The most critical set of questions for our craft

When reporting on terror, the relevance to readers’ lives is a criterion. So is the unending concern to avoid becoming an unwitting tool of the terrorist plotters themselves. The matters of economic and political implications are important. And at least initially, all of this has to be told around the account of human loss and tragedy. To say it is difficult and emotional does not do justice to the newsroom mood. Once again Thursday and Friday, this was the mood at the Daily News. Whenever I think about these issues, as all journalists do, I recall an interview I listened to in the early 1980s with Diego Ascencio, an American diplomat.

Ascencio is to my mind an interesting case in the annals of terrorism. In 1981, he was the American ambassador to Colombia and was taken hostage, along with others, by a group claiming to be Marxists. In the ensuing 61 days of captivity, Ascencio, who knew his Das Kapital, had plenty of time to chat with his captors. Most of them were university students from very wealthy families. Ascencio, who could argue the finer points of Hegelian dialectics, also used the opportunity to emphasize his comparative personal background. His father was a butcher in the border town of El Paso. Ascencio’s arguments ultimately won over his captors. They set him free and surrendered.

If Ascensio provoked his captors with his tales of El Paso, he provoked me, and still does, with his observation on terrorism and journalism, which I paraphrase from memory: "In their fundamentals, journalism and terrorism are both really two very different forms of the same thing," he said. "They both boil down to the juxtaposition of symbols."

Colleagues recoil with disgust when I share this. Of course our motives and values are very different from terrorists. But it still is a useful way to think about and reflect upon our craft. A wire story on the still unfolding carnage in Mumbai that I read just before sitting down to write this column Friday, noted one group of captives emerging from the Taj Mahal hotel with Canadian flags plastered all over their luggage. That this detail was part of the story tells us something about Asencio’s point on the way journalists work. That the captives were still alive may tell us something obvious about the search for symbols on the part of terrorists. Would the events of 9/11 in New York have had the same value for Al-Qaeda and the same emotive power as they were transmitted around the world if the hijacked plans belonged to "Jet Blue" or "Midway Airlines" instead of "American Airlines?"

I share all of this because these are the elements of both the thought and conversation, in a word the "judgment," that pierce newsrooms as they did Thursday when we scrambled to shape the Daily News’ edition for Friday. In the course of things, I received a message from Cansu Çamlibel, the paper’s deputy editor in Ankara and a reporter who spent many years abroad for the television network NTV.

"It is a little ironic that every nation measures the sorrow left behind in the dust in terms of their own losses. What if it is a local terror act only killing locals, no foreigners involved? Like so many of those which have taken place in Iraq since 2003, or the PKK attacks since early 1980s. Then it becomes an ordinary news item. This was also the case for the piracy stories. It became an issue for Turkey when two ships were hijacked."

Cansu went on: "Although often motives behind terror acts are local or regional, foreigners that are affected by the attack make the headlines international. In fact this also plays into the hands of western administrations at the end of the day, which love to stigmatize events like the Mumbai bombings as a perfect opportunity to lash their enemies (i.e: radical islam)." She then went on to present me with some examples of how the news was unfolding Thursday afternoon:

From the BBC website: "Britons have barricaded themselves in their rooms after gunmen stormed two luxury hotels in the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay). The gunmen had reportedly been seeking out U.K. and U.S. passport holders. A British businessman, who spent the night trapped in his room at a hotel, said there was "no escape." Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the attacks were outrageous and would be met with a ’vigorous response’."

From the website of NTV: "Hindistan’da 3 Türk de rehin tutuluyor. Türkiye’nin Yeni Delhi Büyükelçisi Levent Bilman, Hindistan’ın Mumbai kentinde düzenlenen saldırılar sonucu, 3 Türk vatandaşının bir otelde mahsur kaldığını belirterek, oteldeki durumun bir an önce sona ermesini ümit ettiklerini söyledi."

From the website of the Israeli daily Haaretz: "An Israeli rabbi is among at least three people being held hostage by gunmen at the Chabad headquarters in Mumbai on Thursday, following a series of attacks in the city that have killed at least 101 people, police said. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni spoke Thursday morning with the Israeli consul-general in Mumbai, Orna Sagiv. Livni received an update of the latest on the situation, though at this time there is no word on whether any Israelis are among the dead or wounded."

Lastly, Cansu shared this item from the website of the Italian daily Corriere Della Serra: "Terrore a Mumbai, almeno 100 vittime. Morto un italiano, riuscito il blitz al Taj Ancora 200 ostaggi all'Oberoi, fra cui sette connazionali. L'italiano ucciso  Antonio de Lorenzo." Her comments, like those of Ascencio, are provocative. They raise questions that cannot perhaps be truly answered. But to struggle with these questions is imperative. As I said, these are matters of judgment. And only readers can judge how well we have done. Your thoughts on what we should be doing, on how we are serving your needs or expectations, are most assuredly welcome. I have no easy answers. But I do know there can be no more important set of questions for our craft in this most difficult age of terrorism.


David Judson is editor-in-chief of Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review