PressEthic

Ever since September 11, 2001, Americans have been acutely aware that even the lower 48 states are not safe from attack. But things have gotten better, right?

Apparently not. According to the 9/11 commission, the government is not doing a good enough job protecting the American people from another attack. The official report card including, out of 41 categories, five “F”s and a dozen “D”s, including a D for effort to secure weapons of mass destruction worldwide.

"If my children were to receive this report card they would have to repeat a year. We cannot afford to repeat this mistake," said Timothy J. Roemer, one of the commission members.

That sounds like pretty big news. And Editor and Publisher thought so, too. Which is why they reported that of 40 major US newspapers surveyed, only six ran this story on the front page the day the story broke: the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose's Mercury-News, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The Houston Chronicle, on the other hand, carried the headline: “Concerns Over Face Transplant Grow.”

Now, I do know about survey bias, so the numbers may not be as bad as all that; I’d like to see some of the basis behind it. But the fact that the New York Times did not put the story on the front page is indicative, in its way, as is the fact that of the Big Three networks, only NBC’s “Nightly News” led with it.

Still, we should considere that the details first began coming out the Sunday before all of this, so many papers, including the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer, ran it on the front page that Monday, not the Tuesday the survey considered. So again, I’d like to see more details of the survey itself.

In the end, though, this is news and should have been covered. I only wish I knew if the problem lies in the media for not covering a story such as this, or in Editor and Publisher for not making its survey thorough enough to give the whole picture.