Journalism After September 11

by Barbie Zelizer (Editor), Stuart Allan (Editor)

The events of September 11 continue to resonate in powerful, yet sometimes unexpected ways. For many journalists, the crisis has decisively recast their sense of the world around them. Familiar notions of what it means to be a journalist, how best to practice journalism, and what the public can reasonably expect of journalists in the name of democracy, have been shaken to their foundations. Journalism After September 11 examines how the traumatic attacks of that day continue to transform the nature of journalism, particularly in the United States and Britain.

Genres: Journalism, Politics, American History, Sociology

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2002

About the author

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory and images, particularly in times of crisis.

Zelizer is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Europaea Academia. She is also a founding co-editor of the academic journal Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism

Reviews

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very challenging topic, and must have been even more so when it was being written by the various contributors, six months after the terrorism disaster. Therefore a review in 2017 has the benefit of hindsight and ensuing events.

For instance, we're shown that in UK the Daily Mirror turned around its topics from gossip and trivia to serious news after the disaster, and increased circulation; we have now seen that paper close as a result of some staff using underhand methods to tap many private phones in repeated search for celebrity scandals.

The sections each address a facet of the reaction of journalism and the journalists involved.

After the first plane hit the first Tower cameras were set up to film and so captured the second plane hitting the second Tower and ensuing events. Some media firms were based nearby and worked at once or had to evacuate offices. A good analysis is provided of how many people chose to watch the news on TV, how many turned to newspapers for analysis, how many tried to get internet access but found, due to some cables being routed through the area and cell masts being on the high points, attacked, that the net could not handle the traffic and sites were down, or cell phones could not make calls, just texts. Smaller sites sprang into action to fill the demand for fresh news, even those which did not normally host news.

Advertising was not carried on the main TV channels during the first two days of non-stop coverage. The various photos shown on papers are discussed. These include that dead people were abjured generally; the buildings represented those in them. Reactions of people viewing the scene were shown. Firefighters were shown, then politicians and leaders. Later people were shown visiting the scene to leave memorials or put up posters about loved ones; later again people were shown visiting curated gallery exhibits of photography. This is compared with the treatment of World War scenes or the Holocaust by Barbie Zelitzer.

Media felt forced into being patriotic, rather than impartial. The media in US, we are told, had stopped sending staff internationally, because it cost too much and there wasn't enough interest. Celebrity scandals, sports and political characters were the topics. This is a partial explanation for the bafflement expressed by many Americans with the line "Why do they hate us?" A new series of efforts had to be made to cover international affairs; in the interim some of the public turned to non-American media.

James W Carey says "If during the past decade journalism had been sold off to the oil industry, we would all be alarmed at investing a democratic institution to the care of a private enterprise with global interests and virtually unlimited political power. In recent years journalism has been sold, to a significant degree, to the entertainment and information industries which market commodities globally that are central to the world economy of the twenty-first century. This condition cannot be allowed to persist."

The cultural and conceptual divides between western nations and Islamic ones is discussed by Karim H Karim who is frank about the less desirable aspects of Islamic society, including repression of women, education and science. But Robert Fisk is quoted as saying he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of a crowd while on assignment, and he didn't blame the locals for wanting to stone a Westerner.

UK media firms are looked at by Michael Bromley and Stephen Cushion. An overview of the stations and papers is given with some of their history, readerships and political leanings. Largely the media supported American outrage and grief but the distance allowed them to carry more perspective too. "Eight of the ten titles used pictures - an image described as ubiquitous by the Guardian (September 12, 2001) which shows, from a fairly tight angle, smoke billowing and flames and debris issuing from the twin towers of the World Trade Center at the moment of, or just following, the impact of the second airplane. That the Financial Times chose to publish a photograph of a wider shot, taken from across the Hudson River, of the devastation of downtown Manhattan... the mid-market, tabloid sized Daily Mail... opted for a similar picture." War was a constant theme in headlines, whether war on America or the world or both. This is where the Mirror's (temporary) conversion from the trivial to serious is discussed. Comparisons with death of Princess Diana.

Stuart Allen discusses the internet traffic at the time and viewing figures since. Strategies to improve computer / website capacity "included expanding the amount of bandwidth available, bringing additional computer servers on line, suspending user registration processes and temporarily turning off traffic-tracking software.... advertising messages remained a constant feature on many news sites despite the fact that their presence can slow the loading time of a website considerably. ...USAToday.com apparently retained only one small advertisement on its homepage. Meanwhile WashingtonPost.com cleared its homepage of all advertisements but loaded them with individual stories." He explains that many users were forced to look elsewhere and many sites like Slashdot.com responded, trying to help.

