FAILING THE AMERICAN PUBLIC WITH 9/11 COVERAGE
JOURNALISM STUDENTS LEARN IN THEIR FIRST REPORTING COURSE that the standard formula for writing a news story is to answer the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. When America’s leading news organizations covered the biggest event of the early 2000s, they dutifully reported answers to the first four of these questions. The titans of the journalism world faltered, however, when it came to answering the fifth question relevant to 9/11: Why did terrorists attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
Americans were bewildered and looking for answers as to what had motivated a group of men to strike out against the United States in such a horrific way. But although the news media gave their readers and viewers a great deal of information about what had happened—as well as who was involved, along with when and where the attacks occurred—and although the public was hungry for more, news organizations fell short because they allowed that motivation question to go largely unanswered. That missing information was essential for people not only to understand the event but also to help them decide how their country should respond to the attacks.
Answering the why question required the news media to provide the public with substantive material about a number of complex and multi-faceted international issues and historical relationships, as well as information about the cultural and religious differences that were related to those issues and relationships. To do this, reporters needed to consult with Middle East experts and diplomats, along with leaders of countries in the region.
The news media’s failure to rise to the challenge of giving the public this content immediately after the attacks had enormous consequences. For when the nation’s journalists left the why question unanswered, George W. Bush gave his explanation for the attacks—an explanation that was driven by political strategy.
By the time the nation’s news organizations finally began, in earnest, to answer the why question with the depth and nuance it required, a critical mass of the American public had already accepted Bush’s easy-to-understand explanation for the 9/11 attacks. The president then built on this narrative to justify leading the country into the Iraq War.1
Mainstream Journalism Answers the First Four Ws
One way to begin an assessment of how mainstream journalism covered 9/11 is to look at how the most influential news organization in the country reported on the event. Examining the New York Times’s treatment of this particular story also makes sense because the most dramatic of the attacks occurred in the paper’s hometown.
On the morning after the terrorists turned four commercial jetliners into weapons of mass murder, the front page of the Times was dominated by a heart-stopping photo of a ball of fire exploding outward from the south tower of the World Trade Center. Surrounding that image were four more photos and four lengthy news stories that contained a total of 8,000 words.
© Dan Howell/Shutterstock
The writing on page one was compelling, with the lead story beginning, “Hijackers rammed jetliners into each of New York’s World Trade Center towers yesterday, toppling both buildings in a hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke and leaping victims.”2
Throughout its coverage, the Times focused on the human loss. “The area around the World Trade Center resembled a desert after a terrible sandstorm,” the lead story stated. “Parts of buildings, crushed vehicles and the shoes, purses, umbrellas and baby carriages of those who fled lay covered with thick, gray ash, through which weeping people wandered in search of safety, each with a story of pure horror.”3
A second article highlighted the human toll—the number of deaths ultimately totaled almost 3,000—by quoting three dozen men and women who’d been at Ground Zero when the attack had occurred. “For several panic-stricken hours yesterday morning, people in Lower Manhattan witnessed the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the unthinkable. ‘I don’t know what the gates of hell look like, but it’s got to be like this,’ said John Maloney, a security director for an Internet firm with offices in the trade center. ‘I’m a combat veteran from Vietnam, and I never saw anything like this.’”4
Second on the list of the most important organizations to consider when evaluating the news media’s coverage of the huge story is the Washington Post, the dominant journalistic voice in the geographic area where the attack on the Pentagon took place.
