Everyone, it seems, has a 9/11 series going. The Star is doing its mini-profiles of Canadians who died. The Globe is giving its magaziney spread treatment to images from the day and their subjects and photographers. The New York Times, in conjunction with Rutgers Law School, of all places, has put together a remarkable collection of every piece of audio (save United 93) from the day. (Not all of it was up when I checked, so I’m not sure if it includes the rawest one, which has been on Youtube for a while.)
Slate’s series, the most entertaining so far, is on the truthers. I’ve read most of them, and it reminded me, while reading through one of their links to a 2005 Popular Mechanics piece, how much that trust remains the central fact in good reporting.
There was a lot of quibbling with reporting from that day, and afterwards. Much of it was maniacal; it seems to me now that trutherism has an awful lot in common with religious faith, and may in fact be indistinguishable from it. That truthers are so loathe to accept almost anything the media reports about 9/11 underscores just how fundamental trust is to reporting, and how much would collapse without it.
Do you remember Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair? When their fabulations were uncovered, my own greatest interest in the subject was how they got away with it or, more precisely, what led them to believe they could. I only followed the stories as long as they made headlines, and haven’t followed up by reading any of the retrospectives published about them, or even seeing the Hayden Christensen movie, but I imagine what it came down to was that these men realized, after they reached their respective journalistic pinnacles, that even in the holiest of holies – the New York Times and the New Republic—everything is trussed together with trust. They must have noticed, at some point, that only so much gets fact-checked, and once you’ve made it as far as they had, superiors tend to take you as much at your word as your readers. So like Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying, two Morlocks among the Eloi, they met with very little resistance.
But the lesson to take from this is not that editors should become less trusting. There aren’t enough fact-checkers in the world for that (at least, not any more). It’s how fundamental trust is in the media that matter.
And it’s not just trust among co-workers. Every time we read someone quoted in a story in, say, the Star, we are extending a pretty hefty amount of trust in the reporter doing the quoting. We trust that they went through the trouble of actually finding the right person to quote, and that they faithfully wrote down or recorded and transcribed the words as they were spoken and didn’t massage them a little to make the point a little more clearly.
And why do we trust them? Because we implicitly assume that a paper as big and as old as the Star wouldn’t hire just anyone to be a reporter; they’ve got too much to lose for that. And the reporter herself, she wouldn’t try to pull anything over on the paper because it would be so easy to be called on it and once again, a writer who’s reached the Star has too much to lose to risk it.
If you were to do a search on the phrase “mainstream media”, you’d mostly find people slagging it. You might do a little better on “traditional media,” but you’d still find a goodly portion of the references talking about their shortcomings, and the relative benefits of various forms of untraditional media, mostly online. And you might even agree with some of it. I do.
But there are certain things, rather big things as they turn out, that traditional media have that the alternatives do not, and will not for a good long while, if they ever do. And one of the most important is having something to lose.
There are bad things about hierarchies, but there are good things, too, and one of them, in the case of the mainstream media, is that once you’ve made it to the big leagues—and those big leagues are still almost entirely traditional—you mostly don’t want to lose your spot. You like the perqs, how fast someone will return your call, how many people read or watch or listen to you and how, from time to time, as a result of both these things, you can have an influence on the world that far outstrips your individual powers. These media amplify one, and it doesn’t take long before you get pretty used to hearing your voice through a megaphone.
In politics, the desire to hold on to power can result in a lot of badness. And journalism has its share of pitfalls too—mostly related to forgetting who your audience is, and beginning to write for your editors, your managers or your sponsors instead of your readers—but unlike politics and by virtue of the very nature of journalism, you tend to lose your job when you break trust, and Blair and Glass stand out as much as they do because that kind of thing happens so very rarely.
It may be the best thing about traditional media.
To see what happens when people don’t trust what they read and see and hear from the people whose job it is to report what’s happening in the world, look at the truthers. They read 50 experts quoted in 50 stories saying that steel loses its strength as it heats, and doesn’t need to actually melt before it fails, but they hear a few disbelievers in a few alternative publications say that the temperature inside the towers only rose to 1,800 degrees and steel melts at 2,500 degrees so therefore it was a controlled demolition. They look at a dozen videos played on a dozen networks of passenger jets flying into the towers, and they see military jets and drones and missiles. They hear Larry Silverstein tell PBS “I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse” and interpret it to mean that World Trade Center 7 was pulled down, and choose to interpret Silverstein’s clarification later, once the quote took on a life of its own, as a cover-up. Truth becomes lies and mistakes and misintepretations become fact.
Now, it takes a conspiracy theorist to think that all the papers and networks and radio stations are in on it with the governments, but it’s really just a starker version of what we’d all be going through if we didn’t trust our major sources of information about places we don’t go to, things we can’t see and people we can’t talk to. Just pick up your nearest paper, or turn a news channel on, and try not believing what people are reporting as fact, about famine in Somalia, say, or IEDs in Afghanistan. Things get confusing pretty quickly.
Most people read one paper, at most, listen to their favourite radio station, and/or watch their favourite news broadcast, and tend to go to each for different sorts of information: local news from the Star, perhaps, international news from Peter Mansbridge, and sports from the Fan 590. Only media types, and real enthusiasts, are able to compare and contrast among different media. So we trust.
A healthy skepiticism is just that, healthy. But the trust that exists between a reader and a journalist is as important as the social contract itself. Society is built on the assumption that the person next to you in the Eaton Centre’s shiny new food court will not use their fork to stab you in the throat. Every once in a while, we’re wrong, but if we didn’t believe we were mostly right, overwhelmingly right in that assumption of mostly good or at least neutral intentions, things would fall apart.
So extend your moment of silence this weekend and read New York magazine’s 9/11 Encyclopedia, George Packer’s “Coming Apart“. Read about the by now long-untold stories, like the Montreal businessman who convinced the World Trade Centre to put in a food court that never got a chance to be built and bask a little in the thing that separates us not only from the truthers, but the men they still can’t bring themselves to believe are really at fault for this unfortunate anniversary.
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Bert Archer is the Toronto Standard Media Critic. He also writes frequently about architecture and design.
