Abstract
This article reports on a critical tier in the global flow of terrorism information gathered through in-depth interviews with 35 national security journalists in the Washington, DC, ‘prestige press’. This research offers value by organizing, describing and analyzing the opinions of this elite group on terrorism reporting in the digital age. Rarely studied but extremely influential as conversation-shapers and a conduit to other press, these ‘front-line’ reporters offer insider knowledge and unique perceptions regarding the interplay of terrorist goals with resulting media coverage, the decline of traditional journalism, and how new media technologies are affecting their work. Findings include evidence of altered post-9/11 journalist routines. Reported results can offer practitioners insight into best practices and an opportunity for information-users to better understand and evaluate what they are receiving.
Keywords
Introduction
‘Prestige press’ is a term coined by GH Stempel in 1961 to denote the 15 newspapers judged, at that time, to most strongly influence the rest of US media. It is now used to label influential reporters from major, often globally recognized, media outlets of the three modern mainstream media: newspapers, radio and television. These reporters have arguably become the world’s primary conduit for national security and terrorism-related news (Couldry, 2003; Dimitrova and Stromback, 2008; Kellner, 1995; Reese and Danielian, 1989) because of their ability to garner first-hand accounts for their audiences directly from senior US government officials and other Washington insiders. This unique group serves as a prolific channel through which downstream media glean their own stories, definitions and frameworks in a ‘trickle down effect’ (Dimitrova and Stromback, 2008). The Washington, DC, prestige press audience is not only the American public, but in many cases key international policymakers and potentially the entire global media audience.
Post-9/11, American media coverage of terrorism not only increased, but also introduced new journalist routines (Barnett and Reynolds, 2009). The academic literature in this area is laden with cases of reporter routine shifts that indicate an uncritical embrace of the ‘war on terror’ frame and increased difficulty for journalists in gaining access to national security-related information (Moeller, 2009). However, research has only tersely explored the evolving routines and trends within terrorism news coverage from the insider viewpoint of the national security reporter.
This article is based upon in-depth interviews with 35 members of the Washington, DC, national security prestige press to explore their perceptions of reporting in a rapidly-changing digital age ‘from the inside’ (Miles and Huberman, 1994: 10). Specifically, this research examines reporter understanding of the interplay of terrorist goals with resulting media coverage, their perceptions of the decline of traditional journalism, and how new media technologies are affecting their work, including their own use of web-based information gathering, reporting and social networking tools. Capturing a large portion of this small, elite population, findings include evidence of altered post-9/11 journalist routines resulting from the interplay of 9/11 and its aftermath with rapid and pervasive technological changes in the decade since September 2001.
Framing the framers
The effects of framing have been extensively debated in scholarly literature over many decades (Entman, 2004). Scholars generally agree that the media profoundly impact the formation of opinion regarding the public agenda (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987; Patterson, 1993). Media framing is ‘consequential’ and influences ‘the political process, public policy and international affairs’ (Kern et al., 2003: 298). Therefore, even though some scholars caution that a theory ‘that effectively addresses the web of relations and influences among the government, the media and public opinion’ has not yet been found (Gilboa, 2005: 337), if terrorists are aiming for publicity and media possess the power to impact public opinion and public policy, then furthering our understanding of the intersections of terrorism and media is crucial.
Scholars documented an immediate, post-9/11 ‘shift in the predominant news frame used by the American mass media for understanding issues of national security, altering perceptions of risks at home and threats abroad’ (Norris et al., 2003: 3–4). In fact, evidence suggests that most journalist beats, at least for a time, were reported through a terrorism lens (Chermak, 2003). Scholars often point to the extensive news coverage of 9/11 as a culprit in the evolution of the ‘framing of terrorism into an “event”’ and the subsequent feel of ‘prime time terrorism’ that surfaced as an ever-increasing component in ‘the strategic calculus of terrorists’ (Volkmer, 2002: 238).
