News Media as Artifacts of Loss: Journalism History in the 9/11 Museum

Abstract

With the passage of two decades, the story of September 11, 2001, is moving out of living memory and into recorded history. This essay considers the place of journalism within this transition, focusing on the uses of news media inside the 9/11 Museum in New York City, which has drawn more than 17 million visitors since its May 2014 opening. For years after the attacks, journalism was central to public retellings of the 9/11 story. Many of those accounts came from journalism itself, as major news organizations created special supplements, issues, programs, and books, repackaging their own original coverage of the event and recalling journalists’ memories of covering the story. In 2008, the first permanent exhibit about 9/11 opened as part of the Newseum, a Washington, DC, institution funded by news corporations. Journalism was obviously its main focus, with interpretation including newspaper front pages, a film in which reporters shared their terrifying experiences, and an enormous artifact, part of the broadcast antenna that once topped World Trade Center Tower One. When New York’s 9/11 Museum opened six years later, in 2014, its most powerful artifact was its site, the cement foundation of the former Twin Towers. Within their footprints are thousands of other material artifacts that Marita Sturken calls “survivor objects,” from the mundane (paper memos) and personal (shoes) to the structural (twisted steel) and heroic (a crushed fire truck). Most scholarship about this site focuses on these kinds of objects, but the museum also contains news-media survivors. News photographs are plentiful among the digital mediation that visitors encounter as they descend wide ramps to the main displays below ground. While they are documentary images, they are similar in perspective, showing people on the streets of Manhattan looking forward in tears or upward in horror. In the weeks after the attacks, many of these pictures appeared in national newsmagazines and in photography exhibits through which New Yorkers processed the catastrophe. In the museum today, they are displayed at eye level as the visitor walks among them; they are indexical in a way that obscures mediation, inviting visitors into a relay of seeing that makes us forget that someone took the picture. News media are mentioned, however, in audio and written words projected around these “Dark City,” by Dennis Leung (CC BY 2.0)