September 11: The Day Journalism Became Personal

By Habib Toumi
MANAMA: It was mid-afternoon in Bahrain when I began racing toward the newspaper office in the capital Manama.

The car radio was on. I kept switching from one station to another, searching desperately for information, for anything that might help me understand what was happening more than 10,600 kilometers (6,600 miles) away in New York City and Washington on that fatal day September 11, 2001.

The reports were fragmentary and the details were still coming in. They were not complete, yet felt enormous and ominous.

I was responsible for producing the following day’s newspaper. As I drove, my mind was already working ahead of the newsroom. I had made my decision: the front page would be devoted entirely to the four hijacked planes and the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

Inside, we would devote several pages to the unfolding catastrophe. Other international news, sports and entertainment would have to give way. Stories that could wait would wait. There was only one story that mattered that day.

For me, this was not simply a major international story. It was also personal.

During my teenage years, I had lived in Parsippany, New Jersey, about 27 miles from New York City. I had travelled from Parsippany to the Big Apple several times, and from the first day, I fell deeply in love with the city.

It was the amazing combination of vibrant energy, the extraordinary mixture of people, languages, cultures and dreams, simply the feeling that New York represented something larger than itself. I have visited more than 40 countries later in my life, but no other city could displace it in my heart or imagination.

Now, my favorite city was under attack.

I felt the shock not only as a journalist, but as someone who had walked those streets, looked up at those towers and carried memories of that city for decades. The attack felt like a deeply personal assault, not only on innocent people and a place I loved, but also on the ethical, moral and human values I had come to hold dear.

The details were still scarce. But even then, I found myself thinking that there could be no explanation capable of making the deliberate targeting of innocent people acceptable.

People had gone to work that morning. They had said goodbye to their families, driven cars, ridden trains or buses, cycled, walked, entered offices… They were simply living their lives.

The buildings that had become the targets were more than steel, concrete and glass. To me, they represented human imagination, determination and achievement … The audacity of people to build upward, to dream bigger and to believe that tomorrow should be better than today.

My mind went back to 1978.

I remembered a beautiful afternoon at the World Trade Center, long before I could have imagined that I would one day be sitting in a newsroom thousands of miles away, trying to make sense of its destruction.

I remembered being mesmerized by the architecture, fascinated by the speed of the elevator and overwhelmed by the panoramic view from the top.

People around me were smiling, sharing beautiful times, taking pictures and pointing toward landmarks scattered across New York City and beyond. For me, a teenage visitor, it was magical.

That afternoon had been an experience of wonder. The city seemed limitless and the towers, its potent symbols, permanent.

Now, more than two decades later, I was listening to reports of those same towers disappearing into smoke.

When I finally reached the newspaper office, there was no time for nostalgia.

We called a staff meeting and immediately began planning the edition. The newsroom became a place of controlled urgency.

Reporters were assigned to remain close to the television screens and the incoming wires from international news agencies. We needed every verified development: the latest information from New York and Washington, the casualty reports, official statements and the reactions coming from capitals around the world.

Information arrived faster than it could sometimes be absorbed. A new fact would change headlines. A new report would require an entire story to be rewritten. Rumors had to be separated from facts. Numbers and details changed. The picture of what had happened became clearer only gradually.

And throughout it all, we were aware that millions of people would wake up the next morning and turn to newspapers for an account of what had happened.

That responsibility weighed heavily on us. We worked until the last possible moment before the pages were sent to the press.

By then, we were mentally drained, physically exhausted and morally shaken.

But journalism does not always give you the luxury of stepping away from history when history becomes unbearable. There was a newspaper to produce; there were readers waiting, and there was a responsibility to tell the story as accurately, fairly and completely as we could.

In my many years in journalism, I have covered wars, political upheavals, human tragedies and terrible catastrophes. I have witnessed moments when the world seemed to change direction in an instant.

But September 11, 2001, remains one of the most difficult and challenging days of my professional life.

Today, looking back, I feel that on that day, the distance between the journalist and the story disappeared. I was not merely covering New York. I was recalling my outstanding time there. I was not simply reporting on buildings. I was remembering standing inside them.

And I was not simply watching tragic history unfold on television. I was watching a part of my own personal history vanish with it.

That afternoon in Manama, the radio brought the news into my car. By evening, the newsroom had turned that news into pages, and by the following morning, those pages carried the weight of a day that had changed the world.

September 11 was, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once described another moment of national catastrophe, a day that would live in infamy.