Simon Cottle looks at UK TV discussions and public opinion, calling it deliberative democracy and dialogue, comparing it with the agora of Greece.
Silvio Waisbord talks about journalism, risk and patriotism, including media workers being targeted and harmed with anthrax, asking why journalism had not been awakening the public to the hazards in their slipshod airline security policies. The answer may lie in an earlier chapter about the media having been bought up by the entertainment industry.
Annabelle Sreberny looks at the trauma of survival and reporting.

Reporting Under Fire by Howard Tumber is a well written concise chapter about the hazards journalists face, at home or abroad, and why they do this work. "According to the International Federation of Journalists 100 journalists and media personnel were killed during 2001, the highest total for six years.... the number of deaths of media personnel is increasing." He mentions hostile crowds in foreign countries, abduction, killing for political purposes. "The IFJ report identifies killings in 38 countries." "The International Code of Practice for the safe conduct of journalists, formally introduced at the News World conference in Barcelona in 2000, requires media organizations to provide risk awareness training, social protection (i.e. life insurance), free medical treatment, and protection for freelance or part-time employees, coupled with the public authorities' respect for the rights and physical integrity of journalists and media staff (IFJ 2000)." He looks at two training organisations and their courses. He quotes, "All over the world, repressive regimes are arresting, jailing and killing journalists for trying to shine a light on what is happening. I think that the bottom line, and it's all fairly simple, is that in all these cases, people do not want the rest of the world to see what is happening. And the easiest way to stop that is to go after the journalists." (Sievers 2002)

What I note as glaring omissions are twofold.
No mention of the Irish media response. Why do I ask? The list of firefighters and police killed on that day (not much alluded to) was a roll call of Irish names.
No mention of the fact that the financial and trading news for the next few days was full of giant American firms burying their previous quarter's bad news. These firms got one brief mention on some of the channels or papers and were put aside by drama. I noticed this and realised that these firms were already in dire trouble. I made arrangements to pay off my credit card in full and some of my mortgage early. I knew the economy had essentially already crashed. It had, but the US and global collapse did not come until 2008. The media largely did not predict it.

Each chapter has its own list of references. As they are given by surname and initial I am unable to say how many are female. The index is on pages 263 - 268 and I counted 15 names I could be sure were female.
I borrowed this book from Dublin Business School Library. I would recommend it to anyone studying the media.
This is an unbiased review.

[ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many Americans seem to have a peculiar sense of dualism about themselves, a feeling at once slightly elitist and fiercely victimized. The United States attempts to be the great savior of the world, but is cast off by many other nations, and it is from this so many Americans draw both superiority and resentment. While U.S. citizens have much to be proud of, so many seem to be neurotically opposed to admitting any shortcomings, and it is this arrogance--not, as is so often cited, hatred of American culture or freedom--that is a primary source of a bias against the United States from Sweden to Somalia. Two phrases plastered across American newspapers a year ago demonstrate this bipolar affliction: Everything has changed and Why do they hate us? Only Americans could claim that their indeed heart-wrenching loss of 3,000 lives had superseded every other such atrocity the world over, yet simultaneously sequester themselves with a flippant "us."

U.S. newspapers and their journalists were dramatically affected by Sept. 11. From the instant iconicity of "9/11" (a date so beautifully Ameri-centric) to the violent and sudden loss of any pretense of objectivity, American journalism is in not in the same state today as it has very recently been.

Chronicling the myriad shifts over the past year, Journalism After September 11 takes a hard, academic look at nearly every aspect of journalism--structure, stereotypes, objectivity, conglomeration, globalization, patriotic journalism, risks to reporters' health, tabloids (both American and British), talk shows, online media, and photography. All of the writers included are from the world of academia, and it shows in a few of the chapters, which dive headlong into obscure sociology. The authors' distance from the world of news media, however, unquestionably enhances most of the work. There is also a range of opinions on American journalism--though all authors seem to agree that it is flawed, several believe that it can be saved. After being under the microscope its prognosis is cautiously--though barely--optimistic.

In James W. Carey's essay, "American journalism on, before, and after September 11," he argues that American journalists were in the midst of a "vacation from reality," one that began sometime before the 1988 presidential election and peaked with the impeachment of Bill Clinton. During this time, Carey writes, news media did "serious damage" to democracy. They pulled expensive foreign affairs correspondents, integrated news and entertainment programs, and increasingly moved toward tabloid-style scandals in order to sell their papers. When the airplanes struck that morning, Carey says, journalists performed adroitly--but not for very long.

The calm and poise of the television networks during these fateful hours of ignorance represented an admirable professionalism. Perhaps it couldn't last. By the end of the day speculation was pouring forth from the political centers of the country. As the week progressed, television coverage degenerated. Banners were unfurled, inevitably in red, white, and blue, along the crawl space at the bottom of the television screen announcing "America at War," or "America under Attack" as if the story were about a basketball or football tournament.

