The Ripples of September 11   

And what they mean for journalism

It's easy to see how some people forgot that journalism is serious business.

Through the '90s and into the new century, the profession seemed hopelessly stuck in the silly season.

Not everyone, of course. There was plenty of excellent investigative work and enterprise reporting and just good, day-in-and-day-out beat coverage. But at times these efforts seemed like oases of brilliance in a desert of dreck.

The news media skipped blithely from one media circus, as they say down on the cliché corner, to another. Things better left to the gossip columns became front-page news. In some quarters government news became something you had to apologize for. Foreign news largely vanished.

In his piece on how the events of September 11 have affected journalism schools (see "Serious Business," page 44), Don Campbell reports that many students are viewing their profession-to-be in an entirely new way.

"Before, they were more interested in fun things," Robert Zelnick, acting chairman of the Boston University Department of Journalism, told Campbell. "They wanted to be an anchor at ESPN or cover the arts. They now have some sense of the responsibility that journalism has."

There has, of course, been much evidence to underscore the significance of the profession. Immediately after the unfathomable attacks, the nation desperately needed to understand what had happened. Finding that out required not just reporting and writing skills. It often called for extraordinary commitment and courage as well. Witness the New York Times' Katherine E. Finkelstein's stunning account of her 40 consecutive hours on the scene at or near Ground Zero in November's AJR.

Then came the unparalleled danger of covering the war in Afghanistan, an assignment that took the lives of eight journalists in a 16-day period (see "A Killing Field for Journalists," page 32).

Why would someone in his or her right mind venture into a completely lawless venue roamed by gangs of bitter, desperate--and armed--men?

John F. Burns, the New York Times' Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent now honchoing the paper's war coverage, put it this way in an interview with AJR's Sherry Ricchiardi: "Journalists want to know; we are incessantly curious people. The higher-minded among us believe there is a compulsion to bear witness, to tell the story of the afflicted." And then he nailed his point: "But we can't tell that story if we don't go down that road."

September 11 has also resuscitated the notion that what goes on in the rest of the world might well be worth knowing about (see "Rediscovering the World," page 48).

Much of the American news media went into a cocoon after the Cold War wound down. As globalization accelerated apace, as Americans in growing numbers traveled the world and studied overseas, many news organizations took the position that readers and viewers would be bored by anything that happened over the border.

September 11, of course, was a dreadful reminder of how interconnected the world really is. In the aftermath, some people, many of them foreign-news fans already, have predicted or expressed the hope that international news will make a major comeback.

I'd love for that to happen. But don't bet too heavily on it. It's easy right after a cataclysm to feel that things have changed profoundly and irrevocably. Depending on what else transpires, it's certainly possible to envision a scenario in which the sense of crisis ebbs and the foreign-news blackout returns.

The period has also raised the question of how journalism's role vis-à-vis government is affected by an attack on the United States, a war to root out the perpetrators and their protectors, and a laudable upsurge in patriotic fervor. In an astonishing comment more suited to the Taliban than Washington, D.C., Attorney General John Ashcroft suggested that critics of some of the Bush administration's more controversial measures were giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Obviously wartime brings with it some constraints, particularly when it comes to information that might endanger national security or the lives of American military forces. But absent that, the press has a duty to cast a critical eye at all pronouncements, whether by the U.S. government, Osama bin Laden or Muhammad Omar, to get as close to the truth as possible--in Ted Koppel's phrase, "to put it all through the meat grinder."

Any policy that is jeopardized when exposed to bright light isn't much of a policy. Shining that light is eminently patriotic.