‘Women Journalists at Ground Zero’ details experiences well
An assistant professor is co-author of a new book with interviews of 24 female journalists who covered the Sept. 11 attacks from Ground Zero.
By Christina Hager
Skiff Staff

While most Americans were able to gather with friends, family or co-workers the morning of Sept. 11 and watch the coverage of the attacks on television, journalists were in a unique position. Denied the time to grieve, they darted around their respective cities gathering information about the tragedy.

Even more remarkable are the stories of those journalists who braved the smoke, the danger and, in some cases, the police at Ground Zero. In the book “Women Journalists at Ground Zero,” written by Suzanne Huffman, an associate professor of journalism at TCU, and Judith Sylvester, a Huie-Dellmon professor for the Media Leaders Forum at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, 24 women journalists share their stories about the events that unfolded before them that morning.

The journalists’ jobs ranged from working for radio stations, to the New York Times, to CNN. However, these journalists, despite where they were in the country, all responded to the tragedy with courage, determination and an unprecedented dedication to their responsibilities as journalists, the book says.

Susan Harrigan, a Newsday business reporter, lived only a mile north of the site of the World Trade Center. When she learned about the attack she immediately called her editors and headed down to the site.

“I figured I was the closest reporter they had,” she said in the book. “I had a duty to go.”

The only thing Harrigan had with her was a reporter’s notebook and two ballpoint pens. But she, like many other journalists, spent the rest of the day determined to get the story.

Huffman said that one of the intentions of this book is to show what it was like to work under these kinds of circumstances, because “with all the technology we have, (that day) the technology failed. They had to work in unprecedented situations to give the general public an idea of what was going on.”

While it was an emotional day for all, Rose Arce, a CNN producer and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was able to focus on her job. She said she remembered having an overwhelming feeling of, “Oh, this is what I do for a living. You do what you do every day, but sometimes you lose touch with what the value of it is or why it is you do it. All I could keep thinking was, ‘My God, all these people are listening to me on television, and I’m the only news they have.’”

These reporters, through all of their hard work, still had to face the emotion and trauma behind the events of the day.

For Miriam Falco, a reporter for CNN, the reality of what happened would hit her late at night.

“Then the tears would well up. I tried not to cry in public. I cried when I was alone. It just erupted sometimes,” Falco said in the book. “The families touched me. The visual images touched me. I lost my camera before I left New York, but I’ll never lose those images.”

This book does an excellent job of telling their stories and what they were feeling minute by minute, both in professional mode, as well as emotionally.

These women are being recognized not for their jobs as women journalists, but for their jobs as journalists, Huffman said. The authors of the book said they did not seek out a woman’s perspective. However, both noticed how many women were covering the story. In the past, there were never this many women journalists involved in a story of this proportion.

Huffman wants readers to see the hard work and everything these women achieved during this time, not as women, but as the steadfast journalists they are.

“A journalist is a journalist. A president is a president,” she said. “What we aim to do (with this book) is to show that what they did was a good job.”