Media Gain Respect After Attacks

The nation’s news media, battered for 25 years by declining credibility, appear to have regained respect among readers and viewers--at least temporarily--with their coverage since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the first week after the attacks, “an unprecedented 89%” of the public gave the media a positive rating, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a Washington-based independent polling firm. That stands in stark contrast to a Gallup Poll taken last year that showed that the number of people who had little or no “trust and confidence” in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly had almost doubled since 1976.

Viewer comments to the ABC and CBS television networks since Sept. 11 have roughly tripled, with the vast majority being positive, according to network officials. NBC’s “Nightly News,” which typically receives as many as 1,500 e-mails a week, reports an average of 7,000 a week since the terrorist attacks, and they’ve been “overwhelmingly positive,” says Barbara Levin, director of news communications.

Newspaper and newsmagazine editors report a similar trend. This is a welcome change for many newspapers in particular, where a shift toward scandal, sensationalism and celebrity-oriented news, combined with reductions in staff and news space, had exacerbated reader dissatisfaction.

“The news media are talking about real news, real issues, real problems, instead of Gary Condit, shark attacks and roller-coaster accidents, and that’s something that many people have been waiting for for a while,” says Barry Glassner, a USC sociology professor and the author of a 1999 book, “The Culture of Fear,” that contained considerable criticism of the media.

Some of the public’s support for the media may simply be part of a larger, we’re-all-in-this-together attitude that also has contributed to the public approval of President Bush. Pollsters found similar support for the media in the early stages of the Gulf War in 1991.

It is probably unrealistic for journalists to expect their elevated standing to endure. Clashes will inevitably occur when military action begins and the media seek more access and information than the Pentagon and the White House are willing to provide.

After the Gulf War, poll respondents said by a 2-1 margin that censorship for the sake of national security was more important than allowing the media to report important news, a survey at the time said.

Some newspapers already are receiving criticism, either for providing information that readers think could be helpful to terrorists or for columns or photographs that are seen as unfavorable to Bush. But so far, these complaints represent a tiny percentage of the communications received from readers and viewers, news executives say.

In addition, letters to the editor have increased exponentially, newspaper and newsmagazine editors say. Newsweek has received more than 10 times its normal volume of correspondence, and the Chicago Tribune says it has been receiving more letters to the editor each day than it normally receives in a week.

Newspaper ombudsmen--journalists whose primary duty is to respond to readers’ comments and questions about their papers--say their own communications from readers have actually declined.

“It’s down about 25%,” says Michael Getler, ombudsman for the Washington Post.

One reason: Most people who write to ombudsmen do so to criticize the paper. “There’s not usually too many ‘Hey, you guys are doing a great job,’ ” Getler says. “But now there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of people calling and e-mailing to say just that.”

Readers of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has made a number of cuts in recent years, have been effusive in their gratitude for the resources devoted to the attack coverage, says Lillian Swanson, the assistant managing editor and ombudsman.

“We’ve been taking things away from readers before this, and they knew that and they weren’t happy about it,” Swanson says. “Now that we’ve gone full-throttle on this story, they’ve been thanking us for the depth and breadth of our coverage.”

Most papers have been cutting back in response to a declining economy--and most have been busting their budgets and expanding their news holes to provide extra coverage, despite an even greater economic decline since the attacks.

But complaints about coverage already are beginning to increase as the focus of media coverage shifts, some ombudsmen say.

“I got some complaints from businessmen about our stories on the bleak economic outlook here,” says David House, reader advocate for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “They said the stories and headlines on Page 1 were so horribly negative that they would terrify people and doom business here even further.”

House says he’s also received complaints from readers about anything seen as presenting Bush in an unflattering light.

“The day after his speech to Congress, we published a photo of him with a facial expression--lips tight, jaw set--that we thought did a great job of illustrating all the pressures and determination that had built up in him,” House says. “I got more than 20 calls and 10 or 15 e-mails saying we were deliberately trying to make him look bad.”

Support for Bush remains extremely high, and criticism of him in the media often draws an angry reader response.

Columnists in Oregon and Texas were fired after writing pieces that criticized Bush. Both Howard Rosenberg, TV columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and Mary McGrory, political columnist for the Washington Post, got an avalanche of critical reader response after their negative comments on the president.

But most criticism of the media has focused on stories deemed to provide encouragement or sensitive information to potential terrorists.

USA Today was criticized for a Sept. 28 front-page story that began, “Elite troops from U.S. special operations forces have been inside Afghanistan for the past 2 weeks looking for Osama bin Laden. . . .”

Critics complained that the story--which was quickly picked up by other news organizations--could jeopardize the safety of the commandos and the success of their mission. But the story pointed out that the presence of the commandos had been reported by English- and Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan “and would not have come as a surprise to Bin Laden or Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban.”

A frequent criticism of newspapers in recent weeks involve stories, maps and charts that some readers believe give terrorists too much information about the nation’s vulnerability to biological and chemical attacks.

Five days after the airplane hijackings and crashes, the Washington Post published a story, accompanied by a map of Washington, with arrows showing the path and proper wind direction for such attacks. On Sept. 25, the Post reported on concerns that terrorists might use crop-dusting planes to spread poison gas or other chemical agents. The story quoted the president of one helicopter company as saying that to be effective, such an assault would require a special “broadcast nozzle” to cover a 300-foot-wide swath, rather than the normal, narrower nozzle.

Ombudsman Getler says that “a number of angry readers” complained that those stories were “putting ideas in the heads of other would-be terrorists.” Getler pointed out that the information was readily available elsewhere, but he agreed with readers that the details should not have been published.

Ombudsmen at the Portland Oregonian, Los Angeles Times, Louisville Courier-Journal, Chicago Tribune and Salt Lake Tribune have received similar complaints about stories on weapons depots, nuclear plants, chemical weapons or nerve gas facilities in their areas--and they’ve offered similar replies.

Some readers have complained that stories on bio-terrorism or the likelihood of more attacks alarm an already nervous citizenry.

“What strikes me is how many people don’t want information,” says Gina Lubrano, readers’ representative at the San Diego Union-Tribune. “If they don’t like what’s being said, they don’t want to hear it. They want to hide their heads in the sand or kill the messenger.”

Editors and television news executives say they’ve told their staffs that while continuing to aggressively pursue the story, they should avoid anything that could needlessly frighten the public or prove helpful to terrorists. But they say it’s important to keep the public informed.

“When we first started talking about this week’s cover [story] on bio-terror, we were concerned about not giving terrorists the blueprints for how to carry out an attack,” says Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek. “But we found that the level of concern about bio-terror was so high and there was so much disinformation out there about how likely a biological or chemical attack might be, that we could provide a service by pointing out to people that it is actually not easy at all.”