeNiro. my preconception about the idea of it was that it would read as a worlds most shocking home video type thing mixed in with some patriotism/hero perspective with some engineered "emotional" impact.... with commercials........in general i am pretty disgusted with "tragedy" documentaries. in art school once i was eating lunch and some guy was sitting behind me and he was going on about this "doc" he had filmed about this families tragedy......of some sort...with the emotional reactions and all. and this guy was talking about it in a way (that i think is probably pretty common) like a voyeuristic necrophiliac or something.....i got pretty creeped out...i don't think his reaction about what he filmed was an extreme or an exception at all. i doubt the 911 doc was any different than that.
that and the whole "hero" thing is way too exaggerated. obviously firemen become firemen because they like doing stuff like that... it's more like a bungee jumper dying in a bungee jump or a skydiver etc.
~M.E.