While it is clear that terrorists attempt to infiltrate news frames, it follows that journalists themselves are not immune to framing. The media is not simply vulnerable to government or terrorist frames, but scholars have also found empirical support for journalists adopting frames from other journalists – a type of contagious framing (Dimitrova and Stromback, 2008). Moreover, in a panel study of 400 reporters, results indicated that journalist autonomy had risen three points from 2002–2007 with nearly half of the reporters relaying ‘they had almost complete freedom to decide what aspects of a story to emphasize’ (Beam et al., 2009: 282). Entman (2004: 10) argues that a few top news organizations are followed by the rest of the media in a ‘pecking order’. From a media values perspective, journalists know that mentioning terrorism offers traction to any media story. It is therefore arguable that ‘elite newspapers can influence other news organizations and the policymakers in each country’ (Dimitrova and Stromback, 2008: 207) by sparking copycat coverage. In addition, in his comprehensive analysis of mass communication framing literature from the past 15 years, Matthes (2009: 361) identifies as a shortcoming ‘the exclusion of (non content-analytical) studies dealing with framing effects and strategic frames of communicators’ themselves with just 4 percent of the articles in his dataset containing interviews with journalists (p. 357). This article seeks to contribute to rectifying this omission.
Method
Interviews were conducted with 35 Washington, DC-based national security reporters who were the first point of contact with government officials on matters of terrorism. Print, radio and television outlets were chosen because of their national recognition. 1 Participants were the main national security correspondent(s) from each outlet. 2
During the recruitment process, only 27 formally-termed ‘national security’ beat reporters from major DC outlets were found. One reporter responded via email asking: ‘Are there even 35 of us in town?’ Therefore, this research opened the sample to include other prestigious DC reporters who had either covered these topics in the recent past or were editors to the reporters interviewed. Moreover, after data collection revealed that the Washington, DC, trade press―small, ‘inside the beltway’ publications covering the DC political scene with main distribution to Washington political elites, lobbyists and their staffs―were major players due to often serving as the beginning of the ‘news wave’ where the prestige press garnered story ideas, a reporter or editor from the six main trades (as indicated by study participants) was also included as a participant. Additionally, some reporters identified themselves as ‘national security beat reporters’. Each media outlet, barring the trade press, had a national audience without taking account of online communications, and had a formal beat reporter covering ‘national security’ as part of their journalist infrastructure. Participants were composed of 11 females and 24 males of varying ethnic backgrounds, with an age range from mid-20s to 70s.
The purpose of this research was to explore deeply-held perceptions of an elite group of journalists; therefore a qualitative approach was judged appropriate. In fact, most participants said they would not be willing to devote time to a survey or more impersonal method of inquiry because they wanted the chance to more fully explain their answers. Conducting one-on-one interviews allowed for working around the difficult scheduling needs of this population and helped to build rapport and thus facilitate the frank discussion necessary to access rich data. Interviews occurred in a place of each participant’s choosing, or via phone. Each interview lasted at least one hour and, in many instances, a follow-up interview was also conducted to ensure the researcher had understood initial responses and meanings correctly as well as to test rival explanations. All interviews were audio-taped to allow for repeated listening and accurate quote collection. Transcripts were analyzed and coded according to open coding procedures associated with the grounded theory approach to data analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Member checks also helped ensure that all negative cases and rival explanations were examined (Lindlof and Taylor, 2002) and whether a particular story, quote or colloquialism would identify the reporter to others; this reconfirmed a commitment to protect participant identity. Data collection occurred from January through October 2010 until reaching theoretical saturation (Strauss and Corbin, 1990).
The interplay of terrorism and media
One of political communication’s foremost scholars on the ‘symbiotic relationship’ between terrorists and the media, Brigitte Nacos, asserts that terrorists commit violent acts seeking three main objectives: attention, recognition, and legitimacy (Nacos, 1994: 54). Most scholars agree with her assessment and have further concluded that, for a terrorist, ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’ (Bowen, 2005: 86), often asserting that ‘terrorists see the media as a powerful tool’ (Weimann, 2004: 383). The now oft-employed labels of ‘mass-mediated terrorism’ (Nacos, 2003) and ‘media-oriented terrorism’ (Weimann and Winn, 1994) serve as evidence of ‘the centrality of media considerations in the calculus of political violence that is committed by nonstate actors against civilians’ (Nacos, 2003: 23).
