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Aquilina is a top editor at the New York Post, in charge
of keeping the office running. In truth, she's more like a den mother
to us all. She keeps candy and cookies on the shelf outside her
office, and when you see her walking around distributing goodies,
she's usually passing out a special tray of sweets.
Last Friday,
on the day anthrax scares at NBC and the New York Times topped
the news, that changed. Annie made her usual rounds, but this time
she was distributing masks and rubber gloves to reporters and editors
frightened to open their mail.
This is what
it's like to be a journalist in New York now. Actually, journalists
anywhere can be and are being targeted by bioterrorists using the
mail, or sick pranksters seeking to emulate them. What distinguishes
the New York journalist from his colleagues elsewhere is that the
worst of September 11 and its aftermath has taken place not far
away, but in his own city.
Like all other
New Yorkers, he has had to absorb the psychic trauma of the World
Trade Center attack, which he may well have seen up close in the
course of doing his job that day. A Post colleague was nearly
killed in the first collapse. Two of his close friends did die,
and 50 people from his hometown in Long Island perished. My colleague
has continued to file stories without cessation since that day.
He is far from alone in this.
The New York
journalist is also a citizen of this city. He lives here, as does
his family, if he has one. Like firefighters and cops, when disaster
strikes, he runs toward the danger, not away from it. This takes
a toll on his loved ones. On the morning of the disaster, with the
Twin Towers ablaze across the East River, the last thing I said
to my wife before racing, notebook in hand, toward the scene of
the crime, was, "I'm going to get as close to them as I can."
I made it as
far as the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge before the first
tower fell, and I had to turn back. My cellphone was kaput, and
my wife didn't know if I was living or dead; had I not stopped on
the bridge to interview a few downtown office workers fleeing the
burning buildings, I would have had time to have made it to Ground
Zero. My wife knew that, and until I showed up at our front door,
dusted with ash 45 minutes later, she wasn't sure if I was coming
home.
Every day now,
she still isn't — and she isn't sure if I'm coming home with
deadly spores on my cuff. The only American journalists who, with
their families, live with this daily life-or-death uncertainty are
war correspondents. Now, we are all war correspondents.
And not only
war correspondents, but combatants. What we write or broadcast makes
us special targets. Judith Miller of the New York Times was
targeted for a powdered letter attack — which as of this writing,
appears to have been a hoax — apparently because of her writing
on bioterror. I have received hysterical e-mails from Muslims in
response to an NRO piece I wrote criticizing Oprah Winfrey's kid
gloves treatment of Islam. The letters are frothing with accusations
of bigotry and hate (while not addressing a single factual point
I made in the piece), and a colleague has already suggested that
I send one of them to the FBI. Hate mail is part of the job, but
now that this stuff could be lethal, all journalists have to weigh
whether it's worth risking one's life to write a particular column,
or report a certain story.
The answer
has to be, "Hell, yes." But all personal snail-mail sent
to one goes in the trash can unopened, all hostile e-mails are stored
for possible examination by authorities, and one takes other precautions,
especially if one's face is known from TV, or from a photo that
runs with one's column. I had altered my appearance significantly
in the wake of multiple death threats from fans of the pop star
Aaliyah, with whom I share the city's sidewalks and subways. After
9/11, I'm sticking with the new look.
That said,
it is a marvelous time to be a journalist anywhere, but especially
in New York. As a fellow writer told me days after the attack, "This
is probably the story of our lifetimes." We are here to bear
witness — literally, at Ground Zero — to the most extraordinary
events this city and this nation have lived through in a generation.
Our vocations and our press passes give us a front-row seat at history.
Most of us
didn't get into this business to write about puppy dogs, prize begonias,
and Britney Spears's navel, though the relative quiescence of American
life prior to 9/11 often made it feel that one's work really didn't
count, that it was simply part of the national chit-chat.
Now, words
matter more than they have in living memory. Simple accounts of
the burial of a heroic firefighter take on an elegiac quality. The
lines one writes in these times aren't poetry, but they will be
saved in countless scrapbooks by readers who want to be able to
tell their descendants: that's what it was like to live in those
days.
And sometimes
you can do positive good, in ways big and small. A reader let me
know about his five young nephews in rural Pennsylvania, who had
given six years' worth of savings toward a Disney World vacation
to the relief fund for the families of Brooklyn firefighters killed
in the disaster. They had read in my column about how neighbors
around one hard-hit Brooklyn Heights firehouse turned out to support
the men, and the boys wanted to be a part of that. When I reported
on the money they gave to the widows and children, generous Post
readers responded with donations. Live with Regis and Kelly
had the kids on, and gave them a free trip to Disney World —
which the boys are now trying to donate to five fatherless firefighters'
children.
All I did was
tell a story, but so many people who need inspiration were moved
by this one (or so they have told me). Bearing witness to the goodness
and bravery of people in this time is as important as telling the
truth about the terror and cowardice.
Being a New
York journalist now, with its very real danger and concomitant excitement,
feels a lot like ... well, hey, I'm a New York journalist, and still
too much of a smart-ass to tell it straight. Maybe I'll just put
it this way: He also serves who only reads a TelePrompTer, or labors
at a word processor.
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