Remembering 9-11 as a local news story

By Charles M. Sennott.

What would happen if the same attack occurred today amid the crisis in local news?

Twenty-five years ago, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was unpacking a moving truck in London. I had just finished a five-year  posting  as the Middle East bureau chief for The Boston Globe amid the violence of the intifada and particularly the bus bombings which were hitting closer and closer to home. And I had arrived in London to take on a new position as Europe bureau chief for the Globe.

On that fateful morning, we had not had time to set up the television or a cable package or any internet connection, but I had my trusted  Sony World Band Shortwave Radio crackling in the background as I was unpacking. I was listening to the BBC and it was just after 1:46 pm Greenwich Mean Time when regular programming on Radio 4 was interrupted for breaking news. The first plane had just struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later the second hijacked plane hit. And in that moment, the world had changed. America was under attack and would soon be at war. 

Eight years earlier I was a street reporter at the New York Daily News and was covering the first attack on the World Trade Center, a failed attempt to topple the towers with a truck bomb but which offered a crude blueprint for 9-11. My reporting at the Daily News was how I landed the job covering the Middle East for the Boston Globe. 

As the news broke on 9-11, I  worked my cell phone and started reaching contacts across the Middle East, confirming what was growing increasingly apparent: The outrageous and apocalyptic vision set out by Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of holy war against America was undeniably underway. 

I just started writing everything I knew through eight years of reporting that had preceded this moment, the local story of the 1993 bombing had become the global story of the attack on America. I realized that of the four hijacked planes, two of them had left from my hometown of Boston. So for The Boston Globe, 9-11 was also very clearly a local story. I knew quite a few of the passengers on those planes.  

By September 19th, I was landing in Tajikistan and within a day was on my way into Afghanistan, where the Taliban was still in power and Al Qaeda was operating openly. We flew into the country on an old cargo plane owned by the Northern Alliance, the faction of fighters who were aligned  with the US in toppling the Taliban. I would cover the story for the Globe for the next five years.

A quarter century on from 9-11, I am reflecting on the international news coverage by American news organizations then and now. It is safe to say that the commitment that the Boston Globe made to our coverage seems extraordinary today, and it feels safe to say there are not many papers the size of the Globe offering readers that kind of in-depth coverage of the world. The Globe still does some of the best investigative reporting in America, but it no longer has an international desk.

The New York Daily News in 1993 focused our police reporting on the suspects and the militant mosques out of which they emerged in New Jersey and Brooklyn. But City Editor Bill Boyle dispatched me to cover where the bombing suspects originated from, reporting that took me to Egypt, Sudan, the West Bank and Pakistan to explore the origins of the animosity in the nascent islamist movement that would later be known as Al Qaeda. Today, the Daily News is owned by a venture capital firm that has squeezed every dollar out of it and left it hanging by a thread with far fewer reporters and hardly enough resources to staff the outer boroughs, never mind a series of in-depth reports out of the Middle East. The Daily News series in 1993 was titled “Seeds of Terror,” a prescient framing. 

That kind of in-depth reporting just doesn’t happen as much today. There are major American news organizations still carrying out and funding ambitious on-the- ground reporting, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP and CNN and NPR. There are also international news organizations such as the BBC, the Guardian and many others where courageous journalists still travel to countries at war such as Ukraine and Iran.

But the idea of a more local news operation covering a global story is virtually non-existent. Why is that?  Never has trusted information been more valuable to readers. We need eyes and ears on the ground, yet we have fewer and fewer reporters who are there on the front lines covering the big  stories and finding local angles for their audiences back home.

Why would it matter? I believe drawing readers and viewers into the story through angles that speak directly to their concerns can make us all not just  better informed and but more connected to the world. 

That’s why I am writing this essay as part of World News Day which officially falls on September 28th.  More than 1,000 newsrooms from over 100 countries will mark it together and GroundTruth is proud to be counted among them. It falls on that day for a reason: September 28 is also  UNESCO’s International Day for Universal Access to Information. And that’s not a coincidence, as the organizers point out. They believe our right to know is only real if someone is doing the work of making information accessible, fact-checked and true. 

It is a mission  that only succeeds with  a robust landscape for local news. As local news grows more and more barren across America with one news desert sprouting up after another, we should all be concerned. And this downturn in local news is a global phenomenon that is eroding democracies around the world, and eroding the very idea of the truth.

We have much work to do to find a way to restore the idea of truth, and the work begins close to home. It begins with restoring local news. 

Charles Sennott is an award-winning correspondent, best-selling author, and editor. He founded The GroundTruth Project and now focuses on his own reporting and thought leadership through his GroundTruth newsletter on Substack.