Scholars warn about the professional relationship between media and terrorists, cautioning that ‘news coverage of terrorist activities carries a double edged sword of legitimizing the terrorists versus informing and warning audiences of threat’ (Bowen, 2005: 81). Without virulent publicity, terrorists would be unable to achieve their objectives (Hoffman, 2006; Nacos, 2007). Nacos (2000: 175) further argues that, for the terrorist, ‘political violence – especially so-called “terrorist spectaculars” – always results in widespread news reporting and mass-mediated debates’, thereby influencing public policy on at least the awareness level. In fact, this profound media access ushers terrorists into close proximity with society such that ‘terrorist perception of mass media depends upon their perception of probable media impact’ (Torres-Soriano, 2008: 2). Not only can contemporary terrorists take advantage of a 24/7 news cycle allowing for maximum exposure of violent acts, but modern communication technologies have now enabled them to bypass mainstream media to communicate directly with individual citizens – even personally recruiting future members for their groups via the internet (Sciolino and Mekhennet, 2008).
Prestige press understanding of the interplay of terrorist goals with resulting media coverage is surprisingly disparate. Many participants either deny or justify media’s potential influence on further terrorist acts or as a mouthpiece for terrorists. One participant sums up their comments well saying: ‘I don’t think of myself as working for the terrorists, I’m working for the public to try to understand what all is going on …You have to avoid being used by everybody, good guys and bad guys.’ Another journalist, who had previously worked overseas, explained the ‘odd give and take of the media-terrorist relationship’ saying:
Terrorists don’t like us because we don’t carry the message they want us to. Now, journalists are a target of terrorists since Daniel Pearl. At the same time, we have the direct cell number for the Taliban spokesperson, who are right now merging their goals with al-Qaida and want us to cover their moves.
One of the more seasoned reporters didn’t blink an eye at the ‘age-old notion’ of helping the terrorist agenda and said:
I don’t want to sound cavalier when I say this, but I kind of don’t care whether it does or not, so it doesn’t enter into my thinking … and I think that’s a bogus and lousy argument that government officials sometimes try to use to prevent journalists from doing the kind of watchdog reporting they used to do.
Yet another said sarcastically, ‘Yeah, I help them sell terror.’
Others assessed things differently, recognizing their ‘larger role as watchdog’ and seeming to view themselves as having an advocacy role when it came to action against terrorism. One put his argument this way:
If I tell you that the easiest way to smuggle a bomb into the country is in a cargo container then the government say, ‘oh I just told the terrorists how to do it.’ And, I guess that’s the risk, but I think it’s more important to alert the readers, to say there is this problem and you can fix it or not.
Another reporter shared the opinion that:
Basically, it takes a whole bunch of people to make one of these bomb things happen. But people will say that when I do that story, I’m basically going to give instructions to terrorists about how to bomb the US.
Another, more seasoned, reporter immediately dismissed the notion that media aids terrorists and argued instead that:
What’s been interesting in the last 10 years is that publicizing the actions and plans of terrorists … I think it’s actually made them less attractive, as people throughout the world have seen the brutality of their actions. If there was a moment when some terrorist groups might have been perceived as freedom fighters for a particular cause or group of people who were oppressed, that moment has passed.
To him, it seemed that ‘even the sensational wears thin.’ Several reporters agreed with him. One participant likened terrorism to the popular US television show, 24, saying:
You know al-Qaida is like 24, 24 has lost its audience and people just don’t view terrorism the same way they did when 24 started. It’s become mundane and you need an audience to keep going … al-Qaida has lost its audience because it’s just killed off so many innocent people, people aren’t following it anymore.
Other interviewees focused their attention on the reality of the competitive journalistic landscape, observing ‘Well, if you didn’t report on it first, there are many other people who will and you’ll miss the story … I think if you can interview [a terrorist], you should.’ Another reporter said:
I mean certainly they’re doing things to get publicity and they want us to cover them. If Osama bin Laden puts out a message, the more coverage he gets legitimizes him as a leader of a cause. So maybe it does to some extent help their agenda, but that is on balance not a reason not to cover it.
A few participants felt unsure of this interplay and found themselves stuck for words because either they ‘didn’t understand’ or they ‘hadn’t really thought about’ their role in terrorist messaging. One said:
I think that relates to serial killers … [long pause] …which I suppose is what terrorists are. So yeah, I guess I’m part of the unfortunate, but necessary cycle … I really don’t understand them enough to know what plays into their hands.
However, on the whole, this group is quite cognizant of the power they wield. One noted:
We can be either enablers or debunkers and that’s where you have to be careful that you don’t become an enabler … I mean it’s one of the major things that has changed; that has allowed a group of potentially scraggly nobody’s to end up, you know, international celebrities.
