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2004 Knight Lecture: David RemnickThe Press Since Sept. 11
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine
2004 Symposium Panel
Joann Byrd, former ombudswoman at The Washington Post
Noted journalists dissect media's readiness, reactions to Sept. 11 attacks
Stanford Report, May 26, 2004
U.S. intelligence analysts and law enforcement agencies weren't the only ones to fail the American people in the months and years before Sept. 11, 2001, the editor of The New Yorker magazine told a large audience in Kresge Auditorium last week. While many American newspapers and broadcasters responded to the terrorist attacks with bravery and intelligence, "we would be deluding ourselves terribly if we journalists think we were prepared for Sept. 11," said David Remnick, who gave the 2004 John S. Knight Lecture, titled "The Press Since Sept. 11," on May 17. Generally speaking, "our level of readiness was not much better than the readiness of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was painful -- and remains painful -- to recognize that."
Before joining The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1992, Remnick served as Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. The experience formed the basis of his book on the former Soviet Union, Lenin's Tomb, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1994. Remnick observed that for a decade or more after the collapse of communism, American mainstream journalism took "a triumphal nap, a vacation from sufficient awareness" about the tensions that were building in the Middle East. Throughout the 1990s, the evening news was evolving into "a kind of nonfiction show-business mill" that churned out "sustained narratives of developing gossip." Indeed, the biggest story of the decade concerned the sexual dalliances of the president of the United States. On Sept. 11, very few American reporters spoke functional Arabic, to say nothing of Urdu or Pashto, or had even read books about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Well-staffed news bureaus in the Middle East were few and far between. As Remnick explained, foreign bureaus are expensive to operate, and foreign stories, "unless they involve fallen princesses or an American presence," rarely attract readers or ratings. "For whatever historical and geographical reasons, this is a country in which foreign travel, and cosmopolitanism in general, is not a principal value," he said. Most middle-class Americans do not have passports -- the president himself traveled very little overseas before assuming office -- and "we're not a people who learn other languages very often, except the English we learn when we arrive as immigrants," he added. Remnick gave the American press a mixed report card for its performance during the period since Sept. 11. While embedded reporters' coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq "was far better and far deeper than anything since Vietnam," he said, journalists "could have been far more vigilant about accepting government information as holy writ" in the months before the war. The lapse, he said, was not a matter of "willful, ordinary negligence." Rather, it was the product of a volatile, emotional atmosphere - a "hall of mirrors" where reporters, unable to penetrate Saddam Hussein's regime, depended on defectors "who provided stories of weapons and weapons programs real and/or imagined." Those sources weren't the only ones who thought Saddam posed a threat, he added. Well-known, liberal public figures ranging from Bill Clinton to Vaclav Havel added weight to the idea that Iraq was a danger if left unconfronted. Remnick said more recent press coverage of Iraqi prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers "has been strong, but it was late." In a subsequent panel discussion at the Schwab Center on May 18, Remnick was joined by Joann Byrd, former ombudswoman at The Washington Post; David Talbot, founder of Salon.com; and Stanford history Professor David Kennedy, who specializes in the 20th-century history of the United States. Raul Ramirez, news and public affairs director of KQED Public Radio since 1991, moderated the discussion.
Byrd, who recently retired as editorial page editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, agreed that America's media "were pretty slow on the uptake after Sept. 11." Like the rest of the nation, journalists were in shock and grief after the terrorist attacks, and it took them quite a while to begin to think again like disinterested observers. "We were too eager to do whatever authorities -- who seemed to know more than we did -- were telling us to do." Since then, Byrd said she has been troubled by a deepening sense of mistrust among readers and viewers. More and more Americans believe that news organizations are operating largely to make money, and that journalists are motivated primarily by professional ambition and self-interest, rather than a desire to serve the public, she added. But perhaps the greatest element of mistrust is fear. "A lot of people believe that what America needs to defeat an incomprehensible enemy is for everybody to cooperate," so they are suspicious of journalists who challenge the government line, Byrd said. "How else can we explain why so many people came unglued, thinking it was an antiwar statement, when the Seattle Times published the photo of the caskets coming home from Iraq, or when Ted Koppel honored all the soldiers who'd been killed in Iraq? Hardly anybody gave that honorable piece of journalism the benefit of the doubt." Talbot, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine who founded the Internet magazine Salon.com in 1995, was particularly harsh in his assessment of the press' performance after Sept. 11. "I believe the press behaved terribly in the run-up to the war," he told the overflow audience, "and it was not until days and weeks ago that the press finally came alive in this country and began to perform its function, which is to be the watchdog of power." Unlike Remnick, Talbot thought the coverage of the Iraq invasion by reporters embedded with U.S. military units was "a shameful episode in American journalism, and a huge propaganda coup for the Pentagon and the White House." As for the faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction: "We know there were dozens of Deep Throats eager to tell the story. Where were all the Bob Woodwards then? ... We needed newspapers and websites and broadcasters to bring this to light before Iraq became the calamity that it is now, where even the opposition candidate John Kerry doesn't know how to get us out of there all too soon." Kennedy, who won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, was a little easier on the journalists. "I wonder if it's entirely fair to single out the press for the lack of this country's preparation for the events of 9/11," he said. Schools and universities also had a responsibility to educate Americans about the tensions brewing in the Middle East. If scholars who spent their whole lives studying the Soviet Union failed to predict its downfall, he said, "Why expect the press to be wiser?" Kennedy also gently chided Remnick for criticizing Americans' taste for entertainment over substantive news. He said the downbeat remarks reminded him of Jimmy Carter's infamous "malaise" speech of 1979. "'The good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army,'" Kennedy added, quoting Thomas Jefferson. "Maybe what we need of the press is a little less of the hair shirt ... and more of the creative and responsible application of the entertainers' art to the business of sustaining informed and critical citizens." Both the lecture and symposium were presented by the Knight Fellowships Program, which brings distinguished mid-career journalists from the United States and abroad to study at Stanford for an academic year. The program has sponsored an annual lecture since 1988.
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