October, 2002

The Media After 9/11
Patricia Raybon, School of Journalism and Mass Communication

What Has Changed?

One year later, what has changed in the news media? In truth, not much, and not enough. Call it superficiality, but a kind of sublime myopia still pervades news messages, leaving too many Americans still at a loss to explain and understand the world in which we live.

Consider this recent example: On the Today Show, Gov. George Pataki of New York, reflecting one year later on the 9/11 tragedy, intoned to an empathetic Katie Couric: “They attacked us for our freedoms.” A great quote? Couric seemed to agree. Indeed, the statement may be comforting, assuring or even inspiring. But it isn’t true. While it may seem crass these days to criticize Gov. Pataki, or anybody else in New York, his remarks ­ and Katie Couric’s sympathetic response ­ prompt the question: Why do even high-ranking American officials persist in trivializing a real and complex situation; and why do the media participate in this simplification? The question seems relevant, indeed, considering that one year ago most Americans, in our shock, were asking: “Who are these people yelling ‘Death to America’ and why do they hate us?”

On our campus, even students of journalism, whose bread and butter is the news, struggled to understand the horrible event without having a wider context. In the J-School, it was disturbing, indeed, to watch journalists-in-training wring their hands over their ignorance of Islamic militarism and its implications for America. After all, we live in an “All News, All the Time” society, as many have called it. How have the news media been using all that air time? What, indeed, are the myths -- that is, the stories, or the cultural narratives -- by which the media inform us every day?

Do these myths, by being retold daily, reinforce our beliefs, but don’t necessarily deepen our understanding about who we are and what’s happening in the world? When a governor of one of the largest and most important states in the nation is asked to explain Sept. 11, why does he say, “they attacked us for our freedoms”? And why does even a seasoned journalist accept that as true, even when such logic hardly begins to explain the Al-Qaeda network and its objectives? To address such questions, I decided to step back from Sept. 11 and examine media messages that saturate American thinking everyday.

Some Meta Messages

Sadly, and not surprising, some obvious meta messages persist: Black people are athletes and criminals. White people are industrious and good-hearted. Media scholar Robert Entman, author of The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America, says of the racial prototypes: “At least on television, the market discourages serious, complicated reporting and promotes mayhem and fluff. This means more attention to crime without context, poverty without explanation, and less attention to the complicated histories and institutional practices that privilege Whites and burden Blacks.”

The same prototypical approach has burdened others on the margins of American news: children, gays, immigrants. Even American teens and young adults, it could be argued, are presented in presumptive ways through messages that, as Entman puts it, “confirm belief rather than deepen understanding of community.”

On the global scene, similar mythic messages persist in the news in ways that discourage better understanding of the world in which we live. Here are three such messages: America is best. Americans are heroes. Americans are the best heroes everywhere.

While these messages may inspire Americans, they suggest attitudes of arrogance and superiority that, indeed, may "read" as arrogance in other parts of the world. As Simon Li, foreign editor of The Los Angeles Times argues, “There are more ways of living and thinking than the American way. And there are different values. They exist and need to be taken into account.”

A Problem with Perspective

Still, other related messages also have become standards in news media, including this one: American deaths matter more than other deaths. David T. Z. Mindich, a journalism historian, who has written about this phenomenon, calls it “the bias of unequal deaths.” I call it the “arithmetic of news,” whereby one local death in a car crash or one scandalous homicide merits more air time or newspaper ink than hundreds of deaths in a tragedy far from “home.” So while it’s understandable that Americans convulsed over the deaths of Sept. 11 ­ almost 3,000 in a single, horrible morning ­ we might also consider, as Mindich reminds his students, that 5,000 people a day die of HIV/AIDS in Africa, some 3,000 innocent people choked to death on poisonous gas in Bohpal in Central India, on Dec. 2, 1984, and another 14,000 people, according to some estimates, have since died because of that Union Carbide tragedy.

Or consider the United Nations report, “Children on the Brink,” which details how 20 million children in Africa, and potentially even more in China, will be orphaned by AIDS by the end of this decade ­ just eight short years from now. Is it any wonder that observers around the world look at Americans and think we have a problem with perspective? Indeed, so pervasive are American media myths that, as Mindich and other critics have noted, Americans no longer have to listen to or read the news to feel as if they know what’s going on (and a shrinking news audience may confirm this trend).

Combating the Trend?

Instead, the stories just run together. So one suicide bombing looks no different from the next. One crime story looks no different from the next. One devastating flood or drought or famine or epidemic looks no different from all the others that have come before, and still are to come. It’s too easy to succumb, as Entman says, to “the daily diet of junk journalism and its superficial picture of the world.” In the present-day world, however, superficialities and misunderstandings can result in tragedy of horrific proportions. The simplistic paltriness of news information could injure our nation, and our world, beyond imagination.

How can American journalism combat this trend? First, with courage ­ courage to change our practices. Next, with faith ­ faith in our readers’ and viewers’ capacity to digest both the complex and the unsettling. Some journalists thought that the sheer magnitude of 9/11 would force the kind of media change that Americans so desperately need to live in and respond to a troubled, complex world. Sadly, however, we are still hoping ­ and we are still waiting.

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