Reassurance or cover-up? The New York Times or New York Daily News? As New Yorkers suffer, a year and a half after 9/11, from "World Trade Center cough," an article in the American Journalism Review raises central questions about how environmental journalism is done today.

Survivors of the WTC collapse, as they gagged on the dust, knew that it threatened their life's breath. But within a few days, on September 17, 2001, as underground fires burned and dust lingered, the stock market and much of lower Manhattan reopened for business. The next day, EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced: "I am glad to reassure the people of New York … that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink."

Not everyone believed her. A year and a half of data and a year and a half of coverage have yet to resolve the question.

AJR published a thorough review of the coverage in its January/February 2003 issue. "Air of Uncertainty," by Susan Q. Stranahan, takes a fairly evenhanded look at the complicated and contentious question, and comes up with a less-than-perfect report card for the media who covered it.

"Not since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania have reporters and government officials faced such an Everest-size task of communicating complex information to a frightened public," Stranahan wrote. "As at TMI, officials in New York were loath to concede they were in the dark, and as a result, offered erroneous and misleading information about the situation. Like TMI, the best stories often lay hidden in inconsistent statements and arcane technical data -- awaiting discovery by curious reporters."

"All too often after 9/11,” she wrote, “journalists simply accepted the party line from city, state and federal officials. With a few notable exceptions, the New York media took months to zero in on a story that touched the lives of thousands."

Stranahan's piece comes close on the heels of the April 2002 book, Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse, by New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez.

Gonzalez gives himself credit for breaking the story of the wide array of toxics in the dust -- in an Oct. 26, 2001, front-page column. His story was based on nearly 800 pages of EPA test data obtained from a FOIA request by Joel Kupferman of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project.

In this and subsequent coverage, eventually compiled in the book itself, Gonzalez says EPA and state and local officials concealed the dangers of the dust to reassure a jittery public facing a terrorist assault, and to reopen the stock market to avoid deeper damage to the U.S. economy.

Gonzalez is the author of two previous books and recipient of a George Polk journalism award. He is also co-host of the decidedly left-of-center Pacifica radio program, Democracy Now. In daily practice, he is a columnist rather than a news reporter, he writes for the Daily News, a tabloid that tries to be as sensational as it can, and he is not a specialist in environmental matters.

Gonzalez does not hesitate to indict the mainstream media for complacency and lack of skepticism on the story.

Paralleling Gonzalez' coverage was far more conservative coverage by New York Times reporters like Kirk Johnson, Susan Saulny, and Andrew C. Revkin, and by Newsday reporters like Laurie Garrett and Delthia Ricks, mostly specialists. They were struggling to make sure their stories were solidly based in a brand new subject area where data were incomplete and standards often lacking.

Stranahan quotes Revkin on the Daily News coverage: "Some of the headlines were unnecessarily alarmist and not supported by the facts."

Stranahan also quotes Gonzalez on the Times' work: "The Times was and has continued to be total apologists for the EPA on just about everything."

Stranahan herself is a specialist. She reported on environmental matters for some 28 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, working in 1979 as part of the team whose coverage of Three Mile Island won a Pulitzer. In April-May 2000, she co-authored an eight-part Inquirer series, "Beyond the Flames," which probed the health consequences faced by firefighters who fought a 1978 fire at the Wade hazardous waste dump. That gave her special insights into the ills faced by those who worked at Ground Zero.

Perhaps because of her experience as a specialist, Stranahan is able to illuminate where early-off-the-blocks alarmists like Gonzalez may have gone astray. EPA's early measurements and reassurances, for example, focused primarily on a few obvious toxic suspects like asbestos, lead, PCBs, and mercury. But the worst threats (or additional threats) may have lain elsewhere in the endless array of toxins produced by the collapse and fire.

Whatever the eventual conclusion about things like asbestos, equal or worse problems might eventually prove to stem from things like fiberglass, highly alkaline concrete dust, or dioxins and furans, and other byproducts of the fires that burned at the site for weeks afterwards. Whatever the merits of Gonzalez' coverage, he ends up lost at sea trying to illuminate the health importance of the numerous dioxin derivatives.

The essence of Gonzalez' indictment of EPA and the media who simply relayed EPA statements is that EPA's early blanket assurances of safety to the public were knowingly misleading -- not only because EPA knew of but didn't share some data, but, he maintains, because EPA knew that it didn't know. He blames EPA for not leveling with the public about the risks.

Stranahan points out that often the risks are unknown -- as was certainly the case in the unprecedented WTC event. Yet she leaves open the question of what the best response of journalism is to such uncertainty -- reassurance or alarm -- and ultimately leaves room for both the Times' and the Daily News' approaches.

Gonzalez was quick to cast himself in the role of crusading investigator -- and may well have done journalism a service by stimulating a lot of further coverage. But in end, the heroes-and-villains story he told may have served not only the tabloid hunger for sensation, but also a political agenda demanding distrust of government.

As Stranahan puts it: "The good guy/bad guy paradigm didn't fit."

Further links

"Air of Uncertainty," American Journalism Review, January/February 2003, by Susan Q. Stranahan.

"Assessing The Scope Of WTC Ailments: Experts Study How Lung Ills May Worsen," Newsday, October 1, 2002, by Delthia Ricks.

"City Struggles to Contend with Widespread WTC Cough," Newsday, September 30, 2002, by Laurie Garrett.

"Man With Few Trade Center Ties Traces His Asthma to 9/11," New York Times, January 22, 2003, by Kirk Johnson.

"Beyond the Flames," Philadelphia Inquirer, by Susan Q. Stranahan and Larry King, April 30, 2000.

"EPA Response to September 11," EPA's World Trade Center focus page.

"World Trade Center: Lingering Airborne Hazards," National Library of Medicine, includes many further links.