Remembering the Day

The one year anniversary reminds us that news affects everyone

by Michele Salcedo

September 11. No longer merely a date, but code for a day that dawned bright and glorious in New York and Washington and brought terror literally out of the clear blue sky.

Just as people arrived for work, 19 men who thought they had nothing to lose and eternal happiness to gain flew three commercial jets freshly fueled for transcontinental flights into the gleaming twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., symbols of America's economic and military might.

The attacks themselves have been almost more than we can comprehend. It continues to be an overwhelming story to cover, emotionally and logistically. As the first anniversary of the attacks approaches, the news media will look in depth at what the events that day have wrought.

But what of the news coverage of the attacks, which especially at the beginning concentrated on firefighters and stockbrokers and the crimes of some Muslims. Did the coverage adequately reflect the diversity of those who died? Of those whose jobs and livelihood changed as a result of the attacks? Do we know what impact the events of Sept. 11 had on neighborhoods and communities near and far, and hence the very fabric of our country? The reviews are ambivalent.

"People were covering it as it came, without much thought about the mix," said Arlene Morgan, director of Columbia University's Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity. "In the beginning, especially, there were stories about firefighters. It was a white tragedy when you looked at who was being covered. It got better later on."

Because they were in the service of the public and their business was saving the lives of others, the stories of the firefighters' and police officers' horrific deaths in the rubble of the twin towers were facilitated by public information officers used to dealing with journalists. Easier access made their stories easier to tell. The stockbrokers and bond traders, accountants and attorneys who died lived more private lives, and their survivors wanted the deaths to retain that privacy. Their stories took more time to find, to report, to tell.

Many of the people of color who died worked in the offices perched in the towers, or at Windows on the World, the renowned restaurant on the 107th floor of Tower One. Most often, staff reporters, editors and producers of color found their stories and convinced their families to talk with them. Through their sources, gay and lesbian journalists interviewed the life partners of Sept. 11 victims who were homosexual.

Columnist Reka Basu, writing for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel at the time, told the heart-breaking story of a Bangladeshi woman who lost her husband in the Sept. 11 attacks and gave birth to their first son two days later.

Basu found the story through her mother, who works at the United Nations, and who accompanied Basu on the interview to translate. Basu could not have done the story otherwise. The stories of many of those more comfortable in a language other than English have yet to be told.

"We're hearing most about English-speaking people, for the most part white Americans, so it's an incomplete picture" of the Sept. 11 attacks, said Steve Montiel, whose Institute for Justice and Journalism at the University of Southern California recently completed a poll on the impact of the Sept. 11 attacks on ethnic California in conjunction with New California Media. "We're not hearing the voices of people who are more comfortable speaking non-English than English."

Montiel sees the solution in collaboration between ethnic and mainstream media.

"Mainstream media have not integrated as quickly as they need to cover modern America, especially in the big population states," said Montiel. "They haven't been able to keep up with the diversity of the communities they're covering."

Many of those stories were told in small profiles, the lives of each of the identified dead summed up in a few inches and immortalized in the New York Times and Newsday. Those pages brought the true measure of the horror to us, not in a background of blinding smoke and dust and the searing heat of burning jet fuel, but in who we lost, how those who knew them and loved them will remember them and the holes in the lives of the living their absence leaves.

The diversity of Washington and New York, not to mention the small cities that were the Twin Towers and the Pentagon came through on those pages, but less so in the larger stories as time carried us away from Sept. 11, 2001, and toward Sept. 11, 2002, bringing a blessed dullness to a painfully jagged memory.

Michele Salcedo is assistant news editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel where she coordinates the newspaper's coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean. She has also worked for the Light in San Antonio, Texas, and Newsday. She earned a master's degree in journalism at Columbia University and serves as NAHJ's national secretary. Salcedo can be reached at msalcedo@sun-sentinel.com