The Post placed considerable emphasis on the issue of safety. “Amid all the sadness and all the carnage,” the paper stated, “there were questions about lax security and inadequate intelligence, as Americans tried to fathom how such a catastrophe could happen with no apparent warning. On at least two of the airliners, according to federal officials, the hijackers were armed with nothing but knives. How did they get away with it?”5
Though the Times and Post covered myriad dimensions of the story on the day after the attacks, neither paper reported on the terrorists’ specific motivations. The closest they came was the Times saying that the scale of the multi-targeted operation “led many officials and experts to point to Osama bin Laden, the Islamic militant,” as the perpetrator, and the Post reporting that “federal officials suspect the involvement of Islamic extremists with links to fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden and his terrorist web, known as al-Qaeda.”6
The front pages of other major papers followed the same general pattern. The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal were praised for their 9/11 coverage. The papers were lauded for documenting the human dimensions of the tragedy in vivid detail while also asking tough questions about why the US intelligence community had been caught off-guard.7
TV news received accolades for its coverage of the attacks as well. Particularly powerful, media critics observed, were the network broadcasts on the morning of the event—especially the dramatic live shots of the second jetliner hitting the World Trade Center’s south tower and the two iconic buildings collapsing, as if the scene had been created by the special effects artists at a Hollywood movie studio.8
Despite the praise, however, the fact remains that, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, none of the Brahmins of the news world told their readers or viewers what specific grievances had motivated bin Laden and his operatives.9
The White House Answers the Fifth W
Although the nation’s journalistic outlets failed to say what drove the terrorists, George W. Bush did. Many observers had attributed the president’s pre-9/11 political success partly to his ability to transform complex issues into black-and-white terms. He was soon displaying that talent on live television, stating that bin Laden had attacked the United States because terrorists are bad and Americans are good.10
“Today our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature,” Bush said within hours after the terrorist assault. The president followed that brief, simple, and easy-to-understand statement with, in his next breath, what amounted to a declaration of war. “The search is under way for those who are behind these evil acts,” Bush said. “I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.”11
By the end of that history-making day, Bush and his advisers had already crafted a clear message that they would repeat many times in the next several months and years, “Freedom itself was attacked this morning, and freedom will be defended.”12
The president’s message was much the same a week later when he spoke before a joint session of Congress—as well as a national TV audience. “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country,” he said. “Freedom itself is under attack.” Later in that speech, Bush stated point blank the question that mainstream journalists had failed either to ask or to answer: “Why do they hate us?” Immediately after asking the question, Bush gave an answer that was clear and decisive, saying, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble.”13
© Anthony Correia/Shutterstock
In a masterful move, the president also used that speech before Congress, with the whole world watching, to initiate what would prove to be a highly effective campaign to paint the war on terrorism as a broad initiative that would target an entity that he labeled “the global terror network.” Bush didn’t name the specific countries he believed to be members of that network, saying only, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”14
Despite Bush’s assertion that he was telling the public what had motivated the terrorists to attack the United States, he made no mention of Osama bin Laden’s criticisms of American foreign policy.
The country’s leading news organizations didn’t point out the president’s failure to articulate bin Laden’s grievances. Indeed, some of the most widely respected names in American journalism soon went out of their way to echo the same messages the president had been sending—and that were resonating with the American public. The New York Times wrote, “The terrorists who organized and carried out the attack did it solely out of hatred—hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage.” CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather went on his network’s late-night talk show to express his views, which also seemed to parallel the president’s. When Late Show host David Letterman asked Rather what had motivated the terrorists, the newsman said, “Who can explain madmen, and who can explain evil? They see themselves as, ‘We should be a great people, but we’re not,’ and it drives them batty. That’s the only explanation.”15
The Internet Takes a Leap Forward
When journalism failed to report the specific grievances that had motivated the terrorists, many perplexed Americans turned to alternative sources of information by going to a platform that 9/11 played a major role in moving onto the global radar screen: the Internet.
