A 1997 broadcasting graduate, Todd Baer has been a reporter at News 8 Austin television in Austin, Texas, for the past two years. Before that he worked at CNN-TV in Atlanta and ABC News in New York.
I have seen postwar Sarajevo and Beirut. I have been to enough places around the globe to know what war looks like, how ugly and sad and devastating it really is.
For some time, I have known all too well the very serious threat to America from terrorists or rogue states. But nothing could have prepared me for what happened on the morning of Sept. 11. Five days after terrorists flew commercial jets into the World Trade Center, I was on the streets of New York trying to tell the story.
No matter what the story has been in my brief career, whether it was the women of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia who suffered through one of the worst massacres in world history, the mother of a Texas police officer killed in the line of duty or Lance Armstrong beating another obstacle, I have always tried to stick to some basic principles. Be accurate, stay focused, be skeptical but never cynical, keep your distance, don’t cross what I call the emotional line and listen carefully. But with this story I had no choice but to throw most of those principles out the door. There was no rule book; there was no handy guide. It was like having blinders on and hoping I was doing the right thing. But it never felt right.
Not a single day went by, not a single story hit the air that felt right or OK or gave me the feeling that I did some good. When I questioned my subjects, all of a sudden I didn’t know what to ask. What do you ask the wife of a New York firefighter who sacrificed his life to save thousands of others? You shouldn’t dare ask how she feels because you know the answer, but I did it anyway because it’s my job.
How do you approach someone attending a memorial for a friend who was doing her job on the 100th floor of One WTC when the plane hit? I need that soundbite and under most circumstances I am willing to go through great pains to get it, but in this setting, with a microphone in one hand, a pen and pad in the other, I am a human being with a broken heart and the approach just doesn’t feel right. The tears were streaming down my face, too, and I didn’t know how to stop them.
When I sat down to write, I couldn’t find the appropriate tone. During my three weeks in New York I felt lost and confused. How could this be? I have always dreamed of covering huge stories with global implications. This was it. This was the big one. It was like getting the ball in the Super Bowl with nothing but open field in front you.
If only life were as simple and clear cut as that metaphor. Why couldn’t I find my footing here? Perhaps the author and journalist David Halberstam had the best answer for me. In his words, “This (the terrorist attacks) was not merely a story. A story is something that happens outside of your life that you cover. This was something that is part of the fabric of our lives.”
And he was right. This was something that happened to all of us. This horrific act didn’t happen in Sarajevo, Beirut or London or Tehran. This wasn’t a story 5,000 miles away that you cover and when it’s over you get on a plane, recline in your business class seat and come home to your peaceful, prosperous neighborhood in America.
It happened here. It happened in my home city, four miles from where my parents live, 15 miles from where my grandparents live. Almost everyone I know knew someone in those buildings who didn’t make it out alive. My uncle Michael, a Wall Street executive, lost 14 friends, including the guy he took the train with that morning.
My aunt Lynn, a longtime employee of the New York Stock Exchange, the one who took me to the top of the World Trade Center when I was little, lost a handful of colleagues and friends. Then there was my direct connection to the tragedy, as if it could get any more direct. The absolute funniest, most cheerful man I have ever met was in One World Trade Center when it happened, and he never returned home. His name was Tommy Celic, an executive at Marsh and McClennan.
So I was trying to tell the story with a heavy heart. Through it all I realized that being a journalist, a person with a voice and the ability to gather information and present it to the public, was never more important than in the days and weeks following the tragedy.
The people affected, which was everyone in New York to some degree, reached out to us. We served as a calming influence. We had information in a society where information is king.
Over the last four years I have learned that the job of a journalist is varied. We are information gatherers, writers, story tellers, investigators and, sometimes in unpredictable ways, much more. On this assignment I was more of a counselor than anything else. I listened to the stories of people’s loved ones, I got to know them. There is a haunting connection shared among people when dealing with death, and I found out that I am not immune.
Covering this story in an acceptable way, at least to my normal standards, was an impossible task. But whatever I could muster up in those 12- to 14-hour days, telling a story that I couldn’t remove myself from would have to be good enough. And because the people watching my reports were going through the same emotional torture that I was, I can only hope that what I presented was of some use to them, and in some roundabout way, a source of comfort.