Journalism after September 11

Journalism after September 11
I found this article to be very similar in regards to all the questions that we have been asking in class. Just like we raised questions about the uncertain future of people’s lives, emotions and progress to move on and change; it talks about all of these things with journalism. Our government and most every other department like fire and police were pretty much disorganized because no one dreamed of something like this happening, the same way the reports of the tragedy from our journalism industry were disorganized. Our Journalism society had to think about something that they were not used to dealing with. How do they report the events and keep their emotions aside, after all they are human beings. It becomes especially hard for them to remain professional when most of them saw it with their own eyes. Another big question explored is how does the media report the events but still comply with the what the government wants them to show. The question being should they comply with the government? The whole question of patriotism of the reporters and the different media channels come up a lot. I think this quote in the introduction from Matthew Cooper pretty much says it all, “ There’s plenty of flag waving going on but our job isn’t to join in,” he wrote. “Our job is to report what’s happened and to ask questions. It’s to explore the war effort, not to be a cheerleader for it; it’s to explain the new national solidarity, not to help forge it. Others can do that.” I think the media by doing their job properly are doing their American duty. The media at the time did what they had to do with the knowledge they had but certainly they could have done things differently.
From this tragedy, the media got a chance to explore and grow and change their ways of doing things but unfortunately we are backing to doing things the same way.