9/11 Coverage, Part 2: With Little New to Say, Should Media Say It, Anyway?

September 11, 2012, 3:14 pm

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

Kurt Eichenwald's Op-Ed piece on Tuesday about the Bush administration's response to warnings about Al Qaeda's plans generated response among some readers, who thought that it was important enough to be treated as news, not opinion. “Why is NYT op-ed on 9-11 warnings an op-ed and not a news article?” the ProPublica editor Eric Umansky asked on Twitter.  Its author, a former New York Times reporter, has written “500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars,” and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

I thought the piece was given plenty of display as the focal point of the Op-Ed page, and to my nonexpert eye, there were no major news elements in it. This is well-trod ground, though it cer tainly still provokes interest. I spoke with the executive editor, Jill Abramson, who was The Times's Washington bureau chief during the 9/11 era.

“We probably did 20 stories on the intelligence failures” leading to the terrorist attacks, she said.

Ms. Abramson added, “I can't say with authority that there is nothing new in it.” But if there were an important nugget of news, she said, The Times would follow up on it.

Eric Schmitt, who covers national security, and with Thom Shanker, is the co-author of “Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda,” agreed.

“Kurt's a great reporter, and each of these books adds to the body of literature,” Mr. Schmitt said. “You can always keep peeling back the layers of the onion.”

However, Mr. Schmitt did not see anything that demanded follow-up or should change the way we think about what happened. “There are no new secret docu ments,” he said, no revelations “that knock your socks off.”

Others thought the piece was just another example of what they see as the anti-Republican politics of The Times's Opinion pages. On Twitter, the reader John Williams disliked the piece for its criticism of the Bush administration and thought there should have been a countervailing voice.

So if there's nothing really new in the piece, why publish it at all? I found the piece to be a worthy take on a significant subject from a book whose publication date was Tuesday. Opinion pieces by their nature usually don't break news; they're intended to provoke thought and discussion. The Eichenwald piece does that.

Julie Moos, director of Poynter Online, wondered why The Times had no reference to the anniversary on the front page of its print edition on Tuesday. I took part in Poynter.org's live chat on this subject Tuesday afternoon, after blogging earlier in the day.

The Times did have two relat ed news stories inside the first section, mentioned the anniversary prominently on the home page of the Web site on Tuesday morning, and will have coverage of the day's commemorative events in Wednesday's paper, which may include a front-page photograph of the memorial events.

Ms. Abramson addressed this point as well. “It's always a sad day,” she said, and for that reason, worthy of note. “In terms of genuine newsworthiness, our stories and coverage were appropriate to the occasion.”