Journalist's Journal: 9/11 revisited
By Lawrence Ingrassia Posted Oct 1 2003
It is 8:45a.m. on a sunny Tuesday morning in August, and I am walking to the Wall Street Journal's office in Manhattan. It's a route I've taken hundreds of times in the past, and it's a route I expect to take hundreds of times in the future.
But, for my colleagues and I, the walk will never be quite the same.
Across the street is the World Trade Center, or what used to be the World Trade Center. Today, it's a massive construction site. Someday, a few years from now, it will again be a bustling office complex. Always, in my mind's eye, it will be frozen in time: Sept. 11, 2001.
Like many colleagues, I was on my way to the office just before 9 a.m. when the hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers. Instincts took over, as they often do in times of crisis. Journal reporters, without anyone telling them what to do, started reporting. A few editors, including myself, managed to make their way across the Hudson River just before the Twin Towers collapsed. We headed toward our New Jersey printing plant, where a makeshift newsroom was jury-rigged. Other editors struggled to make their way home through the debris, and they turned on their PCs. Copy flowed in – even now, I'm not sure how – and we edited.
The day passed in a blur. I don't recall any reflection on what we had just witnessed – not on a personal level, anyway. There wasn't time. We all just set our minds on doing what we knew had to be done. In the chaos, there was remarkable calm. Against all odds, we published the next day. End of story.
If only.
Sept. 11 was, in many ways, the WSJ's finest hour, but it was also the start of a long and challenging period for us and our journalistic colleagues elsewhere. With our office evacuated – for 11 months, it would turn out – we were scattered in several locations. For weeks we didn't see colleagues who had for years sat next to us. It was hard, at times, to reach them by phone or even by e-mail. Some WSJers not only worked near the WTC, but they also lived in the neighborhood and thus found themselves homeless. Although the shared difficulties pulled us together, they also pulled us apart. As part of a cost-saving measure, our copy desk was permanently relocated to New Jersey, far away from our New York newsroom.
Then, in the midst of this already trying time, came the WSJ's most painful hour. After we managed to survive Sept. 11 without a single employee suffering a serious injury, we watched in helplessness and horror just a few months later when our reporter and friend Danny Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan. We were working on deadline in another make-shift newsroom when we learned that Danny's captors had brutally murdered him.
How have we, and other journalists, responded to these tragic and momentous events? As individuals, by agonizing and mourning. As journalists, by trying to do a better job of informing our readers of the world around them and why what happens far away makes a difference close to home. The Journal long has been a global newspaper, with editions published in both Asia and Europe, but much of the U.S. press is rightly criticized for being too parochial, and, compared with foreign newspapers, many U.S. publications are. Albeit belatedly, more column inches of news – a lot more at some newspapers – are devoted to “foreign” news today than at any time in a long while, I would bet.
Many American newspapers and magazines have risen to the occasion in the past couple of years to pursue aggressively the important global stories of our time – at times fearlessly and provocatively. In the wake of Danny Pearl's murder, reporters here at the WSJ and at other publications have rightly and understandably become more cautious about reporting in danger zones. However, it hasn't stopped them from going where they need to go to get the news.
Just one example among many: In the summer of 2002, less than six month's after Danny's abduction, Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker bravely ventured to the Bekaa Valley, a stronghold of Hezbollah, to report on a militant Islamic organization that the U.S. government considers a terrorist group. His revealing two-part series, “In the Party of God,” won a National Magazine Award for reporting.
The temptation, to the extent that there was one, immediately after Sept. 11 to separate the world into good guys (us) and bad guys (them) quickly faded. Journalists have become just as assertive and aggressive in pursuing stories as in the past, sometimes uncomfortably so for the Bush administration. Critics who say otherwise don't read newspapers very closely.
It doesn't take much looking to find numerous stories that have been written in U.S. newspapers questioning the Justice Department's detention of terrorist suspects, examining whether suspects are getting fair trials or probing the shortcomings of U.S. intelligence that might have allowed the Sept. 11 tragedy to occur. Leading up to the war in Iraq, newspaper reporters in the United States scrutinized the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and wrote stories warning about the dangers the United States would encounter post-war in administering such a splintered country as Iraq.
Two years after Sept. 11, we and our journalistic competitors are not only looking back but also looking forward. Even as we're writing about the war in Iraq, we're continuing to probe into corporate scandals in America. We're writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and about the struggling U.S. economy. Our reporters are chronicling efforts to investigate terrorist groups in Indonesia and analyzing the challenge that cheap labor in China poses to American jobs.
Things are getting back to normal – as normal as they will ever be.