From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Why We Do It
A need to know, a need to tell.
The Wall Street Journal has been celebrating this week the awarding of its Pulitzer Prize in the category of breaking news. The news was that on September 11 last year four American airliners loaded with human beings were used as weapons against the United States.
One plane was crashed into the U.S. Defense Department, two others into the World Trade Center, which burned and fell, and the passengers of the fourth plane forced it to crash into a quiet field in Pennsylvania. All of this in one morning. So it is true to say that this prize, and that of many others won this year, was born in awfulness. Born on a day whose details are by now known but whose moral and emotional content may never come fully into view, at least not for many of us.
The story of what The Wall Street Journal did that day has been told. Essentially, everyone working across the street at the World Financial Center evacuated, most likely not to return. What this leave-taking would mean to reporters is hard to explain. The metaphor isn't exact, but the decision to flee for good the building where you put out a newspaper every day would be like a captain abandoning his ship. Most reporters and editors would just as soon go down with the ship, hoping to get the final edition out.
My colleague John Bussey, the foreign editor, it has been told, had to be convinced to leave the building, even as he was broadcasting live for CNBC. It has not been told how my colleague on the editorial page, Phil Connors, sent an e-mail at midafternoon, saying he was at his usual desk on the dewindowed 9th floor, his PC was still online, and did anyone need any work done? Told, by e-mail, to get out, Phil grabbed a left-behind digital camera and dodged the cops to take startling photos of what was not yet known as Ground Zero. Of course we all wanted to do the same thing.
Winning a prize in April for writing about what was lost last September seems an appropriate occasion for reflecting on why we journalists do what we do. It is the case that some of the best journalism is done, and rewarded, when the story is humanity dropping into the lower depths--from war, catastrophes of nature, bad luck or the human penchant to do wrong and get caught.
What we do, or at least what we did that day, can be described in a way that not everyone might consider wholly admirable: That morning, there came a point when nearly every frightened person working at the southernmost end of lower Manhattan wanted nothing more in life than to get across a river and throw their arms around their loved ones. In the same circumstance, nearly every member of The Wall Street Journal downtown wanted nothing more in life than to get across that river and throw their arms around a PC.
Why do we chase these stories toward the printed page as if nothing else within the realm of God's handiwork mattered more--not personal safety or health, not the feelings of others, not any known authority? Having watched my colleagues do what they do for a long time, it is obvious that they respect one, and only one, mortal force--a deadline. The moment the presses roll. (For all the mayhem of September 11, the Journal's tenderhearted powers that be extended the deadline for their blasted-away reporting staff by about an hour.)
There are a variety of pious ways to think about newspapering, and indeed many in our business often seem to feel as if they are a kind of monastic order, selfless fathers and sisters of the word, able only to do good. But this notion of holding a "sacred trust" is not mainly what amazes me about press people. I'm fascinated by their compulsions.
In the world of government security, there is a phrase called "need to know." It means that for security reasons you only tell someone as much about any given subject as they need to know, no more. Newspaper people adhere to a slightly different version of this famous phrase. They would say: "I need to know and I need to tell."
The journalistic compulsion to know, to find out, and then to tell is really where the nobility in this business comes in, and why The Wall Street Journal moved heaven and earth to be in print Sept. 12.
All the remarkable effort made on September 11 was only half the story. The other half began, the more powerful part, the next morning, when nearly two million subscribers started to read. These people were sharing what might be called a common set of facts. This common set of facts, the news as it appears in a newspaper, allows people to talk intelligently with each other about public life, about something beyond themselves; it is the basis for talking about a community of interests--as small as the neighborhood or as big as the nation.
This notion of what the news does is not new, and one could go on about it. Often it is just good storytelling, and often that is quite enough. But there is a contemporary aspect worth comment.
We tell ourselves we live in the information age, which was preceded by the age of television. It is very apt that this new information flow is sometimes called a "data stream." That doesn't sound like news tome. It is something else and often useful, but it is not what any of us at the Journal would call news.
On September 11 Bryan Gruley, an editor in the paper's Washington bureau, received dispatches from 50 reporters. If we were television, Bryan Gruley would have asked all 50 reporters to recite for the audience everything they had in their heads. So we call them talking heads. Instead, the Page One story that resulted, "Nation Stands in Disbelief in Horror," which was the lead story in the Journal's Pulitzer submission, is a seamless account of September 11, as if done by a single person.
What that story did, what good newspapering does, is take the chaos that is the Information Highway and submit it to an organizing intelligence--first the reporters and after them a series of editors and copy editors who have the skills, in a few hours, to make that chaos coherent. In turn, we hope, the conversations that take place among our readers about the world we describe each day will also be coherent.
The daily grind of newspapering is too hard and relentless to think high thoughts all the time. But this moment makes it appropriate: Whether September 11 or this afternoon, newspaper people will do what they have to do to get the facts out, believing that what's news may lead to solutions for the pain, problems and violent events we witness and describe in words that become news after they are written, edited and published.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