In the days that followed, Sylvio Waisbord argues, American news media "resorted to standard formulas and stock-in-trade themes." The national news media served primarily to comfort and to warn, and to do little else. The centerpiece of the book is surely Waisbord's chapter, "Journalism, risk, and patriotism," which builds on the other contributors' conclusions. With the news media's growing ignorance of foreign affairs, Waisbord writes, insecurity itself became "othered"--terrorism was simply something that occurred, however unfortunately, to other people in other places. This begins to account for why the American public did not react so viscerally (or, in some cases, at all) to either massive genocides or attacks on American holdings abroad. There was no general American revulsion following Rwanda. After massive atrocities were revealed in the former Yugoslavia, Hollywood stars did not proclaim how suddenly "meaningless" their work had become. This cultural sense of invincibility was truly what broke down on September 11, and Waisbord argues it may have taken the news media along with it. In addition, professional journalists felt that, in the wake of a violent message interpreted against American "freedoms" (and certainly after the death of reporter Daniel Pearl), they were being specifically targeted. Thus, Waisbord writes, they increasingly used patriotism to inoculate themselves against the threat. News had suddenly become legitimate in the eyes of the public, and journalists were more than willing to write what the public wanted to hear. Gone was the subtle elitism that Carey describes, which had pervaded the media since Watergate. Patriotism allowed journalists to be a visible part of what they interpreted as a united nation. With the combination of a supposed attack on the freedoms that supported their own enterprise and a newly-admiring public, the news media embraced patriotism as their rightful purpose.

As Robert W. McChesney laments in "September 11 and the structural limitations of US journalism," this deference to patriotism--or, more frequently, rabid nationalism--gave journalists an extremely limited framework in which to operate.

What is most striking in the US news coverage following the September 11 attacks is how that very debate over whether to go to war, or how best to respond, did not even exist. It was presumed, almost from the moment the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, that the United States was at war, world war. The picture conveyed by the media was as follows: a benevolent, democratic, and peace-loving nation was brutally attacked by insane evil terrorists who hated the United States for its freedoms and affluent way of life.

There is considerable reason to believe that the text selected by most media and politicians--of "evil" or "insane" terrorists--was not merely a gut reaction, but carefully selected vocabulary. If the terrorists were evil, then they had no motivations, and it was absurd to attempt to discover what led them to carry out such an act; their motivation was evil alone. But as another author points out elsewhere in Journalism, "There has emerged over the last three decades a set of journalistic narratives on 'Muslim terrorism,' whose construction is dependent on basic cultural perceptions about the global system of nation-states, violence, and the relationship between Western and Muslim societies." Doubtless these tropes reinforced the predominant feelings of "having to do something" ("something" which inevitably translated into "war") to combat the evil marshaled against us.

Not coincidentally, risk suddenly became real, not by a measurable increase in danger (virulent anti-Americanism had been flowing for quite some time), but primarily by the media's own increase in focus. They--meaning both the public and the journalists who were now, proudly, a part of it--had been attacked, and they would stand sentinel against any further threats. The anthrax attacks were a good example of this: perpetrators were almost immediately assumed to be foreign, working against a unified American public, and a relatively small number of deaths created a firestorm of articles for more than a month. Waisbord and several other authors lament modern journalism's reliance on official sources and "events" for their news. This policy precludes long-term explorations of structural violence, such as the building threat of terrorism against the United States in the previous decade. In the case of the anthrax attacks, the news promptly dropped off the front page shortly after the final death, despite the fact that no perpetrator had been identified.

It is this combination of legitimizing patriotism, reliance only on official sources, and risk based on definable events that did the most harm to American journalism after Sept. 11. Carey places the blame for these policies primarily on the conglomeration that governs most news organizations, writing that "in recent years journalism has been sold, to a significant degree, to the entertainment and information industries which market commodities globally ... This condition cannot be allowed to persist." With Sept. 11, however, Carey seems more hopeful. In their introduction to Carey's piece, the editors write that journalists "just might have realized that democratic institutions are not guaranteed; rather, they are fragile and can be destroyed by journalists as well as by politicians."

Patriotism is itself a nebulous term, and Waisbord questions why journalism opted so forcefully to embrace "hawkish patriotism," parroting the official line and increasing the level of anxiety.

Journalism needs to resist the temptation to dance to the tune of deafening nationalism often found in public opinion. Instead, it could courageously show patriotic spirit by keeping criticism alive ... [it] could provide reassurance by lowering the fear volume and offer community by defending diversity and tolerance rather than foundational, ethnocentric patriotism. A choice for the latter not only excludes democratic dissent from patriotism, but it also minimizes the possibility that citizens of the nation imagine that they also belong to a world community of equals.

[Athalia Stoneback · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, very detail oriented. It was interesting to read how the way journalism is presented can sway the readers' opinions of an event.