9/11: How Did We Do?


September 6, 2002


BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. It's often noted that the worst of times can be the best of times for news organizations. On September 11th nearly 80 million viewers watched prime time broadcasts or cable; untold numbers listened to the radio. There was a stampede to newspaper and TV web sites. Americans were united by what they saw. [RUMBLING SOUND]

MAN: The entire building has just collapsed.

PETER JENNINGS: The whole side has collapsed?

MAN: The whole building has collapsed.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: A survey conducted last November by the Pew Research for People in the Press found that the news media were at last winning the respect of their audience. Andrew Kohut is the director of the Pew Center.

ANDREW KOHUT: I think it's safe to say that it was the most positive review of the American news media that we've ever recorded and perhaps has ever been recorded in a public opinion poll. The public had a great need to know, and 80 to 90 percent said boy, the news media has done a great job in delivering this important story to us.

AARON BROWN: 9/11 -- the day 9/11 was defining moment for my generation of journalists.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: CNN News Night anchor Aaron Brown.

AARON BROWN: We had waited a long time, I think, for that moment. Our generation had been defined by O.J. and Princess Diana, and we proved that we were very much prepared to handle the biggest story of our lives. I'm incredibly proud of my business on 9/11 and in the days and weeks and mostly the months afterward.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:The Pew survey found the public also gave high marks to the media's patriotism, and newsmakers and news watchers took note. Advertisers pulled ads from local news programs whose anchors declined to wear flag pins. Commentators' remarks were parsed for undue skepticism toward administration pronouncements. Fox Newschannel found it advantageous to snipe at the patriotism of its rival, CNN. And when L.A. Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg wrote a column suggesting that the president looked stiff and boyish in his first appearance after the attacks, he was buried under an avalanche of hate mail.

HOWARD ROSENBERG: I got approximately 900 e-mails -- 99.5 percent of which were harshly critical, calling me, you know, Osama bin Rosenberg; equating me with the terrorists; ordering me out of the country; ordering me not to write again; ordering me to die. That was the tone.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Rosenberg says he wished he waited a day, but actually it took most of the media weeks to examine the performance of American institutions -- to ask why Air Force fighters were unable to intercept the planes; why the FBI and the immigration authorities failed to keep known terrorists out of the country; whether poor coordination among New York City authorities contributed to the death toll of firefighters that day. Early on, there seemed to be little appetite for scrutinizing our heroes and our leaders. In fact even as journalists pressed the Pentagon for greater access to the war, CNN's chief of standards and practices wrote in a memo to correspondents that "we must remain careful not to focus excessively on the casualties and the hardships that will inevitably be a part of this war or to forget that it is the Taliban leadership that is responsible for the situation Afghanistan is now in.

DAVID DOMKE: Journalists closely paralleled the language of the U.S. government leaders, and they had opportunities to not do that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: University of Washington communications professor David Domke led a study that scrutinized 210 Time and Newsweek stories published in the first 5 weeks after the attacks. He says those magazines gave little space to critics who questioned the government's actions for three reasons: the mood of the public was one and the natural patriotism of the American press corps was another. The third and possibly most important was the lack of dissent on Capitol Hill.

DAVID DOMKE: In fact the votes for various supporting-President-Bush resolutions or the Patriot Act that was passed were overwhelmingly in support of those things. So what happens when there's not open dissent within official government circles -- the press has a hard time offering dissent of its own.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: CNN News Night anchor Aaron Brown.

AARON BROWN:I wish we'd been a little more aggressive in how we covered the Patriot Act when it was working its way through Congress. I think this is a particularly important area to talk about, because I think ultimately it is one of the things that history will look at very carefully.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Reports on the impact of government actions like the Patriot Act on civil liberties and access to information came too late, according to many press critics. Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and a former editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution says he's concerned that no one he knows has seen fit to create a civil liberties beat to watchdog the government since 9/11. Because, he says, if the public is kept in the dark during times of crisis, when the truth comes out, it ceases to believe in any institutions at all. During World War I there were powerful photos of men dying in the trenches, but they were censored. The public didn't see them; didn't really know about the war.

BILL KOVACH: As soon as the war ended, those pictures started coming out, and one of the reasons we had what we now call the "I Don't Care Age" in the early 1920s was the total disillusion of the American public after World War I when they began to realize, one, we never won the war; two, we didn't get anything out of the war; and three, my God what we put out poor troops through when they started seeing the pictures. They became totally cynical.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:But when the need to know is greatest many people resist knowing. In recent months, as the news media have become more forthright in their coverage of the war in Afghanistan, the potential war in Iraq and the war we're waging at home, the patriotism rating of the press plunged 20 percentage points according to another Pew survey released only last month.

BILL KOVACH: And on 17 measures that we use to judge public opinion of the news media, they were all back pretty much to their pre-9/11 levels.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, says the public is still satisfied with the information it's getting about the war, but--

ANDREW KOHUT: On patriotism, and on a number of values --professionalism, morality -- the media has taken some very big hits!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Many journalists might consider patriotism an irrelevancy amid questions gauging fundamental issues of professionalism and credibility. But the low marks on patriotism have sobering implications, because another new poll conducted annually by a research center at the University of Connecticut found that, not for the first time, the least popular First Amendment right is freedom of the press, with 42 percent saying the press in America has too much freedom. Bill Kovach.

BILL KOVACH: Any time there's a national security alert, any time there is a sense that the nation is in jeopardy, the public immediately --immediately - swings to the side of the government and the government's right to keep secrets and urges the press to lay off.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:The solution for journalists, says Kovach, is to break from tradition and report not only the information but also why that information is necessary for a democracy to function. The objections of the people must be anticipated and addressed, says Kovach, so that they fully comprehend the consequences of not knowing.

BILL KOVACH: These things are inextricably bound up, and science may have figured out a way to separate twins joined at the head, but I don't think anyone's figured out how to separate democracy from a journalism that gives 'em the information they have to have in order to govern themselves!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press notes that it was journalists, not government officials, who pieced together for the public how the 19 hijackers assembled and completed their mission. It was reporters who revealed details on how and why the military and the CIA failed to capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. This year, the great newspapers, the most conscientious TV and radio programs spent past their budgets and trusted their audiences. The best gatekeepers made the decision to place more emphasis on news the public needed than on what it wanted, while keeping their fingers crossed that it was one and the same. [MUSIC]