25 Years Later

Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the deadliest terror attack on America. For those of us of a certain age, it falls into the category of events marked by remembering exactly where you were and what you were doing—when the world seemed to change forever.

September 11th, 2001.

Some other occasions rise to that level of memory. November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas and then April 4th, 1968, in Memphis. There’s July 20th, 1969, at Tranquility Base and January 28th, 1986, over the Atlantic. The shock of April 20th, 1999, at a high school in Columbine, and the horror of December 14th, 2012, at an elementary school in Sandy Hook.

December 7th, 1941 should be among these dates as well, though that happened before most of us were born—much the way 9/11 happened before most now in their first job were.

What connects 9/11/01 and 11/22/63 specifically, in our memory, is that on both occasions we remember exactly where we were—and what happened next.

We found the nearest television screen and watched as two of the darkest moments in our nation’s 250 years unfolded, in real time. The first filmed pictures from Dealey Plaza took hours to reach the country. The pictures from lower Manhattan arrived instantly.

But the instinct was the same both times: we learn that something incomprehensible has happened, and then we see it for ourselves. On television.

We watch. In horror. In disbelief. In anger. In shock. That instinct is the actual subject of this column, not just nostalgia for its own sake. (We would direct you to Tom Jones of The Poynter Institute for an excellent look at the stories looking back at that fateful day a quarter-century ago.)

And so, “submitted for your approval” (with apologies to the scripts of Rod Serling) is our inquiry here today: Is television’s time, as the place the nation turns to in “the fateful hours” after the unthinkable happens, now in the past? Or is that role just slipping away, one bad quarter at a time?

Those who work in television newsrooms, on both the local and national level, know the editorial agenda changes day to day, sometimes hour to hour. Some days the lead story is obvious. Other days it takes real struggle to find and deliver it.

And then there are the days that unfold as “a date which will live in infamy,” as Roosevelt called it—the days journalists exist for, when delivering the first draft of history—in real time—is the whole job.

For a significant and growing share of the audience, the television screen isn’t their first screen anymore. It often isn’t even the second. And that matters more on a day like this one than it does on an ordinary Tuesday, because the value of a news operation was never really about the other 364-odd days of the year. It was about being ready—fully staffed and resourced—for the one day nobody sees coming.

Which is what makes the industry’s current trajectory so uncomfortable to sit with today of all days. Being in the news business has never been cheap, and running a network or a local station hasn’t been the lucrative operation it used to be—for quite a while now. Every week brings word of another media company trying to cut its way to success—slashing staff and budget, and ultimately having fewer resources for exactly the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that is only demanded once or twice a decade, and that nobody notices the absence of — until the moment they need it and it isn’t there.

Twenty-five years ago, a fully staffed newsroom with deep institutional memory and the resources to go wall-to-wall with coverage for days on end was assumed. Twenty-five years ago, digital media was still in its infancy. Writing for Vanity Fair, David Friend suggests that the events of September 11th helped spawn “The Digital Media Era.”

Twenty-five years from now, on whatever next date earns its own place in history, will it still be? That’s the uncomfortable part—not that anything has been fully lost yet, but that the infrastructure we’ll need is being quietly dismantled.

So we’ll ask it plainly, on the anniversary itself rather than around it: when the next “date which will live in infamy” arrives in this country, will there still be television newsrooms capable of covering it?

Or will we be left to turn to the cacophony of voices on social media, spewing rumors and opinions and posing them as facts?

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