Nick Jimenez

Tragedies are supreme test for journalism

On Wednesday morning my clock radio went off, as it always does shortly after 6 a.m. Tuned as it is to National Public Radio, I've become accustomed to the usual morning news buzz about "budgets," "Republicans and Democrats," discussions on the Hill" and maybe once in a while a light feature, maybe something about a guy who makes banjos by hand in Arkansas.
   It was half a second before I could focus on words now: "the search for bodies," "had been working on the 101st floor when the jetliner hit," and "the rubble of what was once the World Trade Center."
   Yes, it really had happened.
   Like all Americans, I had been stunned on Tuesday. Deborah Fisher, the editor of this newspaper, and I watched in my office as the first, and then the second, of the twin towers that were once the World Trade Center came down. We are newspaper people, so we have a habit of slightly distancing ourselves from the news. This is the only way we can cope with the regular run of news and instead focus on how to gather and publish news. But we could not, in this instance, disengage ourselves emotionally from what was happening, by way of television, before us.
   But journalism is a great comfort. That's why I've always believed that we, as journalists, are fortunate at times of a great crisis. Americans everywhere are looking for some way to express their concern and some way to get involved. That's why ordinary Americans are flocking to blood banks and flying American flags. But as journalists we already have our way to get involved; we have our work. In doing our work, in gathering the best information we can get and making it available to our readers, I believe we perform a vital function.
   That's especially true, I believe, at times as on Tuesday when the public seeks confirmation that as cataclysmic as the day was that something still worked and that this part of the institutional fabric of the country, the news media, was purposefully at work.
   You may say this invests a daily periodical whose contents on any ordinary day contains everything from the somber to the silly with a higher purpose than it deserves, but there it is. That sense of professionalism, at least, is what drove the team at this newspaper to prepare three editions, two of them extras, in one afternoon and night.
   To cancel or carry on?
   However much we would have liked to return to some sort of normalcy on Wednesday, there was no end.
   That's when I remembered the South Texas Distinguished Scholars, a newspaper program that selects outstanding high school seniors. And on Wednesday afternoon there was a panel of judges due to come in. Somehow, the idea of having some local citizens judge the nominations of scores of high school students seemed out of place to the extraordinary events that had overtaken us. Should I cancel?
   We went ahead, excusing ourselves by saying that time was too short to cancel out. But when the first judge appeared on the agreed on time, I knew we were OK.
   "No, we must go on," said Apu Battacharya, a chemistry professor at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. "We can not allow them to take over our lives. We must try to go on with what we do or they have won."
   Another judge said that doing something on behalf of youth and education was something positive that especially needed to be done now.
   With that spirit, a group of citizens, professionals in their own field, took time out from the mayhem, from their own lives and from their own emotions to focus on the accomplishments of a lot of high school students for a few hours.
   I don't know when normalcy will return, or whether we can define what normalcy will be. But perhaps investing our work, whatever it may be, with that sense of duty and commitment is one way to deal with the world gone mad.
   It was, after all, an ordinary workday at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon when Tuesday dawned.
  
   Editorial Page Editor Nick Jimenez can be reached by phone at 886-3787, or by e-mail at jimenezn-@caller.com.
  
  

 
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