Terrorist www.match.com
Most participants agreed that terrorist use of new technologies, specifically the internet, affects their reporting. In fact, most of those interviewed relayed that they cover all al-Qaida video messages in some form or fashion, even if it’s simply on their outlet’s website or blog. One reporter explained:
The increased use of the internet by terrorist groups has made monitoring and access much easier; at the same time, it lessens the sensational, the shock value, because everyone can access it now. The press doesn’t have something unique anymore.
On the specific topic of beheadings, one journalist commented that reporting should ‘always remain in context … since I don’t see, like, millions of people being beheaded, I’m not sure what people can learn from seeing that now.’ He continued, ‘The beheading phenomenon seems to have passed. Or, maybe it’s lost its appeal and just isn’t covered inside our echo chamber anymore.’
Another journalist described increased internet use by terrorists as ‘a game changer’, drawing from his recent overseas experience that ‘the enemy doesn’t need the media anymore or to set up a TV appearance, because they’ve got the internet. I think they’re being even more effective on the internet.’ Most of those interviewed also commented that the greatest amount of recent press about terrorists is about their effective utilization of the internet, with one journalist observing ‘It’s like match.com for terrorists … people are being brought together who never would have met otherwise.’ Another participant commented: ‘Now, terrorist organizations can come out of nowhere and get these people radicalized just by looking at some internet videos in a matter of months instead of years.’ Another concurred, but with the caveat that ‘what is interesting is that this medium, while more ubiquitous and reaching more potential jihad followers, creates shallow followers who need getaway cars and are not willing to die for the cause.’
Culture shift? Post-9/11 anonymous sourcing
Not only did post-9/11 reporter routines change to include concerns and questions about terrorism after any disaster or crime (Chermak, 2003), but presidential administration and government agency secrecy immediately heightened. In response, interviewees indicated that an entirely new culture for DC newsrooms emerged that encouraged national security journalists, in particular, given the sensitive nature of the content they sought from sources and the need for quickly establishing trusted relationships between reporter and source, to consent to source anonymity to a much greater extent than previously. One reporter explained why this new routine surfaced: ‘Anonymous sources became the norm, much more than the usual Washington culture because the government threw up huge secrecy walls … we had to get in somehow.’ Another reporter said that ‘the whole issue was so closed that if we wanted a story, we had to acquiesce to their terms.’ Yet another vividly explained that ‘DC shut down on us and access to anyone other than Hill staffers was cut off like a beheading of our own.’
Some interviewees indicated that it was Capitol Hill culture that dictated this extreme routine shift. ‘I’ve worked a lot of places and the DC culture is just more accepting of this practice than anywhere else, and for stupid unnecessary comments too. It’s just so common, government officials abuse it’, one reporter observed. Another participant remarked that this practice was so pervasive that ‘fashion stories used anonymous sources for opinion and gossip … it’s gotten out of hand.’ Later, he revealed, ‘I probably do way more anonymous sourcing than I really have to.’ Another journalist defensively said, ‘Well, 7 out of 10 people inside DC can figure out who your anonymous source is anyway.’ Others, however, lamented the implications of this now widespread practice, remarking:
These people say things and then later in life get into really important positions of power but you don’t have them on record saying things in the past that could relate to what they’re doing in the future now … sometimes this has been really frustrating.
And:
You know, you don’t want to set off a mole hunt. And the reader should know that this is not a mole. It’s not someone who shouldn’t be giving me something they shouldn’t … This is a paid mouthpiece who’s hiding themselves.
Another drawback is that this practice may have become so engrained that it is influencing how reporters judge story value. For example, one reporter shared that he ‘once heard a reporter from The New York Times who claimed that he never talked to anybody off the record. Yeah, bullshit, I don’t need it if it’s not off the record.’
Interestingly, many reporters said their outlet had no rules on this issue; reporters were free to decide on their own whether to include anonymous sources in a story or not. Having said this, one reporter shared that ‘we just got a piece of paper yesterday with like an ethics thing … I think that’s the first ever paper on how we’re supposed to use anonymous sources in many years.’ There were a few outlets, however, that had extremely strict policies regarding this practice, particularly the necessity for backstops, including having a back-up, independent source; not anonymous, sourcing opinions; and offering an explanation when using an anonymous source as to why that source wanted to remain anonymous.
