Media Hype May No Longer Be Necessary
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 16, 2001; Page C1
In his New York Times column last Tuesday, Thomas Friedman recalled telling his teenage daughter that he was going to Israel.
"'Why do you have to go there?' she asked, with a worried frown."
The attacks on New York and Washington that morning made painfully clear that danger is no longer limited to such faraway lands, as Friedman underscored in his next column: "Does my country really understand that this is World War III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead."
To look at anything published before Tuesday at 8:45 a.m. – People magazine's cover on Ben Affleck's struggle with alcoholism, Time's cover on Venus and Serena Williams, Business Week on the "Wine War" – is to realize how suddenly, dramatically, unalterably the world has changed. And that means journalism will also change, indeed is changing before our eyes.
The presidency will become a constant focus in ways not seen since the height of Ronald Reagan's struggle against the so-called Evil Empire. Reporting on the military, the spy services, diplomacy and global terrorism will take center stage after years of back-burner status. No longer will exploding bombs in Israel or the United Kingdom seem quite so distant. And while sports, entertainment and gossip will edge their way back into the limelight, there may well be less space – and less appetite – for frivolity and celebrities.
Media obsessions that no longer seem very important:
Gary Condit.
The lockbox.
Microsoft's browser.
Rudy's divorce.
Al Gore's beard.
The Redskins quarterback controversy.
Journalists, like politicians, are adept at sensing the public mood. If America is at war, as so many pundits have been declaring, the media battalions are clanking into action on terrorism – even if, unlike in Korea or Vietnam, there is no clear battlefield to cover.
President Bush will be the most visible symbol of this coming era. "If any of us were wondering whether presidents were relevant any more, last week showed us in a big way that they are," says historian Michael Beschloss. "That will drive the way journalism evolves."
He says the strong presidency – and the mushrooming of the White House press corps – "was totally a product of the Great Depression and World War II and the Cold War."
But those events also underscore how the media's role has changed. During World War II, reporters wore uniforms and submitted to censorship. During Vietnam, much of the press turned against that agonizing conflict, fueling the Nixon administration's covert war against the Fourth Estate. In the Persian Gulf War a decade ago, news organizations openly chafed at restrictions on their movements imposed by the first Bush administration, which was led in part by Colin Powell.
"We have lived in an environment where the media in this country has been able to establish an independent and adversarial relationship, even when American lives could be lost," says Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press. "I think the government and the military are going to want to renegotiate the deal."
The terms will include "what is considered fair game, what is considered appropriate lines of questioning, what is reasonable disclosure of embarrassing information," he said.
As became apparent during the battle over Kuwait, the public tends to side with the government, not the press, in wartime. Nearly eight in 10 Americans in a Times Mirror poll supported the Pentagon's Gulf War restrictions on journalists, and 60 percent said there should be more limits.
"There's going to be pressure to get in line – much more pressure for self-censorship and coerced censorship of any information on what our intelligence capabilities are," Jones says.
On Friday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer asked the media not to report Bush's travel plans in advance to foil any potential attacks. "We don't want to do anything to violate national security," NBC's Tim Russert said.
Like it or not, the Internet Age media are an independent and instantaneous force. Beschloss recalls the country rallying around John Kennedy after his 1962 televised speech disclosing that the Soviets had installed missiles in Cuba, triggering a nuclear crisis.
These days, says Beschloss, "the missiles would have been discovered by the press a week earlier. You would have had cable television pundits saying, 'Why isn't Kennedy doing anything? How did he let this happen?'‚"
The dilemma for journalism in reporting on the likes of Osama bin Laden and American intelligence efforts is that, as in garden-variety criminal cases, nearly all the information comes from authorities. That means reporters are often fed self-serving leaks designed to make the agency in question look good, put pressure on targets or advance a particular agenda. It also means, as was all too apparent last week, that the information sometimes turns out to be wrong.
When ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News reported Thursday that five people had miraculously been rescued from the World Trade Center rubble, they said they were relying on New York police officials. It turned out that the rescue involved two firefighters who had fallen into a hole hours earlier, not people trapped for more than two days. Washingtonpost.com also carried the erroneous story.
On Thursday night, several networks trumpeted word that authorities had detained suspects with knives who were trying to board flights at Kennedy and LaGuardia airports. "Armed Groups Caught Boarding N.Y. Flights," said a banner headline in Friday's Washington Post. "TERROR SUSPECTS ARRESTED," blared the New York Post, which said, "The Middle Eastern men were carrying knives or pen-knives."
The coverage was understandable, perhaps, since the New York airports were promptly shut down. But federal officials said the next day that none of the 10 suspects had weapons, and most were quickly released.
The 24-hour coverage has annoyed many viewers by periodically turning tragedy into showbiz. Why did the networks keep showing the planes crashing into the World Trade Center as scene-setters for their opening credits? As "bumpers" before commercial breaks? As video wallpaper while talking heads are opining? As a split-screen diversion during official briefings?
The sheer repetition seemed to trivialize and dehumanize the tragedy as viewers watched the fireballs again and again, the towers collapsing again and again, the people dying again and again.
In quieter times, journalism has a tendency to pump up routine stories into a "budget crisis" or "health care crisis" or "urban crisis," not to mention all the semi-scandals and mini-scandals that are portrayed as threatening the country's moral fiber. As of Sept. 11, 2001, that sort of media hype may no longer be necessary.
Last week's New Republic carried these words: "Imagine, for a second, that the United States knew that one of Osama bin Laden's men was on his way to Manhattan with a bomb: No sane American would argue against intercepting, and even 'assassinating,' him to prevent the atrocity that would transpire."