News & Terrorism

Terrorism and Homeland Security: Bringing The Stories Home

By Walter Dean

Journalists have a vital role to play in helping Americans set priorities for the war against terrorism, according to prominent members of the nation's scientific and intelligence community who met with news executives in Washington.

"Almost all we do today is going to have to be re-done in the future," noted Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "How do you make value judgments so that you don't have a vast overreaction in one area and a vast under-reaction in another?" And how do you report it?

More than 40 broadcast and print journalists considered those questions at a December 6, 2001, conference on "Terrorism and Homeland Security: Bringing the Stories Home." The day-long program, held in Washington, was sponsored by the Foundation for American Communications, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, in association with RTNDF and the Associated Press Managing Editors, and brought together experts from various disciplines to discuss the kinds of terrorist threats facing America and ways journalists might report those risks.

Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, told participants that "the communication of risk and the public dialogue about how we are responding to threats is very important" and that "news organizations are essential in this effort."

Ridge noted that the 'first responders' to terrorist incidents in this country are local police, fire and public health workers. Broadcast journalists, of course, will likely be right behind them and, as such, will give citizens their first information about an incident or threat.

"How should we react to alerts?" asked one news executive. "How should we play them?" Ridge noted that his office had issued three terrorist alerts, the most recent before the Christmas holidays. "The convergence of religious holidays (Christmas and Ramadan) and the previous history of attacks led us to conclude that we should raise awareness," said Ridge, who acknowledged the latest alert is based as much on an "intuitive feeling" as any hard evidence that an attack is imminent.

Ridge agreed it is "appropriate (for journalists) to probe and question decisions" made by his office, adding that, "if we do our jobs right, there's a public information role we can share with you." "We are concerned," he said, "about how people respond to a series of general alerts," and promised "to try to work out the language of the alerts."

Local newsrooms, however, could play a far more prominent role in the civil defense process by actually uncovering the terrorist attack.

How could this happen? Baruch Fischhoff, director of the Center for Integrated Study of Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carnegie Mellon University, cited the case of an outbreak of cryptosporidium in the water supply in Milwaukee. Seven years ago, 100,000 Milwaukee area residents became sick with flu-like symptoms, 1,000 of them were hospitalized, and 100 died. But, according to Fischhoff, the public health system failed to detect the outbreak for several weeks because most of those who became ill had treated themselves with over-the-counter medications. It wasn't until pharmacists began to notice a run on products for upset stomachs and reporters began asking questions that public health department finally put two and two together.

Fischhoff said the local news media performed a similar role in the first days of the anthrax attacks. "The press helped determine the set of issues" by "pulling together" various pieces of information from a lot of different places at a time when the Public Health Service was "crushed" with information. The news media, he said, "played a critical role in figuring out what was there," and now "the public has developed a fairly sophisticated understanding" of the risk factors associated with anthrax.

Dr. Margaret Hamburg, vice president for biological programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a former New York City Health Commissioner, characterized the anthrax attack as "the tip of the iceberg" of potential bioterrorism. She noted that future attacks, which she believes will happen, "probably won't come in a letter with a note attached," as the anthrax letters mailed to two U.S. senators did. Rather, she says, it will likely be a "silent release" of a killer bug or toxin, with no clear indication of the presence of the disease until days or weeks later. By that time, she fears, a lot of people will be very ill and a "public health issue will be a public safety issue."

Hamburg says it will be up to health care workers to detect the threat and then treat it, perhaps on a massive scale. The news media, she says, can help. Not just by sifting through reports and passing on information, but by asking tough questions. She suggests several that reporters can use to help determine how prepared local public health agencies and medical facilities are to detect and treat a bioterrorism threat:

• Do you have a laboratory, how well is it equipped and staffed and what is its core capacity to do studies?
• Do you have Internet access with the ability to plug into the national public health system and Centers for Disease Control?
• What is your relationship with health care providers? What are your reporting requirements and are health care providers subject to them?
• What's your relationship to public safety agencies like the police, fire and EMS? Do you conduct drills together and are those drills more than 'table-top' exercises?

Hamburg says the first tip-off that a public health office is ill equipped to handle a bioterrorist attack is whether they answer their phone. Unfortunately, she says, some don't.

Jeremy Isenberg, president and CEO of New York City-based Weidlinger Associates and an expert on blast engineering, said reporters should not be afraid to ask architects and builders about construction and design tradeoffs necessary to protect buildings from terrorist attacks.

Isenberg says that until now, "absolute minimum cost has been the governing criteria" in high-rise construction. He noted that engineers are trying to determine why older buildings adjacent to the World Trade Centers withstood the catastrophe while some newer structures collapsed, and speculated that newer, lighter weight building materials might be a factor. "Are older materials more fireproof?"

Jeffrey Hunker, dean of the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert on cyber terrorism, said the Internet might eventually replace the EBS, or Emergency Broadcast System, as a tool to warn of attacks. That is, if the web itself isn't compromised. Hunker says the theft of personal information from web sites is "happening a lot more than is being reported" and that "it's incredibly difficult to know who's doing it." Most alarming, says Hunker, is our collective failure to understand how interdependent computers have become with the rest of our infrastructure. "I once visited a pipeline control center that was in a bomb shelter," he observed, "but you could dial into their computers from your home." And those computers controlled the pumps that moved the oil and natural gas through the pipes. This is one reason why Hunker believes we are entering an age when wars will be fought as much with software as with guns and bombs.

For the present, however, those bombs--especially nuclear devices--are still a very real threat. Scientist Richard Garwin, a fellow emeritus at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, NY, worries that a nuclear device could be made with materials from the "vast surplus" of uranium left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union and placed in one of thousands of cargo containers shipped into the U.S. each day.

William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, noted that since less than one half of 1 percent of these containers is ever inspected, they pose a potentially serious hazard. The challenge for the engineering community, he said, is to find an economical way to inspect the contents of ships and trucks entering this country without destroying our ability to conduct international trade. Said Wulf: "We can't afford to make it impossible to be attacked. All we can do is reduce the probabilities."

--Walter Dean is with NewsLab/Project for Excellence in Journalism