
          One Nation, Unquestionable: The News Media
	       Responds to September 11
          By Wehner, PatrickPatrick Wehner
          Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 4-7
          
          Amid the pulse
of satellite uplinks, videophones, webcasts, and
tickertape displays,
the taglines manufactured by the news media in the wake of September
11 have become such permanent fixtures on our television and computer
screens that one almost expects to see their images burnt-in even
after the power is switched off. The unfolding storylines range from
"A Nation Challenged," the struggle against adversity reported daily
by both the print and online editions of The New
York Times, to "America Strikes Back," the big-budget Hollywood
revenge fantasy that, in an unprecedented display of cooperation, is
being heavily promoted by no fewer than three competing television
networks. A recent report on National Public Radio likened these
taglines to branded products, suggesting that in a competitive news
environment where the available facts are essentially the same, subtle
differences in style or image-say, "Attack on America" versus "Terror
Hits Home"-can provide an edge in promoting audience
loyalty.
          The comparison highlights some uncomfortable
truths. Much of the
official news has been the same, especially when
it comes to the military action in Afghanistan. The news editor
coordinating the post-September 11 coverage for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bert Roughton, Jr.,
recently told an audience of journalism students at Emory University
that despite the obstacles faced by correspondents filing from the war
zone, the "biggest problem we have with information is not there, it's
in Washington." The enduring lesson that Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint
Chiefs learned from the Gulf War was that while the press corps may
grumble, they will continue to cover military briefings that are
little more than public relations events largely out of a need to have
something to report each day. Comparing the major media outlets to
commercial brands also admits the distasteful reality that the news
business remains a business even in a time of crisis. While not all
differences in coverage are the result of calculated attempts to
improve market share, the marketing experts have successfully
convinced many news executives that ratings and circulation are all
about "selling a relationship."
          The problem with the brand
analogy is that the goal of differentiating a media "product" is
simply inconsistent with all the obvious repetition. Overworked
phrases like "The War on Terror" or "America's New War" accomplish
little in distinguishing one news organization from another when
everyone else is using them. So while the idea of branding the news
surely captures the spirit of our market-driven society, it must also
be said that sometimes a cliché is just a cliché even if it achieves
that status in record time. 
          Despite their apparent emptiness,
clichés have consequences. Swaggering taglines like "America Fights
Back," for example, seem to be encouraging viewers to put their feet
up, adjust the surround sound, and enjoy the special effects. But it
is the more innocuous slogans, the wildly popular "America Unites"
among them, that may have the most lasting effects. The sentiment is
undeniably heartfelt: stories of people drawing together in the
aftermath of the attacks bolster a belief that we as a nation will
survive the present crisis and perhaps locate new sources of communal
strength. There is also some factual, or at least statistical,
justification for this continual refrain. We have all heard the
polling figures-overwhelming support for a military response, high
approval ratings for a President whose election was bitterly contested
a year ago. Grief and confusion create a longing for certainty,
community, and institutions deserving of our trust, and journalists,
being human, share in those desires. Dan Rather's post-September 11
appearance on "The Late Show with David Letterman," provided one
dramatic example. The CBS news anchor's pledge to "line up" wherever
President Bush asked horrified many of his fellow journalists because
it revealed how close to a vanishing point objectivity was being
pushed.
          Ironically, in helping to harden collective longings
into
something-an accepted truth, an article of faith, a reassuring
cliché that is no longer open to discussion, the major media have
contributed to a climate where journalists are condemned for living up
to their professional principles. Unpopular with the public even
before September 11, reporters who have asked difficult questions
about the reasons behind the attacks or the wisdom of U.S. foreign
policy have encountered outrage on an entirely different
scale. Roughton, for example, acknowledged intense pressure from Journal-Constitution readers to be unconditionally
supportive of the war. Speaking of journalists' professional mandate
to uncover the truth, however embarrassing or inconvenient it may be
to those in power, he admitted, "I think right now, the American
public isn't very sympathetic to our cause." Nor have the charges of
treason and accusations about a lack of moral character been limited
to rank-and-file reporters. Talk-show personality Bill Maher,
bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, and even media tycoon Ted
Turner have been met with a chorus of angry responses for having dared
to disrupt the consensus.