Participants largely attributed the adoption of increased anonymous sourcing to the decrease in access to government agencies, documents and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) information. 3 Moreover, participants reported experiencing an increase of autonomy because of the decrease in access. Several reporters commented that editors had to trust them to get the story ‘at all costs including an unnamed source that sometimes I couldn’t even tell my boss’. In many cases, the new threat of legal action from heightened government scrutiny and the ‘secrecy that surrounded all things national security’ caused reporters to ‘clam up at work’. Interviewees also said that this new autonomy was only further exacerbated by the economic downturn causing many news outlets to operate with a skeleton staff. In fact, most participants reported that they possess unique autonomy in their jobs that is ‘off the charts different post-9/11’ because of the sensitive topics they cover for their beat. One participant said, ‘I’m the one in the trenches, protecting my sources … Since this topic is so “insider”, I choose my own story ideas for the most part.’ A more seasoned reporter said:
I see my colleagues in DC working other topics that struggle with editor interference … I’m lucky to be on a beat in a city that is hush-hush for the most part so once I gain access, I’ve got it, and no one is telling me how to run my day or do my job.
Yet, another explanation of increased autonomy was shared by one journalist when he said:
With so many different forms of communication outlets now available to me, I have so much more freedom to communicate with the audience and really without interference, because it’s all so much quicker now, than ever.
Greater reporter autonomy and the ‘anonymous sourcing phenomenon’ are not the only significant changes that have taken place within the prestige press since 9/11, however. The contemporary ubiquity of the internet has also significantly influenced the everyday practice of national security reporting over the past decade.
The impact of the internet on traditional journalism
The death of traditional journalism?
The Washington, DC, prestige press had strong opinions regarding the decline of traditional journalism. When asked about their perceptions of the current journalistic landscape, all conceded to recent mammoth changes that generally centred on the changed media landscape wrought by the internet. Their comments can be summed up by one journalist’s emphatic response to the question ‘Have these changes affected you at all?’, to which he replied: ‘Yeah, I’m fucking unemployed.’ He had just been let go the week prior to our interview. Most of those interviewed considered this ‘a trend’. One reporter said heatedly:
It’s brutal out here. I mean it’s just awful … The [Washington] Post is laying people off. The [Washington] Times is probably about to lay off 40 percent of its staff. The New York Times has been retrenching. And all the papers have been closing Washington Bureaus or merging them. I mean it’s just disastrous. And look what’s happened to the Tribune papers.
Ironically, another reporter framed the rapidly expanding technological age and its effect on jobs within the familiar Homeland Security Advisory System coding: ‘We’re at Defcon One and using the color-coding system, we’re probably looking yellow right now.’
In regard to the decline of traditional journalism, most participants blamed poor business models unsuited to the internet age. One said, ‘They didn’t charge for online content and now I have so many colleagues out of work simply because they can’t sustain traditional journalism anymore.’ Other journalists focused more on the lack of oversight with the emergence of new technologies. One participant stated: ‘You could take the best reporter in the world and their blog would still not be as good as their reporting because no one is editing it.’ ‘The problem is ubiquitous communication … It’s difficult to get a scoop on anything. The flow of information is uncontrollable’, emphasized another interviewee. Several others revealed similar sentiments: ‘we just don’t have the patience or time anymore to backtrack like we should our sources and we rush to air with half-sourced or a half-backed story.’ Another shared this opinion:
We don’t cast our net as wide anymore. There is very little investigative, in-depth reporting now and at the same time we’re fixated on, like, 3 stories, instead of the 30 we used to … We did a much better job 10 years ago than we do now.
Many reporters, however, saw some positive implications of a new media landscape. One journalist said: ‘In many ways it’s the democratization of journalism. It’s good that everyone has a voice and it’s bad because everyone has a voice.’ In the end, participants generally agreed that traditional journalism was on the decline. One interviewee explained:
The fundamental thing that has changed in journalism is the monopoly of information is no longer exclusive and has given way to a proliferation of different styles, reporters, organizations and sources … It’s given life to a different global social conscience.
The death of the prestige press and the future of news
The more seasoned reporters predicted that new media technologies, while convenient and productive, were so ubiquitous that they ‘would eventually be the demise of the press as we once knew it’ and the downward spiral has already begun:
If organizations can rise up in the wake of the demise of major urban newspapers, that will be good. I’m just concerned if nobody is reading newspapers, they’re not going to read these long articles on a website either. I’m a little pessimistic about the prospects for good reporting to continue.
