https://joannelipman.substack.com/p/015bae08-af1b-4002-b83b-a69fd4253791

September 11 and the Media
Remember what it was like to trust the press?
Joanne Lipman
Sep 11, 2025

Every September in the journalism seminar I teach at Yale, I devote a class to the 9/11 terror attacks. The students already know the basic, awful details, of the hijacked planes, the thousands murdered, the heroism of the first responders.

But it’s what they don’t know – and likely never will - that saddens me. And that is, what it feels like to trust news reporting.

As a journalist, this is both personal and professional for me. I was inside the World Trade Center when it was attacked. At the time, I was an editor at the Wall Street Journal, which was headquartered across the street. That morning, a gorgeous, early fall day, my colleague Joe and I were browsing the Concourse level shops for a birthday present for my 10-year-old daughter. That’s when the first plane hit.

I walk the students through what happened next. The sudden evacuation from the building. How we emerged to find what seemed like snow – pulverized concrete and steel – falling from the brilliant blue sky, while blank financial order forms wafted down from above. The unimaginable sight of an ugly black gash tearing into the tower’s upper floors. The confusion on the street. “It was a sightseeing plane,” I heard one man say. “Maybe a helicopter,” offered another. No one could conceive of this as anything other than a terrible accident.

I tell the students, gingerly, about the unspeakable horrors we encountered as we tried to get to our office to report on what we assumed was an aviation disaster. How the street leading to our building was on fire, an airplane engine and empty rows of seats incongruously strewn across the ground… and how, blocked by the flaming debris, we detoured a block south… where we found ourselves in a scarlet river of human remains, splattered violently on the pavement, as if a butcher shop had exploded, the gore punctuated only by a single shoeless foot here, a headless body there. An incomprehensible sight, one that no human should ever see.

And then the roar of an airplane directly above our heads – could it be coming to rescue those survivors on the tower roof? – followed by a sonic boom, a physical explosion so loud and deep, resonating layer after layer, that not one person on the street looked up. Primal instinct took over. Everyone ran to flatten themselves against the nearest wall, our primitive base brains propelling our bodies to safety before conscious thoughts even had a chance to kick in. And the realization, then, that this was no accident. We were under attack.

I explain how, when the towers fell shortly afterward, The Wall Street Journal office was all but destroyed – it wouldn’t be habitable again for almost another year…

… and yet how my colleagues did what they do best. Everyone turned into a reporter that day, tapping out eyewitness accounts and interviews on their Blackberrys, and uploading their reports to the entire organization, unsure of who was on the other end to receive them. Staffers who were able to get to New Jersey gathered in a back office and transformed it into a makeshift newsroom, pulling those memos into coherent articles. Corporate executives who hadn’t practiced journalism in years showed up, volunteering to edit copy.

Joe and I, meanwhile, escaped on foot, hugging the river as we passed under the burning towers, both of which looked like they might fall over onto the fleeing pedestrians. Onlookers around us gasped as victims began jumping from the towers. Ultimately, I walked seven miles or so uptown, stopping briefly at home to hug my children and my husband, who had been unable to reach me and was certain I was dead. Then I continued uptown to a fellow editor’s apartment, where a makeshift central command was set up around his dining room table. My own scrawled notes reflect the discombobulated, out-of-body feeling of vertigo as we attempted to craft a front-page headline:

Then I tell the students about the miracle, that thanks to the heroism and dedication of my colleagues, we were able to put out a paper on September 12. I show them the front page:

Here’s what strikes me today. Not what is on the page, but the students’ puzzled reaction to what is not on it: Finger-pointing. Blame. There’s no name-calling. No Democrats calling out President Bush for a massive security lapse, no Republicans trying to shift blame to the other side. No conspiracy theories. Not even a reference to politics. Instead, a top headline connotes a unified “Nation Stands in Disbelief and Horror.”

To be sure, there was misinformation swirling back then, and there would be horrendous attacks on Muslims and feverish whispered conspiracy theories in the coming weeks. But mainstream news organizations didn’t take the bait. They didn’t give oxygen to baseless theories. Nor was there social media to further amplify the vitriol or spread the conspiracy theories. Straight reporting ruled the day.

For my students, this is a bit baffling, or at the least outside the norm. And that’s what I’m referring to, when I mourn what students don’t know. They don’t know what it’s like to live in a world where people trust the media, where they believe the news they read and see. They don’t know a news media that isn’t viewed - and doesn’t view itself - through the polarized lens of left and right.

When the planes struck on 9/11, the majority of Americans still trusted mass media, per Gallup. That majority held until 2004, when trust fell below 50% for the first time - perhaps not coincidently, just before most of my students were born. For their entire lives, they have never experienced a single moment when most Americans trusted the press.

For their entire lives, my students have never experienced a single moment when most Americans trusted the press.

This week, my students pondered how a national tragedy on that scale would be reported in today’s world. As one said, “I wonder how posterity will remember tragedies such as 9/11 through this lens of online conspiracy.” Another recalled the famous image of President Bush, receiving the news of the terror attack while reading to school children, and asked, “Would today’s equivalent of that photo be a screenshot of a tweet, hastily made, making charged claims about the attack’s origins?”

In the decades since 9/11, there have been plenty of journalistic missteps. But I have never been more proud of my colleagues, or my profession, than on that day. It was journalism at its best. One can only hope that my students and their young peers will someday know what that trust, and pride, in journalism feels like - and that it won’t take a national tragedy to show them.