          Lost in the controversy surrounding
Turner's speech at the Woodrow
Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. on
October 10, 2001-in which he proposed, with no apparent sense of
personal irony, that U.S. leaders could be more "humble" in their
dealings with the rest of the world-was the CNN founder's pointed
criticism of both the broadcast and print media. Turner accused news
executives of having contributed to American audiences' lack of
knowledge about international affairs by closing many of their
overseas bureaus in the 1990s. "Americans are woefully uninformed at
the current time about international news in general, and I've always
said we were doing that at our peril," the Cox News Service quoted
Turner as saying. While the media billionaire has seldom allowed facts
to get in the way of his opinions, his observations about the decline
of international news parallel the findings of A number of surveys and
reports by media research institutes. Citing studies conducted by
Harvard, UC-San Diego, and a broad range of professional groups, media
critic David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times
estimates that newspaper and television coverage of international
events has declined by as much as 80 percent since the
mid-eighties. News organizations often claim to have cut back on their
foreign staff for budgetary reasons, but Shaw argues a far more
significant factor in the decline was that after the Soviet Union
dissolved, "most news executives decided that Americans weren't
interested in international news." Scandals, celebrity gossip, and
"soft" lifestyle features replaced coverage of overseas
events.
          Nathan McCall, an author, former Washington
Post reporter, and visiting professor
of journalism at Emory,
sees a historic parallel for recent events in
the Report of the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders, issued in 1968 and more widely known as the
"Kerner Report." Among the Report's most
significant findings, notes McCall, was that "there was a lot of
racial hostility beneath the surface in the nation's African-American
communities, and the media was partly to blame for that bubbling up."
The Commission described at least two ways in which the media bore
some measure of responsibility for the violence occurring in
neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Newark, and other American cities during
the 1960s. "One, the media had compounded the frustrations in
African-American communities where people's grievances weren't being
heard. Two, it undermined the consciousness of the rest of the country
who didn't even recognize the problem or the injustices that were
occurring." In a similar fashion, reductions in the amount of
resources expended on the gathering and reporting of international
news have left many American audiences unaware of the deep resentments
that U.S. foreign policies have inspired. "Here we are forty years
later," says McCall, "and it's just that it's happening on an
international scale."
          As it happens, the media's response to
September 11 demonstrates more than one form of historical
amnesia. Part of the irony behind all the present assertions of unity
is that for the past three decades, media decision-makers have been
conducting business according to a decidedly opposite set of
principles. Since the 1970s, the prevailing wisdom among advertising
and media executives has been that American society is increasingly
fragmented into separate interest groups and lifestyle enclaves. The
magazines, cable channels, radio stations, and websites that have
thrived have been those able to deliver a detailed portrait of a niche
audience to their potential advertisers. Even newspapers, once the
medium promoted as offering "something for everyone," have focused
increasingly on upscale suburbanites with "zoned" editions edited for
specific neighborhoods and a greater emphasis on local news,
lifestyle, and personal finance. Those who work the business side of
newspaper publishing readily admit that these kinds of features help
attract advertisers with images of affluent readers. Whether the
media, in their sudden passion for our shared connections, will
reaffirm an obligation to serve all segments of American society by
making substantive changes in their coverage remains to be
seen. Already, the worst excesses of "America United" resemble the
idealized world that journalist Naomi Klein calls "Representation
Nation"-the ethnically-balanced visions of harmony that are featured
in Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger ads.
