Girding for Terror: News Organizations Are Making Contingency Plans to Keep Operating during an Attack and to Protect Staffers Who Have to Cover It. in the Post-September 11 World, Every Journalist Is a Potential War Correspondent
Magazine article by Rachel Smolkin; American Journalism Review, Vol. 25, April 2003
Magazine Article Excerpt
Girding for terror: news organizations are making contingency plans to keep operating during an attack and to protect staffers who have to cover it. In the post-September 11 world, every journalist is a potential war correspondent. by Rachel Smolkin Employees in the Cox and Knight Ridder Washington bureaus keep "escape hoods" at their desks. WNBC-TV in New York outfitted news vehicles with kits containing protective suits, gas masks, gloves and water. The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, less than 10 miles from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, procured 600 potassium iodide pills in case employees are exposed to radiation. And USA Today in Northern Virginia is training a "Go Team" to protect themselves while covering chemical, biological or nuclear attacks. News organizations have trumpeted their efforts to train and equip correspondents heading overseas to cover a war in Iraq (see "Preparing for War," March). But they also are readying themselves more quietly to protect employees here at home from terrorist onslaughts that experts warn could occur at any time. One of the legacies of the September 11 terrorist assaults and subsequent anthrax scare is the sobering realization that journalists anywhere could find themselves reporting from the front lines of an attack. "What is new is that every journalist in America today is potentially a war correspondent," says Peter Van D. Emerson, a senior associate at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Journalists from large cities to small towns could wake up and be on the front lines of a new kind of warfare involving radiological, chemical or biological agents with all the associated hazards or responsibilities. There's a whole new dimension here that's never existed before." Editors and news directors, particularly in major newsrooms and bureaus in Washington and New York, are struggling to devise plans that would balance staff safety with rapid dispersal of accurate information to a frightened public. Preparations range from assembling emergency contact numbers and stockpiling food, water and first-aid supplies to more elaborate measures such as purchasing safety equipment and readying contingency newsrooms in the suburbs. "Journalists will figure out how to cover a story. They don't very often think about how to keep themselves safe," says Karen Timmons, managing editor at Scripps Howard News Service, located three blocks from the White House. "This is a new realm for us in terms of thinking about how to flip that priority: the safety of the staff first and then thinking about how to cover the story." When planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, reporters grabbed their notebooks and dashed into the dust- and smoke-choked outdoors to chronicle the devastation. By 9:20 a.m., Wall Street Journal employees had evacuated their offices at the World Financial Center across from the World Trade Center. Some editors rushed onto ferries to reach backup offices 50 miles away in South Brunswick, New Jersey, while the four deputy managing editors escaped to the Upper West Side apartment of Barney Calame, one of the four. Top editors communicated throughout the chaos and even delivered stories via BlackBerry e-mail pagers. But Managing Editor Paul E. Steiger did not have a BlackBerry (he now carries one), and for several hours his deputies feared he had been killed when the towers collapsed. Editors were unable to account for their entire New York staff until nearly midnight, Calame recalls. "Our reporters went charging into situations and wanted to find out what was going on," Calame says. "We weren't terribly well organized, so through the midafternoon people were using their own instincts. We wouldn't have asked them to do that had we been in a real command-and-control situation." Reporters now have instructions to check in during an emergency with immediate supervisors. The supervisors could then contact top editors on their BlackBerry pagers, enabling those editors to assemble information about the entire staff. Calame says editors have emphasized that although they want to publish, they don't need on-scene or first-person accounts so badly that reporters "should take any risk that is not acceptable to them." Before September 11, journalists tended to associate danger with foreign reporting in war zones or volatile areas such as the Middle East. "Even before [Journal reporter] Danny Pearl's kidnapping and murder, foreign correspondents had developed a set of safety standards," Calame says. "We never really thought about the U.S. very much." But amid a post-9/11 existence of orange alerts and duct tape, the sense of peril at home is omnipresent."On 9/11, everybody, including us, just jumped ... |
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