Another reporter opined that ‘blogs have shifted the media landscape in terms of integrating opinion with fact and it’s tough to discern where the line is anymore … I fear that the fact-telling, truth-bearing press won’t be here much longer.’
The question of who can serve as journalists also weighed heavily on interviewees’ minds. One participant honed in on the new ‘citizen journalism’ movement (Mythen, 2010) and said, ‘Journalism is changing and now citizen journalism is everywhere … I mean look what happened [with the terrorist attacks] in Mumbai. The only information coming out of there was from citizen journalists.’ Other journalists were more skeptical of this new practice arguing:
CNN has that iReport thing and they frame it as a traditional quote using the same anchor voice from the normal news, but it’s what they got from a Twitter viewer … That may save money, but it seems misleading at the very least.
A younger reporter was more upbeat saying new technologies were ‘one of the positive impacts of journalism in the 21st century’:
The distance between reporters and viewers has gotten a lot smaller. So, people have more access to you. People follow you on Twitter, Facebook, online. They read what you write. They feel a degree of intimacy with you and share things with you.
Comparing the ‘new’ and ‘old’ media landscape, another reporter said:
If this were 15–20 years ago… [you’d have to] send them a postcard and, like, six months later they don’t even remember the story. Now, by the time you’re off the air, someone has already sent you an email or a message on Facebook or Twitter … Who knows? Maybe in another 15 years’ time, the director of the FBI will actually start giving you secrets on the internet on his anonymous blog that he developed.
Many reporters lamented that the main journalistic casualty of the digital age, other than their jobs, is foreign news coverage, with one interviewee quipping: ‘And Americans are dumber for it.’ One of the DC-based international reporters interviewed argued that American-based news organizations just cannot provide the worldwide outlook that those with bureaus around the world can:
I’ve been to Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iraq … I have personal experience and the opportunity to garner other perspectives … To marry the information I am getting here in DC with our other reporters and bureaus worldwide … We’re having economic issues too, but we are staying true to our mission.
This reporter added, ‘Perhaps we need a President of Journalism for the world to help media standards.’
Journalist use of internet tools and platforms
Interviewees’ daily use of new technologies was pervasive in many cases and null in others; the impact of these was nonetheless felt across the board. With regard to social networking platforms, one journalist boasted: ‘I use LinkedIn to cultivate relationships and sources because it brings credibility to my stature.’ Another said: ‘I know a guy at [a major media outlet] who got a worldwide scoop because he followed [a prominent individual] and said something about being in Iraq and what was going to happen next.’ Still another reporter said, ‘Robert Gibbs the White House Press Secretary tweets, so I’ve got to pay attention to that.’
As one might expect, age was the most important factor in this finding; younger reporters tended to utilize many forms of internet communication, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The older reporters, in general, shied away from engaging in a new routine, particularly if they had been with the same outlet for many years. One participant said, ‘A tweet does not meet the traditional threshold, how do you verify that the person is who they say they are?’ However, there were several seasoned reporters who had launched into the digital world, albeit cautiously. One participant said: ‘I have a pseudonym on Facebook. I don’t want people finding me or my sources … the FBI doesn’t need a warrant to go on Facebook.’ Another agreed explaining:
As soon as Facebook figures out how to make me feel better about not being seen then I’ll be happy to use it, so at the moment I’m one of those people who goes and asks the interns to use Facebook pages to find people.
An older, well-connected reporter still prefers face-to-face communication and said: ‘I don’t feel like I need to [use the internet to connect to others]. I feel like foreign policy … The players in the US Government … It’s fairly evident who they are and I know them.’
Some reporters simply feel forced to use the new technologies available:
It’s constant deadlines because if someone is looking at the internet it doesn’t matter what time it is, they’ll look at midnight or one … you just keep feeding the beast until you explode.
Another participant said: ‘Anybody’s got a blog. If there’s news coming out of the White House it doesn’t hold for 5 minutes and within 2 hours it’s old … I have to read the blogs.’ Many shared that they felt their workload had increased at least twofold with the need to adapt to the constant flow of communication. One participant lamented that: ‘It makes the job for traditional journalists harder because you have to wade through a lot more disinformation now … There’s a lot more false leads to run down, which consumes time on writing a better piece.’
