Just over two weeks after the awful events of Sept. 11, a variety of thoughts are being expressed by readers. They run through my mind as well.
One of these thoughts is that this must be a bad patch for readers. The stories of courage and heroism that literally could lift one’s spirits right off the page have mostly been told and are dwindling. In their place is a steady flow of important but distressing news. Our city was seriously unprepared. Our airport remains closed. The intelligence failure was massive, and the FBI wasn’t prepared either. There are terrorist cells in the United States. Markets and business are way down, as is consumer confidence. Unemployment is up, and we are probably in a recession. We also read tales of vulnerability to still other forms of terrorism.
Perhaps the news will be more reassuring in the weeks ahead. But for the moment, the oppressiveness of what has happened remains largely unleavened. The stories of determination, coalition building and preparation seem repetitious. The public seems patient but quietly on edge. Families wonder and wait for that next shoe to drop. In newsrooms, one also wonders whether this prolonged drumbeat of important yet bad news, and its effect on readers, is something that editors should think about and discuss more. Normally, the answer is no, but this is not a normal time. Reporters need to keep on digging. But editors are the ones who decide how much of that gets into print and how it is presented.
Twice in the past two weeks — weeks in which the paper has done an outstanding job of reporting all aspects of these attacks — a number of angry readers complained that Post stories about bioterrorism were further unnerving already frightened residents or were putting ideas into the heads of other would-be terrorists.
The first story, headlined “Bioterrorism: An Even More Devastating Threat,” appeared just five days after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. It was written by the paper’s first-rate science writer, Rick Weiss. It was a scary but important and well- done story that alerted readers, based on government and academic assessments, about real vulnerabilities to chemical or biological attack. The problem was that the paper added a map of Washington, which was not mentioned in the story, with arrows showing the proper wind direction and path for a plane releasing spores. Terrorists would probably not rely on such a map, but adding that illustration struck me, and a number of readers, as lacking in editorial judgment and common sense.
The second story, on Sept. 25, was a good account of government disclosures that the terrorists were also interested in crop-dusting planes. Deep inside the story, however, was a quotation from a helicopter company director explaining that “if you were going to do some kind of damage” one would need a special “broadcast” type nozzle to cover a 300-foot swath, rather than the normal and narrower crop-dusting nozzle. This information is generally available to specialists, and you could argue that the article showed that it is not so easy to convert a crop-duster to evil purpose. But here, too, readers argued — properly, I feel — that this kind of alarming detail was uncalled for and should have been removed.
On the plus side, one of the things that distinguishes world-class newspapers such as The Post is its investment, over several decades, in a corps of experienced foreign correspondents operating out of 20 overseas bureaus. Their work was on display as the paper moved rapidly to cover the unfolding global fallout of the terrorist attacks. Post correspondent Peter Baker, along with a colleague from the Los Angeles Times, was probably the first into northern Afghanistan, while others quickly fanned out to Hamburg and Manila, Pakistan and Yemen, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Readers, presumably, appreciated these rich reports. But that is what they take for granted.
What some readers don’t like, and let us know about, is when the paper appears to take them for granted.
