If there is anything more confusing than weather forecasting terms (such as partly cloudy vs. mostly cloudy, a nomenclature based on the percentage of the sky covered by clouds), it is the federal terror alert scale the federal government adopted to let citizens know the probability of a terrorist attack. Figuring out how alert (paranoid, frightened, anxious, nonchalant) the American people should be may be something best left to philosophers who deal with the abstract daily.
While this may be confusing at home, it could be even worse in a newsroom. Face it, newsrooms are full of people whose goal in life is to know things.
Money drives some people; prestige motivates others. Newsroom staffers are not paid big bucks and the public ranks the trustworthiness of reporters and editors only slightly above that of legislators. So the carrot that impels most journalists is the allure of finding out, before other people, the events of the day.
That said, understand this: Most newsroom personnel are citizens of this country with families they care about. Many have friends and relatives in branches of the military. They have the same kinds of worry about mortgages, bills, health, child care and education as everyone else. They share with other Americans the same headaches in juggling job, family and personal responsibilities.
So pile a terror alert on top of this and you generate anxious journalists.
Some newspaper people are the greatest silent patriots you can imagine. There is nothing like covering the events of a free society, as well as those societies that do not know freedom, to make journalists understand how rare, fragile and enlightened a democracy is.
I was a student in journalism school when President Kennedy was assassinated. I still remember the professors’ tears as we stood over the old teletypewire machines and watched the bulletins that signaled the end of Camelot. I was a reporter in a newsroom when man took his first steps on the moon. There were wet eyes all around me that day.
But on the day when terrorists aimed jet planes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there was a new wrinkle that brought a sense of immediacy. From the time the first plane hit, there was wall-to-wall television coverage of the event. Images of explosion, smoke and fire along with other disturbing pictures flooded the screens.
Ted Turner, who invented CNN and the 24-hour cable news concept, wandered into the CNN newsroom that day and asked why it was not on all his signature channels. The crew threw it up on TBS and TNT, too.
While journalists selected photos, culled wire service stories and wrote up the local angles of what initially looked like an East Coast story, a twinge of anxiety crept into the minds of people whose anxiety is generally blotted out by their persistent need to know. There were tears that day, too, in newsrooms across the country.
Simply put, American journalists whose job is to report and disseminate the news in towns and cities and states and the nation and the world may choose to put themselves in dangerous situations from time to time to ferret out information, but they do not enjoy the feeling of threat. No one likes that edgy, watch-your-back kind of lifestyle.
But it has been forced uponon all of us. And, do not be fooled; the government has not told journalists more about what those terror threat levels mean than it has told the American public. Officials gave us all the same spiel about the duct tape and plastic wrap. Maybe the only difference is this: The sense of gallows humor in the newsroom has brought some of us to the conclusion that we would use the duct tape to affix our heads closer to our bottoms so we can kiss them goodbye when the attack comes.
It is hard enough to push personal preferences and beliefs out of the way to cover stories as objectively as possible, but adding what appears to be never-ending, high-level anxiety about personal safety and the safety of friends and families to the challenge makes for some nervous and tic-ridden journalists.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, there is seldom a time in the newsroom when a TV is not on and tuned to CNN. Just in case.