Another journalist evinced disgust with bloggers, explaining ‘They can be parasitical where you know they’re taking our reporting and using it for their own ends and not doing their own reporting.’ Other reporters, while open-minded, said they tended to rely on the 20-somethings in their organizations to write web stories. Sometimes that backfires, however. One participant shared that her web staff changed a key word that not only altered the entire context of a story, but also placed the outlet in legal danger. She explained:
These 20-somethings will shortcut stuff … I said, ‘Don’t you think I know how to write? … There’s a reason I put it the way I did and before you change it, did it occur to you to give me a call and find out why I might have done it?’
Overall, a majority of interviewees expressed shock and consternation at the way new technologies are affecting journalism. One reporter said:
I’ll never forget this, there was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, a picture of a young woman who was shot and became the iconic image of the [Iranian] riots, and underneath it the caption said, ‘In this unverified photo.’ I thought to myself this is really a remarkable change: that The Wall Street Journal would acknowledge an unverified photo on the front page, which they certainly got off of YouTube.
Most reporters were thus cognizant of the rapidly changing power dynamic that stems from the digital age. They acknowledge that ‘the big news organizations no longer control the narrative. The narrative is now controlled by the cloud; you know the interconnected web we all exist in.’ And even for the newest generation of journalists, the importance of face-to-face communication is perhaps not yet lost, as the youngest participant interviewed stated:
I rely heavily on the web for my reporting generally … and people my age tend to trust the internet more than those 20 years older, but I’ve never written a good story that did not involve personal conversation, ever.
With regard to new, internet-enabled media start-ups, 30 of the 35 interviewees mentioned ProPublica as the new wave of journalism for the future, many admitting ‘I didn’t think they would succeed.’ 4 One participant summed up the effect of their successful emergence saying: ‘ProPublica has had the biggest impact since publishing paid traditional media.’ Another journalist said: ‘It seems that the non-profit route is the avenue to go down and it could help bulk up national security reporting.’ Similarly, the most talked-about new technology, by far, was Wikileaks, with one reporter lamenting:
This is the future … where people no longer have to find a trusted journalist to protect their information and present it in a thoughtful way; they can just dump it out themselves. An operation like Wikileaks totally changes the power dynamic.
Conclusion
Results from this research indicate a new, post-9/11 news gathering culture that has altered journalist routines. With evidence of contagious framing in the press, the changing routines of the participants studied in this article may directly influence terrorism reporting as distributed around the world. In an age of decreased access to official named sources leading to the need for increasing acceptance of anonymous source use and changes wrought by the internet, Washington, DC, national security reporter autonomy is at an all-time high. Given the serious repercussions of national security reporting and journalist content choices within the terrorism and threat communication process, this study uncovered implications that could affect not just audience frames, but public policy itself.
Overall, these journalists do not accept the argument that their reporting might help legitimize terrorist messaging. Almost unanimously, these reporters believe that, while they may feel like pawns in a warring-rhetoric chess game, not giving the news to their audience is an impossibility that would violate all values of free speech that they are charged to uphold. In fact, many participants argued that their watchdog function ‘includes advocacy where the public should know if there is a new form of terrorism looming around the bend.’ They also shared their belief that the audience appetite for terrorism is waning. Audiences are generally turned off by too much violence, ‘freedom fighters’ no longer resonate, and al-Qaida’s days as a limelight organization are over. Many thus argued that since the ‘sensationalism of terrorism is gone, our reporting really doesn’t hurt anything.’ This raises the question of whether increasing terrorist use of the internet is backfiring on terrorists. Since most people have access to the internet, these journalists don’t seem as interested in ‘the same terrorist story that my competitors can also find’ online.
The journalists interviewed perceive that the traditional prestige press is dying with the emergence of new technologies and that the digital age has impacted their occupation at many levels. This group of journalists were largely seasoned in their profession and thus older and new to the digital age. The overwhelming sentiments of these reporters, particularly those who grew up in a ‘just the facts, ma’am’ era, are disheartened, at worst, and energized to preserve a press void of ‘rampant online opinion’, at best. This task seems daunting, especially when the older reporters are generally saying ‘truth is absolute, not relevant’ while the younger reporters are saying ‘truth is what you make of it.’ A growing fear therefore seems to hover over the city of Washington, DC, that, as one participant put it, ‘Once the internet generation become editors of our papers, the press as we know it now will be dead.’
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This research was partially funded through the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. Additionally, I gratefully acknowledge Maura Conway’s comments and critiques, which contributed greatly to this article’s final version. In addition, I thank Linda Aldoory for her overall contribution to this research.