From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Neutral in the Newsroom
The media have trouble grasping that we're at war.
Shortly after the memorial service held, last month, amid the still smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, CNN's new chairman issued an exceptionally pointed memo. In it, he directed CNN reporters to balance their war coverage, to supply the context for the American bombing raids and to beware being used by Taliban propagandists.
The need for such directives was clear to him, Walter Isaacson says--that Oct. 28 service would probably be the last televised memorial. Furthermore, he noted in a conversation last week, there would now be less and less coverage of the terrorist attacks, and their victims, just as the networks were about to be flooded with video coming out of Afghanistan showing bombings and civilian casualties. He concluded that something had to be done to ensure that the atrocities that had caused the U.S. to go to war not be obscured.
The something turned out to be the memo to CNN's international correspondents--a breed not exceptionally renowned for their devotion to balance--which instructed them to include, in their dispatches about civilian casualties matters like the Taliban's propensity to use civilians as shields. The directive said it would be desirable, also, to remind viewers from time to time that the Taliban harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 people.
If news of this memo elicited a certain amount of harumphing--from other news organizations--Mr. Isaacson still had an immeasurably better week than David Westin, president of ABC News. As a fair quarter of the world now knows, Mr. Westin delivered a lecture, in late October, at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. There (the subject having turned to September 11) he took a question from a member of the audience who wanted to know whether he considered the Pentagon a legitimate military target--a fateful query for Mr. Westin, whose reply would soon travel far and wide, not without cause.
"I actually have no opinion on that," he informed the audience. Further, said Mr. Westin, it was important he have no opinion on that because he thought his job of running a news organization made him "feel strongly" that he should not "take a position this was right or wrong."
It was a reply soon to achieve semi-immortal status, thanks to C-Span's broadcast of this event. In the furor that followed, the ABC news head delivered clarifications--the attack on the Pentagon was, he said, criminal and without justification, and he also tendered apologies for any harm his original statement might have caused. The only harm done, needless to say, was to Mr. Westin and perhaps to Disney corporate heads dizzily trying to fathom what he could have been thinking.
There is, of course, no mystery about that. Mr. Westin's response was the logical result of decades of religiously held belief in the special vocation of journalists--an order of fact-seekers sworn to neutrality, divested of all allegiances that cumber the minds of ordinary citizens. The kind of people who know, for instance, whether they think a terrorist attack on the Pentagon was a legitimate act. Unlike Mr. Westin, who--having absorbed the above noted religious tenets of journalism today--found himself telling Columbia students that it would not be "doing a service to the American people" if he, a journalist, said it was wrong that the Pentagon got hit.
Not everyone in journalism, to be sure, holds with such views. Still there can be no doubt that one of the terrors that have long haunted newspeople is of seeming to violate the neutrality rule--a considerable problem, in the current circumstance. Even Tom Brokaw--the man who brought us "The Greatest Generation"--is reported to have explained, a few weeks ago, that he didn't want to wear an American flag pin on air lest he give the impression he supported government policies across the board. Now, nobody needs Tom Brokaw sporting a flag pin, nor to give reasons why he will or will not. Still his explanation says a good deal about the reach of the proscriptions that hold sway in newsrooms these days, and the confusions they have wrought. The flag is, of course, the emblem not of the government but rather of the entire country, the press included.
The reporters who covered the greatest generation's war did not, despite their American uniforms, fail to question authority nor did they accept official stories without question, as many journalists today like to think. They were bitter about censorship, and what they called "sugar-coating" for the folks back home. They were appalled at war bulletins that gave, as one correspondent wrote, "the impression we were bowling over the enemy every time our handful of bombers dropped a few pitiful tons."
Still, there is no denying the tone of these American combat reporters, all of them conspicuously lacking in concerns about neutrality. In the foxholes, in the jungles and on the bombing runs, the only terror was of the war that might fail. Nor did they repress language that might suggest which side they favored--words like the ever-present "we."
"We are producing at home," Ernie Pyle wrote from Tunisia, in 1943, "and we are hardening overseas. Apparently it takes a country like America about two years to become wholly at war. We had to go through that transition period of letting loose of life as it was. . . . I can't see yet when we shall win, or over what route geographically or by which of the many means of warfare. But no longer do I have any doubts at all that we shall win."
It probably still takes a country like America two years to recognize, fully, that we are in a war--even given the attacks on our own soil, in two of our greatest cities. If CNN's reporters run out of ways to introduce context for the war America has undertaken, they can always air tape of the New York City memorial Mr. Isaacson spoke of.
There they would find, after the crowd had nearly all departed, the stony-eyed boy of 17 or so, still holding his father's picture up to be seen--a sword in the air. They would find the moment recorded by one of CNN's own reporters, who talked to one of the bereaved families wandering dazed around the ruins, and, like a lot of others here, clutching face masks they hardly bothered to wear. Why had she come here today to this difficult place, correspondent Gary Tuchman asked the woman whose husband was one of the Aon employees killed September 11.
She had to be here, came the swift, agonized answer. "I had to breathe the air--I had to fill my lungs up with him," she told the reporter in that wasteland filled with mourners. In this place a news director could find enough context for several decades.