          Not coincidentally,
media institutions that have historically
expressed the double
consciousness of their audiences-as both American
citizens and
members of distinct and often oppressed social
groups-have proven to
be among the most willing to question the limits of unity. The
African-American press and ethnic newspapers have focused on local
angles to the September 11 events, have covered benefit events and
prayer services, and have attempted to alleviate the anxieties of
readers for whom English is a second language. But black newspapers
like the Atlanta Daily World and the Baltimore Afro-American have also featured a steady
procession of columnists reaffirming a commitment to civil liberties,
objecting to racial profiling practices, and questioning the wisdom of
U.S. foreign policy. In a commentary pub-
lished in the October 11 issue
of the Atlanta Daily World, for example,
columnist Hazel Trice Edney expressed concern that U.S. government
actions often seemed uncaring and arrogant to people in the developing
world, citing the U.S. walkout on the U. N. Conference Against Racism
in Durban, South Africa as one of the more recent instances. In the
Spanish-language press, syndicated columnist James E. Garcia reminded
his readers of the mass deportations of Mexican-American citizens
during the Great Depression of the 1930s, calling upon them to speak
out against acts of violence and discrimination directed at Arab
Americans. These examples demonstrate that while many people may feel
the need to draw together in a crisis, they are not willing to
overlook the ways in which America has failed to live up to its
promises, or to ignore the manner in which "unity" can become
exclusionary.
          Peace demonstrations, marches, and rallies
visibly complicate this theme, and press coverage of groups organizing
to oppose the war in Afghanistan has been accordingly sporadic. "In
the immediate aftermath of the attacks in D.C. and New York, there was
a kind of united front and a real frenzy that we saw in the media,"
says Lance Newman, a member of the steering committee for the Georgia
Coalition for Peace, an Atlanta-based activist group composed largely
of veterans of the street protests against institutions like the World
Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. When the media
have reported on the activities organized by local peace groups, the
tone of the coverage has been "fairly patronizing and sarcastic,"
Newman observes. The eagerness with which many news executives have
aligned their organizations with the cause of unity has made it
difficult for peace groups to have their messages heard. "I think
there's a lot of people out there who oppose the war but don't feel
confident enough to put themselves on the line right now because they
see what's going on," says Newman. "They see the crackdown on civil
liberties, they see the way dissent is treated in the media, and they
expect that's how they are liable to be treated."
          When dealing
with groups who oppose the war, the media seem to have
little
awareness of past mistakes. In late September, for example, more than
a dozen black churches in the Cascade Heights area of southwest
Atlanta organized a march for peace. Although other vigils and
demonstrations had been held in downtown Atlanta parks and at the King
Center, the march down Cascade Road was noteworthy for the number of
participants (eight hundred, by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution's estimate), for the range of ages that was
represented, and for the fact that the marchers identified themselves
by faith rather than membership in an anti-war group. "We gather to
pray and speak a word of peace" read the statement issued by the march
organizers, "first to the hearts and minds of those most directly
affected by these horrific and haunting events, but also to the
nations of the world, who have begun to position themselves for
international conflict."
          All three of Atlanta's leading
television stations reported on the march, but only one emphasized the
congregants' clear message that one might pray for the country while
still opposing retaliatory violence. Of the other two, one focused
almost exclusively on the presence of famous leaders like the Reverend
Jesse Jackson and Georgia Governor Roy Barnes. (While the presence of
these leaders was a significant show of support for the marchers, the
fact that this station only highlighted Jackson and Barnes ignored the
important message of the march.) The final station's 45-second piece
featured a white man as the subject of its single on-screen interview,
the reporter apparently having concluded that the real story of the
march was the presence of people who admitted membership in a
socialist group. Such racism and red-baiting seemed straight out of an
era of Civil Defense drills and automotive tailfins, and the reporter
went on to emphasize the "controversial" nature of the
march. Overlooked was the more compelling reality that many of the
marchers were acting on their own definitions of citizenship and
solidarity, offering them as an alternative to President Bush's
"either you're with us or against us" rhetoric.
          Journalists
and their critics alike agree that a few positive signs have appeared
in the past weeks that seem to indicate that news organizations are
beginning to focus on missed opportunities. But if there is a growing
recognition of where news organizations might have failed their
audiences in the past, many of the ongoing problems have yet to be
addressed. When the events of September 11 have become more distant
history, predicts Professor McCall, "someone will have a big media
convention somewhere and the big mucketymucks will talk about what we
could have done better with what I call progressive
hindsight. Journalists-we're all very good at being progressive in
retrospect. The problem is, it's always hard to get changes made in
midstream, when they would make the most impact."	
          
            Patrick Wehner
is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Myth and Ritual in American
Life at Emory University and served as a special contributing editor
for this issue of Southern Changes.
          
        