TV scores, stumbles in attack coverage

At first, we couldn't look away; later repetition and rumor replaced news. Coming up next: How will TV cover possible military action?

By ERIC DEGGANS

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 24, 2001

It was a pacifier and an irritant. A source of up-to-the-minute, objective information and wild inaccuracies. A conduit for cathartic emotional release and a flash point for America's building sense of dread and paranoia.

Unless you were standing in Manhattan or Washington, D.C., when the hijacked passenger planes hit their targets, television probably served as your primary connection to the terrorist attack.

And now that the cleaning up and healing have begun, it's time to ask:

How did TV do? And is it, like so many institutions, irrevocably changed by the flood of events since Sept. 11?

The answers, at least from this critic: a) As well as could be expected, b) Probably not.

The flood of news coverage brought mistakes, but in the exact reverse of our last media spectacle -- November's election debacle, when TV networks somehow managed to call the wrong victor in Florida's end of the presidential race twice, and spent weeks recovering their credibility with quality, in-depth reporting.

This time, the media rose to the challenge best in the early days, chronicling exactly how the planes hit the World Trade Center, instantly transmitting images of the devastation at the Pentagon and getting emotive, moving reports of survival and loss on the air with a minimum of panic or missteps.

CNN scored hours after the attack with videophone images of a Taliban press conference and shelling in Afghanistan (turns out the explosions were part of their ongoing civil war). Its newly hired star anchors, former ABC anchor Aaron Brown and ex-Fox News Channel face Paula Zahn, became symbols of steady coverage in a single, powerful stroke.

But as coverage played on, what first was unbelievable began to grow wearying.

ABC anchor Peter Jennings, reassuring in his rolled-up shirt sleeves and calm manner in the first few days, seemed a little too casual by the Sept. 14 memorial service. Howard Lutnick, chairman of the Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage firm, told a heart-rending tale of losing an estimated 700 workers in the World Trade Center collapse on the nation's morning shows; by the time his words were aired and re-aired that evening, they had joined a mind-numbing flood of similar accounts.

Images of the planes striking the World Trade Center used at the start of some network and cable channel reports, informative and spellbinding at first, began to infuriate viewers who hated seeing such a gruesome display reduced to video wallpaper.

The images had an effect. More than eight in 10 viewers among 1,200 surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported watching wall-to-wall TV news coverage. (More than 79-million viewers watched over 11 networks on Sept. 11, according to Nielsen Media Research.)

Viewers gave the media high marks, with 89 percent noting an excellent or good performance. (CNN earned top honors among TV news providers, with 24 percent saying they performed best, followed by ABC News, Fox News and NBC News.) But 71 percent also noted the coverage depressed them, up from 50 percent during 1991's Persian Gulf War.

By Sept. 17, ABC News had decided to restrict footage of the airplanes hitting the Trade Center from its airwaves without well-thought-out justification. Other TV news outlets soon promised similar restraint.

Before long, it was obvious that the same emotional connection that made TV images of the airliner crashes so powerful -- wiring the moment's horror directly to our collective consciousness -- also proved TV's biggest flaw.

Television journalism has always been an artful dance between emotion and reason, balancing the objective distance needed for quality news reporting with the emotional power moving pictures often provide. Overloaded on sadness, anger, hope and fear in the days immediately following the attack, TV news had to struggle back to more objective, reasoned footing.

"We were asking our news anchors to do two contradictory things: To be the people we connect with a surrogate fathers or friends, and also to be a straight, efficient reporting machine," said Robert Thompson, head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television. "No wonder journalism tradition tends to be overtaken."

Nowhere was that dichotomy more apparent, strangely enough, than during late-night host David Letterman's return to the airwaves on Sept. 17.

Combining a sharp intellect with a refreshingly down-to-earth approach, Letterman took the stage with no music and no humor, offering emotional words on New York's response to the tragedy and saying Mayor Rudy Giuliani's request for normality brought him back to TV.

