Groups 3-4, Journalism After 9/11

In the forward and introduction of Journalism After 9/11 by Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, was in my opinion not an overly important topic. This entire article asked is whether journalist, news reporters and the like should have any right to report on 9/11 like they did, because many felt that there was too much propaganda and tabloid articles surfacing, that it was almost making a mockery out of 9/11. The authors also talk about how many of the news anchors from the well known even news channels like NBC, ABC, and CBS were harassed and were written about as having either no right to talk about 9/11, or report they way they do. The article is long and drawn out, I felt it was a waste of time, because I feel that the people reporting on 9/11, either right after the event or later on have every right to say and broadcast the news however they like, its their job!

One passage that is quoted and makes a lot of sense states that “the images were terrifying to watch, yet the coverage was strangely reassuring because it existed with such immediacy, even when detailed information was scarce. Imagine how much worse the nightmare would have been if broadcasting had been destroyed. On a day of death, television was a lifeline to what was happening” (Quoted in Journalism After 9/11). Of course there will be articles out there that are so flamboyant and over done, and sometimes not even reporting the truth, that’s why it is out job as citizens to pick and choose the material we want to read, from which sources we feel are credible, and be educated about the information being distributed, that’s what we have been learning in college for some odd years!

Besides, all of us who didn’t see it first hand, but watched it on TV, were deffinetly glued to out TV’s while the reporters did the best they could to either figure out what was going on or how to get the best coverage of the event, because we all wanted to see more. One Fox News vice presedent who was quoted saying “‘I think at first out audience and all the television news were like moths to the [screen]…We are addicted to the video of the horrific event’” (Quoted in Journalism After 9/11). Without the news coverage, we all would have been either left with our radios or completely in the dark, the news will always be the news, cause we want to know, we are a nation that thrives on information, being in the know.

Alicia