The news media criticism magazine Columbia Journalism Review would later report that the terrorist attacks provided the Internet’s “great leap forward” as a source of information. “Many people were not satisfied with what they read and saw in the mainstream media,” the magazine wrote. “Or it was all the ‘Why do they hate us?’ sort of teeth-gnashing. There was a deep dissatisfaction with that.”16
One document that legions of Internet users found when they sought answers to the why question was a statement bin Laden had issued in 1998. The “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders” had initially been published by an Arabic newspaper based in London, but by 2001 it had been reproduced on any number of websites, many of them accompanying the statement with commentary. The manifesto made it clear that bin Laden saw himself not as a terrorist but as a heroic defender of Muslims who wanted to fend off what he believed was a Western invasion that threatened his faith and culture much the way the Christian Crusades had done some 900 years earlier.17
The most chilling sentence in the document was bin Laden’s interpretation of how the Islamic prophet Mohammad would have responded to the actions of the United States. “In compliance with Allah’s order,” he said, “we issue the following fatwa [religious ruling] to all Muslims: To kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim.”18
According to the manifesto, the single most significant factor leading to the call for mass murder was the American military’s continued presence on Arab soil. “For over seven years,” the document stated, “the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula: plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors.” This statement referred to the 15,000 US soldiers who had remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Some Muslim leaders saw America’s operation of military bases in Saudi Arabia as a deliberate desecration of holy sites because two of Islam’s most sacred places—Mecca and Medina—are located in that country.19
A second specific grievance cited in the “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders” involved US support of Israel. “The Americans’ aim,” bin Laden stated, “is also to serve the Jews’ petty state.” According to experts whose comments accompanied the manifesto on many websites, bin Laden believed that America’s long-term strategy was to make Israel the dominant power in the Middle East, at least partly to control the region’s oil reserves. He alleged, therefore, that the United States was using its economic and military might either to weaken the other countries in the region—such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan—or to make those nations puppet regimes that would do America’s bidding.20
A third major criticism of US foreign policy articulated by the manifesto focused specifically on Iraq. The document stated that by 1998 the “crusader-Zionist alliance” had brought about the deaths of more than 1 million Iraqis, most of them civilians. Americans had targeted that particular country for “horrific massacres,” bin Laden wrote, because Iraq had been, before the Persian Gulf War, the strongest country in the Arab world and, therefore, the biggest obstacle the United States faced in its quest to make Israel the region’s dominant force.21
Many of the sites that reproduced the grievances questioned the statements in the manifesto. One that described itself as having been created “expressly to expose the evil of bigotry, extremism and hatred found in radical Islam,” for example, challenged bin Laden’s assertion that the United States was responsible for the deaths of 1 million Iraqis. “Nowhere can I find evidence to back that number up,” the site’s creator said. “Various sources estimate the Iraqi civilian and military casualties from the Gulf War at between 10,000 and 205,000.”22
Why Not the Why?
Because bin Laden’s grievances against the United States were readily available on the Internet but news organizations such as the New York Times and Washington Post didn’t report them, a logical question to ask is: Why didn’t they?
One possible answer to that question came in the news media criticism magazine American Journalism Review. After criticizing reporters and editors for not identifying the motivations of the terrorists immediately after 9/11, the magazine wrote, “During this time of national trauma, they feared putting forth anything smacking of criticism of the U.S. government. There were real concerns that, in the days immediately following the attacks, stories that explored the roots of anger toward the U.S. would appear to rationalize or excuse the tragedy.”23
In other words, news organizations steered clear of identifying the terrorists’ motivations because they were afraid that doing so might be interpreted as both unpatriotic and as an effort to justify the attacks.
Based on the firestorm of criticism that one liberal intellectual received after publishing an essay in the New Yorker, that fear was well founded. “Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world,’” Susan Sontag asked in the piece, “but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”24
Peter Carlson of the Washington Post instantly condemned Sontag. He called her piece “belligerent, self-righteous, and anti-American—astonishingly wrongheaded.” Carlson went on to say, “Regular people can be dim at times, but it takes a real intellectual to be this stupefyingly dumb.” Charles Krauthammer, whose syndicated column appeared in 150 newspapers across the country, also denounced Sontag, writing, “What she is implying is that because of these ‘alliances and actions,’ we had it coming. The implication is disgusting.”25
Building a Case for War
More important than speculating on why the news media didn’t report bin Laden’s grievances immediately after 9/11 is documenting what journalism’s failure allowed the White House to do. Propelled by his success at convincing the public that the attacks were motivated by the terrorists being evil and America being good, President Bush set out to build on that idea to justify going to war with Iraq.