Later, Rosie O'Donnell, Craig Kilborn, Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno would attempt similar speeches. But none would do it as well.

Letterman's composure contrasted with his first guest, CBS anchor Dan Rather, who choked back tears twice on air and offered hazy, uninformed answers to simple questions, such as "Why do these terrorists hate us so much?"

Instead of noting the considerable anger over America's abandonment of Afghanistan after its war with Russia, Arab civilian deaths during the Persian Gulf War and America's ties to Israel, the anchor suggested Islamic fundamentalists were jealous of the United States and cited the lyrics to America the Beautiful.

As network TV's new fall season follows Letterman's lead this week -- including three shows based on CIA-type spy agencies -- you can't help wondering if America's media culture will have learned anything from the events of Sept. 11.

"We ought to pay attention to how the notion of returning to sitcoms and entertainment programming has been completely linked to patriotic duty," said Syracuse University's Thompson. "You see someone on CNN being interviewed because she's going to a Broadway play . . . like her patriotic duty is going to see The Producers. I don't think it's entirely wrong, but it is interesting."

Just as a crisis can galvanize individuals, the struggle to mount what became the longest-running commercial-free news event in the history of television highlighted the differences in news organizations.

CNN, by far the most-watched cable news network in the early aftermath, proved its hard news and international focus with restrained reporting and a valuable overseas perspective. NBC News used vast resources spread over MSNBC, CNBC and NBC to provide impressive domestic coverage, bolstering anchor Tom Brokaw with MSNBC's Brian Williams and the Today show's Matt Lauer and Katie Couric.

Every TV news outlet made its share of missteps. But Fox News Channel's aggressive approach was particularly troubling, rashly predicting 10,000 casualties on Sept. 11, displaying the number of a mental health counseling service controlled by the Church of Scientology, showing a headline that claimed a Tampa student was involved in the attack and broadcasting hawkish comments from evangelist Pat Robertson, signature personality Bill O'Reilly and former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.

"The shrillness in some of what Fox is doing, I don't think plays well at all," said David Klatell, academic dean at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. "The situation is so dramatic in and of itself, I think sometimes the best thing reporters can do is take a very measured tone."

As the crisis progressed, hopeful searchers, earnest rescue workers and a small number of hoaxers and scam artists birthed a network of misinformation that stung TV news outlets many times.

News that five firefighters had been rescued after being under the rubble for days, that a policeman rode the debris down safely from the 82nd floor, that ten trapped police officers were in contact with rescuers by cell phone -- all were reported on TV, and all were untrue.

Giuliani pleaded with reporters to stop airing unconfirmed reports. "Some of it is meaningless, ultimately, because it gets corrected, but some of it could be very, very dangerous and very emotionally damaging," he noted.

After the first weekend, media outlets began to realize how vulnerable they were to rumors and hoaxes, and the end of continuous coverage allowed time to think and gain valuable perspective.

Still, there were problems. Coverage of Wall Streeters returning to work Sept. 17 seemed to focus on mostly white, mostly middle-class business types (CBS' 60 Minutes and ABC News, in particular, followed financial workers from their suburban homes to their jobs).

It took National Public Radio to offer a story Tuesday on the many minimum wage and working class folks also left without paychecks and workplaces.

In the end, the most lasting effect on the nation's media may be financial.

Already this year, media outlets had implemented significant layoffs in the wake of an economic slowdown that had slashed advertising budgets.

Experts now say broadcasters likely lost $300-million to $1-billion nationwide -- more than $2-million locally -- during their commercial-free reports. Losses may continue as advertisers remain uncomfortable placing commercials next to crisis coverage.

And faced with possible overseas military action that may require news organizations to rebuild and restaff foreign bureaus shut by economic concerns, a question emerges.

Will the media be ready?

"Here we are faced with why people watch news," said Carl Gottlieb, of Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism. "And you can't just drop a reporter in Afghanistan and expect them to make sense of a situation that has a deep history. I hope the networks learn a lesson from this."

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