Twenty-five Years after 9/11: Politics, Journalism, and War
A detail of a memorial to firefighters who died in the 9/11 attacks, New York, July 2024 © James Rodgers
JOURNALISTS HATE TO COME BACK from a story without getting anything online or on air. That day, I understood. On September 11, 2001, I was in Calais, reporting on migrants’ attempts to cross the channel (a story quarter of a century ago, too). When, mid-afternoon French time, news broke of the 9/11 attacks, it was clear my material was not going to be needed. I went back to Brussels, where I was then based, in the hope of somehow getting to the United States.
The houses in that part of Brussels where I lived had shutters, usually closed at nightfall. The September evening was still light. Most shutters were open. Through the windows of almost every ground floor flat I passed, I saw the glow of a television screen, and the silhouetted heads of people watching towers, flames, and smoke.
No one, including me, could quite believe what had happened.
The thought most frequently expressed then was that the world changed. I will argue that it did, but not in ways that world powers, especially the United States, reeling from the shock of an unimaginable assault, intended—or have yet fully understood.
As a journalist then, and still now, alongside my academic work, and having spent more than half of the intervening 25 years teaching journalism, I would like also to offer some reflections on what I learnt from covering stories in the aftermath of 9/11.
I did get to New York, but not at the first attempt. The following evening, Wednesday 12th September, I went to Brussels airport to board a journalist charter flight to Canada (US airspace remained closed), but the plane was not given permission to take off. The following night, we left, landing in Montreal early on the morning of Friday September 14th, and travelling from there by road to Manhattan.
By early afternoon, I was broadcasting live from a location close enough to see the smoke rising from the ruins of the twin towers.
Over the weekend, preparing a more detailed report for Monday, I walked around the city and spoke to stunned New Yorkers. No smartphones or social media, so many had pasted pictures of the missing onto lampposts and walls, strips of paper with a number to call to be torn off bottom.
“If I could, I’d go to war myself,” one man said. Another warned, “The wrath of the U.S. will be felt worldwide.” One woman told me she wanted to join the search so she could find her missing brother. “I wish I could be there digging, and looking for them. Anyone.”
Conversations like that last one were hard to have. I knew it was unlikely she would find her brother, so wondered about the ethics of broadcasting the words of someone, already traumatized, for whom the audience could see even worse ahead. In the end, I used the material, reasoning that the woman’s words conveyed the mixture of resilience and disbelief that was the mood of most of Manhattan.
The U.S. media were shocked too, of course—and swept up in a national fervour for response and revenge. It is to Silvio Waisbord’s great credit that, in one of the earliest edited collections published on the reporting of 9/11, he offered the following assessment that still holds good today. “The ‘journalism of crisis’ was a journalism that snubbed the professional requirements of detachment and objectivity and willingly embraced patriotic partisanship.”[1]
U.S. soldiers outside the village of Ad-Dawr, Iraq, 15 December 2003. Saddam Hussein had been captured nearby two days previously © James Rodgers,
The man who warned of the wrath of the U.S. was right, of course. Two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq followed. The consequences of 9/11 dominated the international news agenda for years to come. A little over two years after my trip to Manhattan, I was in Baghdad—my assignment there coinciding with the capture of Saddam Hussein. In 2011, I reflected on the way the announcement was stage managed.
The news conference unfolded like an expertly edited television programme. The opening words were designed not to grab the headlines, but to be them. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!’ was ready-made to be used, asa whole or in part, for a newspaper or website front page. Only a few seconds in duration, it was rehearsed to fit perfectly at the top of a broadcast news bulletin.[2]
Of course the military operation itself was not nearly so slickly produced, and was sold to the publics of participating countries, especially the U.S. and the U.K., as a campaign to bring democracy to the Middle East, and to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction that it turned out Saddam Hussein no longer had. The lessons on for journalists on questioning government spin in wartime are too obvious to go over again.
The response has come to be remembered by many as a disaster. Even former U.S. president Joe Biden accepted mistakes had been made when in 2023 he said to Israel, terrified and angry at the Hamas attacks of October 7, “I caution that, while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Those mistakes included isolating Russia. The Kremlin felt its interests were ignored over the Iraq invasion. Putin, newly president them, was especially disappointed after offering his support to the U.S. immediately after 9/11. His humiliation was a factor in the renewed confrontation between Russia and the West that we are now living through. As for wars launched without a clear strategy, look no further than the latest headlines on Iran.
The author reporting for the BBC near Basra, March 2004.
[1] Waisbord, Silvio (2002) in Zelizer and Allan (eds) Journalism After September 11 (London: Routledge) p. 206
[2] Rodgers, J. (2011), ‘Capturing Saddam Hussein: How the full story got away, and what conflict journalism can learn from it’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 4: 2, pp. 179–191, doi: 10.1386/jwcs.4.2.179_1.