The initial fighting began less than a month after 9/11 when US and British forces launched a bombing campaign in Afghanistan, the country where bin Laden was living at the time of the attacks. The stated purpose of the strikes was twofold: first, to weaken al-Qaeda, the network of Islamist militants that bin Laden had created to end foreign influence on the Muslim world, and, second, to weaken the Taliban, the repressive movement that prevented Afghan women from working and Afghan girls from receiving an education. After bombing the camps where al-Qaeda and the Taliban trained new recruits, US and allied troops took control of Afghanistan’s largest cities.26
During his State of the Union address in late January, the president said, “Our war on terrorism is well begun, but it is only begun.” The specific statements from his speech that received the most attention were that America’s enemies included all “regimes that sponsor terror” and that those rogue nations represented an “axis of evil.” When it came time for the president to name nations on that list, number one was Iraq, followed by Iran and North Korea.27
Vice President Dick Cheney was soon sending strong messages as well. In March 2002, he said of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, “This is a man of great evil. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons.” Five months later, Cheney updated that statement, saying, “Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”28
Cheney took the lead in communicating a second message that was even more central to the campaign to take the country to war: Iraq had been involved in 9/11. The vice president stated on NBC’s Meet the Press in September 2002, “There is a pattern of relationships going back many years between Iraq and al-Qaeda.” Cheney said the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had traveled to Czechoslovakia to meet with an Iraqi man to plot the attacks. “We have reporting that places Atta in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official,” Cheney said, “five months before the attack on the World Trade Center.”29
That statement by the vice president was a key factor in propelling both houses of Congress to pass a joint resolution authorizing the president to use force in Iraq. The vote was 296 to 133 in the House, 77 to 23 in the Senate.30
Bush later followed in Cheney’s footsteps by also connecting Iraq to 9/11. The president stated, “Iraq has sent bomb-making experts to al-Qaeda,” and another time he said, “Iraq has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda.” Bush also made the link by repeating Cheney’s assertion that “The lead hijacker met with an Iraqi intelligence official to plot the attacks.” And in an address to the nation, Bush not only conflated Iraq with the 9/11 terrorists but warned the public that another attack could occur at any time, saying, “The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country.”31
Although by the early spring of 2003 it was clear that the nation was on a course to war, at least one online news outlet spoke out against that action. Slate magazine quoted Czech President Vaclav Havel as saying that he’d told the White House there was no evidence that Mohamed Atta had ever met with an Iraqi intelligence official. Slate also opposed the United States going to war with a country struggling with enormous internal conflicts. “The Bush administration is in no shape—diplomatically, politically, or intellectually—to wage war with Iraq,” the magazine stated. “How is the administration going to handle Iraq’s feuding opposition groups, Kurdish separatists, and myriad ethno-religious factors?”32
On March 19, 2003, the Iraq War began.
America Pays a High Price
President Bush was soon boasting that US forces had defeated Iraq after a mere forty days of fighting and with only 139 American casualties. “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” he said. “Iraq is free.” He made that announcement while dressed in a flight suit and standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln against a backdrop of a huge banner that read “Mission Accomplished.”33
In fact, the war was plagued with problems from the outset. No weapons of mass destruction were found, and bin Laden escaped capture on numerous occasions. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the Prague meeting that Cheney and Bush had used to link Iraq to helping al-Qaeda plan the terrorist attacks had never taken place and that bin Laden, in fact, disagreed with Iraqi secularism so fundamentally that he never would have cooperated in any way with Saddam or his followers. A Gallup Poll found that, by early 2005, a majority of Americans believed Bush had “deliberately misled the American public” about the reasons the country should go to war. And as the insurgents proved to be both large in number and effective in strategy, many observers began comparing the growing quagmire the United States was facing in Iraq to the one it had faced thirty years earlier in Vietnam.34
One of the darkest days for the White House came in January 2004 when Bush’s former treasury secretary revealed that the president had been fixated on attacking Iraq more than eight months before 9/11. “From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out,” Paul O’Neill said, “to show the world what U.S. policy is all about.” This former member of Bush’s inner circle said, in other words, that the president had gone to war not to avenge the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans but to advance a preconceived and highly politicized foreign policy agenda.35
