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DARTS & LAURELS
BY
GLORIA COOPER
LAUREL
to America's Fourth Estate --the broadcast and cable networks,
which, only a few hours past the dawn's early light on that infamous
September morning, rose to put the public interest above monetary
concerns, delivering continuous commercial-free coverage to a
stricken world desperate for news; the television anchors, whose
steady professionalism through the perilous days that followed
proved how apt the term "anchor" truly is; the reporters
and photographers for the area's newspapers and magazines, TV
and radio stations, wire services and Web sites, who, with little
regard for their own personal safety, prowled Ground Zero, bringing
to light oh, such tales from the towering tons of rubble; the
distant correspondents, scrambling to gather background and reaction;
the editorialists, columnists, and commentators, patriotic yet
prudent, supportive yet measured, respectful of the country's
leaders yet not unduly reverent of all their actions; the editors
and publishers, news directors and producers, writers and researchers,
scrapping material made suddenly irrelevant and racing to assemble
the extra edition, the special issue, the instant documentary,
the real-time report.
Even as they transmitted the awful, incomprehensible images, the
media were sending -- more precisely, if you will, the media were
-- a message with another meaning. For however arbitrary the framework
of the long-established news process, however imperfect the categories
by which it organizes day-to-day experience, the implicit rationality
of the very process itself, manifest in familiar forms one could
read and watch and hear, gave reassuring, if unconscious, testimony
to the triumph of order over chaos. Here, for example, was Judy
Woodruff, hair awry and make-up long gone, marshaling facts of
insane, depraved horror in her usual matter-of-fact way. Here
came The New York Times, covering monumentally a monumental crisis
at once national, global, and heartbreakingly local -- and without
missing a beat, examining in the paper's various separate sections
the less obvious reverberations in every conceivable aspect of
the city's domestic life. Here, excusably a little bit late, was
the weighty Wall Street Journal, the staff having set up shop
at the Dow Jones corporate facility in New Jersey after fleeing
its World Financial Center quarters, fearing all the while (mistakenly,
it thankfully turned out) that editor Paul Steiger hadn't made
it out. Here in hand at last was the cartoon-bereft New Yorker,
wrapped in a Spiegelman cover of haunting, wordless eloquence.
Here was Katie Couric, after a hasty summary of other news of
note that had been obscured by the attack, confessing to feeling
"embarrassed" about so many past Today shows spent on
so much trivia. Here was Dan Rather, standing in, it seemed, for
countless less visible colleagues when, during a late-night talk
show interview, his controlled passion for the story he felt destined
to cover gave way to tears of anguish. No one doubted for a moment
he'd be back tomorrow, tight-jawed as ever, reporting on "part
of our world."
Of course, there were lapses. Inaccuracy. Opportunism. Misjudgment.
Exploitation. Warmongering. Of course, there will be more -- already,
enough to fill a dispiriting page or two of Darts. But somehow,
right now, the less glorious aspects of our independent press
don't seem to amount, as Rick once said to Ilsa, to a hill of
beans. Overwhelmingly, in those early defining moments of mid-September,
the nation's news media conducted themselves with the courage,
honesty, grace, and dedication a free society deserves. In that
tragic emergency, America's journalists knew what they needed
to do. And, for the record, they did it.
The Darts
& Laurels column is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's deputy executive
editor. Nominations may be addressed to her by mail,
phone (212-854-1887), or email (gc15@columbia.edu).
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