Online and looking away on 9/11: Is this the future of news?

In his September 10th Washington Post "Media Notes" column, Howard Kurtz preemptively analyzed the 9/11 saturation coverage that everyone knew was coming the next day. "The feeling out there is that the media know only one mode – overkill – and that this is one subject on which it's kind of offensive," he wrote. The overkill was already well underway by September 10th, and the eleventh featured wall-to-wall coverage on most major television networks, radio stations, and online news sites.

Kurtz's assessment of "the feeling out there" struck a chord for me. I run the Web site Kuro5hin.org, where stories are written and submitted by anyone, and editorial decisions made by democratic voting among all members (currently more than 30,000). In the week leading up to 9/11, only a single article mentioning the anniversary was approved by the voters. Titled "9/11: Enough Already" it was a reaction to the standard media coverage of the event, taking as its main source a New Times LA column by Jill Stewart questioning the notion that 9/11 "changed everything."

On the eleventh itself, two stories mentioning the date were posted. One was about the foundation of the Scottish Parliament, which happened on 9/11/1997, and one was a general roundup of other notable 9/11 events in U.S. history.

While the mass media were exclusively focusing on The Anniversary, the readers and writers on Kuro5hin were ignoring it with an almost desperate intensity. What was going on here?

First I asked what the media professionals on Poynter.org's Online-News mailing list thought of the coverage. One respondent summarized the general feeling aptly: "It's just what newspapers do." Another reported that "in at least one quarter, the process has been referred to as 'Dianafying' the horrific events of a year ago."

On a personal level, most of the journalists themselves felt frustrated and sometimes repelled by the saturation coverage. Nancy Weil of IDG News Service said she was "avoiding the coverage as much as possible ... I have read some online coverage, but not a great lot considering how much is out there, and I did watch a bit of CNN late last night, but mostly to be certain all hell wasn't breaking loose in Asia that might affect how we needed to shape our day here."

Several journalists pointed out that The Anniversary had almost completely buried the astounding news that Switzerland had joined the UN. Barry Parr put it more bluntly: "It's bad journalism, and it's bad for democracy ... The news media, particularly the TV networks, have not served the public well in this crisis. Outrage is more profitable than analysis."

In her Online Journalism Review roundup of the day's coverage, Stacy Kramer opined that "I see news organizations giving a massive event the kind of coverage it deserves. I see viewers and users who have a choice ... They can turn to the Internet instead of the TV and choose their paths or they can leave them both off." The latter seems to have been what the vast majority of Kuro5hin readers did.

I asked the members of Kuro5hin what they thought of the coverage. Out of 78 replies, only a few didn't actively avoid it on the eleventh. Even fewer watched more than bits and pieces, or went out of their way to read the coverage online.

Most of them, however, reported going into what amounted to a media blackout that day. "I don't need help remembering, and don't need other people to tell me how they felt, or [how] I should feel," was a view shared by several readers. Many felt that there was a severe lack of real news to justify the blanket coverage, and that networks and sites had to resort to emotional manipulation. One commenter said "It's not that I'm not interested in 9/11 at all, I just think that what the mainstream media (especially television, less so print media) provides in the way of alleged information and so-called analysis is an insulting waste of time." Another said, on a more general note: "My current attitude towards news organizations is this, for breaking stories I'll watch and I'll be riveted. I DON'T WANT ANALYSIS--I'LL MAKE UP MY OWN MIND THANK YOU."

And that seems to be the crux of the issue for almost everyone. The problem with the 9/11 coverage, from a journalistic standpoint, is that the media felt they had to cover it, but there was precious little actual news. Reminding people what day it was started out unnecessary and rapidly became insulting. Nothing particularly newsworthy happened at any of the memorial services. It was an important event, there's absolutely no doubt about that, but it was an important event that didn't fit very comfortably into any of the well-worn grooves of Standard Media Treatment.

It ended up being covered as a kind of hybrid of three media archetypes: Breaking News (with special issues of online and print publications, and full-day TV coverage with headline crawl), The Big Story (exhaustive, and exhausting, analysis of every possible angle, in the tradition of Diana, O.J. , and so forth) and A Time to Remember (generally deployed for the anniversaries of much more distant and safely idealized events, like Pearl Harbor). The problem was that there was no Breaking News, no one wanted to see 9/11 masticated like the O.J. trial, and A Time To Remember rather ludicrously seemed to imply that anyone could possibly have already forgotten.

In the column that started all this, Kurtz predicted: "We're sure most of the coverage will be sensitive. But we think there's a backlash brewing out there." He also quoted The San Francisco Chronicle's Tim Goodman, who said that "If television has taught us anything, it's that most viewers, news junkies or not, are incapable of looking away."

The readers of Kuro5hin may just be an irascible, unrepresentative bunch, but it's clear that they simply want the news media to report the news, without "analysis" and without appeals to emotion. For many of them it seems the backlash is already here, and on at least one day when everyone was betting they couldn't, they looked away.

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