Dramatic evidence that the public was dissatisfied with the Bush presidency came in the 2006 midterm election when control of both houses of Congress shifted, after a dozen years, from the Republicans to the Democrats. Exit polls showed that voters were concerned because economists estimated the Iraq War could eventually cost as much as $2 trillion and because the fighting had already taken the lives of 3,000 US soldiers.36
Although there was no national election to document dissatisfaction with the country’s news organizations, myriad critics were saying that journalists should have done more to block the White House effort to build support for invading Iraq. American Journalism Review sniped, “Prominent critical articles were rare,” and Columbia Journalism Review wrote, “The American media failed the country badly,” and “The success of Bush’s PR war was largely dependent on a compliant press that uncritically repeated almost every fraudulent administration claim.”37
While the critics denounced mainstream news organizations, they had positive comments about both the paid journalists and the unpaid observers who had raised their voices on the Internet. Slate magazine was praised, for example, for having pointed out, in advance of the war, that the White House wasn’t prepared for the level of hatred among the opposition groups within Iraq that eventually became a major problem in the war. In addition, American Journalism Review commended the bloggers who’d called it a “sorry spectacle” that reporters hadn’t challenged Cheney and Bush when they’d made the spurious connection between Iraq and 9/11.38
Still more praise went to the online magazine Salon for publishing critical comments about the president that mainstream news outlets labeled “sour grapes” and refused to print because they came from Al Gore, the man Bush had defeated in the 2000 election. “President Bush and his administration have been distorting America’s political reality by force-feeding the American people a grossly exaggerated fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger,” Salon quoted Gore as saying. “There is now voluminous evidence that the powerful clique inside the administration that had been agitating for war against Iraq seized upon the tragedy of 9/11 as a terrific opportunity to accomplish what they had not been able to do beforehand: Invade a country that had not attacked us and didn’t threaten us.”39
Another Internet venue that critics applauded was YouTube, the website that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. After Cheney repeatedly denied that he’d ever said there was a connection between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official, YouTube began replaying the video of the vice president saying exactly that.40
Too Little, Too Late
Although the country’s major news organizations failed to report bin Laden’s grievances against the United States immediately after 9/11, it should be acknowledged that they eventually discussed the topic—though generally neither directly nor prominently.
Three weeks after the attacks, the New York Times ran a profile of bin Laden that included the statement that he had grown to “hate an America that, as he saw it, had used its power to oppress the people of Islam.” That profile appeared on page five of the newspaper’s second section. Likewise, a full ten days after the attacks, the Washington Post reported that bin Laden considered the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia “an intolerable affront to 1,400 years of Islamic tradition, dating back to an injunction from the prophet Muhammed that there ‘not be two religions in Arabia.’” That statement in the Post appeared in the twelfth paragraph of a story that was published on page twenty.41
The specific dates on which those stories were published are significant. For the references to bin Laden’s grievances didn’t appear until many days after President Bush had already stated and then repeatedly reinforced his “terrorists are bad and Americans are good” explanation—which appeared on the front pages of newspapers and as the lead stories on network and cable news programs—that he presented both as the reason for the attacks and as justification for going to war.42
Because this chapter has been built around criticizing early news accounts of 9/11 for failing to answer the why question, it seems appropriate that the chapter should speak to another question related to that fifth of the Ws: Why was George W. Bush so determined to go to war with Iraq?
Several reasons have been suggested. The president may have wanted, as he’s said, to bring freedom to the people of Iraq. Or he may have wanted to control the production and distribution of the world’s oil supply. Or he may have wanted to weaken one of Israel’s fiercest enemies. Or he may have wanted to finish the job that his father, President George H. W. Bush, had started with the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Or he may have wanted to use what he believed would be an easy US victory in Iraq to intimidate other hostile nations around the globe.43
Whichever of these factors or combination of them served as Bush’s motivation, he failed the American public by starting the Iraq War, much as the news media failed the American public in their coverage of 9/11.
