How the Media
By Robert Irishman, Capital Times Staff Writer
many reflections and
memorials concerning
the events of that day.
Thursday,September
12, in the Morrison
Gallery of the Penn
State Harrisburg Library, members of a
panel discussed how the media (both
national and international) handled the
tragedy and what its role is in times of cri
sis.
“We saw the best and worst of the news
media on 9/11,” said Tim Riggs, former
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge’s press
secretary at the time of the attacks. He
pointed out that the positives outweighed
the negatives.
He added that news anchormen Tom
Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather
showed great stamina and dedication in
keeping viewers informed and said, “they
were heroic in their own way.” Riggs went
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on to say that the circumstances were evi
dence of the danger that reporters and pho
tographers face in covering such events.
Riggs also said that this showed what jour
nalism is like today and will be like in the
future. “There is no deadline anymore,” he
said. “In a time of crisis you need 24-hour
instant reporting.”
Juraj Kittler, a native Czechoslovakian
journalist, talked about the European press
and demonstrated how it reflected
European attitudes toward the tragedy and
the United States. He was surprised to see
a lot of pro-American patriotism in France
following the tragedy, but said that a few
months later a French newspaper carried
the headline “Are We All Americans?”
which showed a reluctance to be associated
with the U.S.
Kittler also said that a Belgian paper
called the United States “helpless” and “a
failure” because air strikes and raids on
Afghanistan did not capture Osama bin
Laden.
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PSH communications professor, Eton
Churchill, said, “We’ve changed from
telling stories to presenting participation in
stories.” He said that we no longer tell, but
we show. An example he used was during
the Gulf War how cameras were placed on
bombs and we saw images of the targets in
Iraq that the bombs were headed towards.
Churchill also said that reporters were lim
ited in the kind of stories they could tell.
The public (and the press) wanted certain
categories of stories dealing with 9/11.
Those were testimonials or “Where were
you?” stories, victim stories, hero stories,
and survivor stories.
All agreed that the media had one of the
most important roles in the tragedy: keep
ing the public informed. This was evident
in one comment that said the people watch
ing CNN at home knew more of what was
going on than did the firefighters in the
World Trade Center.
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