Museum goers thoughtful against backdrop of troop redeployment in Afghanistan

A fragment of the broadcast antenna from the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The wall of newspaper headlines from the day after the attacks can be seen in the background.

For Betsy Northrop, the prospect of forgetting about what happened during the 9/11 attacks makes about as much sense as the attacks themselves.

Her 28-year-old daughter lived in New York during the attacks, and had to walk barefoot across the Brooklyn Bridge to get out of Manhattan, on her way to taking a train home to Williamsburg, Va.

Northrop, 56, couldn’t sleep for a month.

“For people to not remember this, or to think that it can’t happen again, I just don’t understand it,” Northrop said through tears during a Dec. 5 visit to the Newseum’s 9/11 Gallery.

Four days earlier, President Obama pledged a new plan for the conflict in Afghanistan that includes an increase in troop deployment. The goal of the plan is to root out al-Qaida, the group responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Northrop was optimistic about the new strategy.

“We either had to get out or rededicate in Afghanistan to succeed,” she said. “Now that we’ve done that, we have a better chance.”

Beth Borko expressed reservations about President Obama’s invocation of the attacks during his speech this week.

“It was pretty clear that it was geared to bring those feelings back,” Borko said. “For people who thought that 9/11 was directly related to the war, I think it worked, but for others I think it was frustrating.”

Randy Mcfayden is a 46-year-old private equity consultant, and his wife went to grade school with victims of the terrorist attacks in New York City. He said that he had just read former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir, “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” which gave an insider’s account of the war on terror. Mcfayden questioned the priorities of the past presidential administration in handling the dual conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We went into Iraq too quickly,” he said. “We should have taken care of Afghanistan first.”

A box of tissues greets visitors to the 9/11 Gallery Exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC.

The 9/11 Gallery at the Newseum uses a variety of formats to show how journalists covered the events that day, including a wall of newspapers from around the world and a jarring short film titled “Running Towards Danger,” with behind the scenes footage and commentary from journalists who covered the attacks.

Mike Mcnamara was a fourth grade teacher on the day of the 9/11 attacks.  He was critical of the decision by some newspapers to run photos of office workers jumping from the windows of the World Trade Center.

“All of my fourth graders were talking about it, and they were confused,” he said. “I don’t think it belonged in the coverage.”

Cory Watson, 24, works as a guard at the Newseum. He watches quiet, often crying patrons make their way through the exhibit every day. He acknowledged the emotional power of the exhibit, but for Watson, the wall of newspaper headlines held the most impact because it demonstrated the country’s freedom of speech.

“Everybody’s got something to say,” he said. “Every paper tells its own first amendment story.”

After living in DC for the past eight months, I’ve noticed a distinct difference in the way crime is covered in the local media in the two cities. 

In Baltimore, there seems to be more attention paid to violent street crime, or crimes related to gangs and the drug trade. Crime coverage seems to be more unified, with an eye toward emerging trends and how crime is rising and falling in various neighborhoods.  Because of this comprehensive coverage, I now know that the Black Guerilla Family is a strong Baltimore gang, and that the Tree Top Pirus are a local sect of the national Bloods gang.  I know that there is an old rivalry between the drug crews of the east and west sides of town, with the occasional New York interloper thrown in, who could face violent interference from either faction.  I know some of the worst drug corners, and places where violent crime occasionally spills over into more well-to-do neighborhoods.  This is especially remarkable when you consider how dramatically the Baltimore Sun newsroom has been downsized by buyouts and staff cuts, and that the Sun is the only daily in town. 

In DC, crime is essentially non-existent in many NW neighborhoods, and coverage of the violence taking place in other neighborhoods must be sought out and found.  Most crime coverage is being treated one case at a time by, for example, the Washington Post.  I have no feel for the highest crime areas, aside from a neighborhood called Trinidad where there were nationally publicized police blockades last year due to an outbreak of shootings.  There’s almost no linear coverage of gang crime or the drug trade, though both are problems here.  The most I can find are one-offs of shootings.  The Post seems to be more focused on white-collar crime.  This city is pathologically obsessed with national politics, and that obsession hampers the public’s knowledge of what is going on in its own backyard. 

The new local news venture owned by Politico and helmed by former Washington Post editor Jim Brady would be well advised to take a close look at the metro crime beat when the new site launches.  It’s being neglected and many stories are going unreported.

The Baltimore Sun flexed its Fourth Estate muscle on Wednesday and filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Police Department, claiming that the department often ignored Sun requests for public information that they are required by law to provide.  The suit also claims that when the department did make requested documents available, it did so at an extremely high cost, in one instance attempting to charge the Sun $1,250 for a year’s worth of police reports about rapes.  Read the full Sun story by Jamie Smith Hopkins here.

I’m not surprised by this story.  BCPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi is notoriously tight fisted with information that used to be made public on a regular basis.  He arrived in Baltimore just over a year ago.  In that short time, he has managed to build an impenetrable information blockade between the public and the department.  The department must now authorize any officer to speak with a member of the press, and officers who do so face stiff discipline.

Back in March, Guglielmi’s new policy of withholding the names of officers involved in shootings drew the ire of Baltimore’s few remaining true crime journalists.  Sun crime reporter Peter Hermann assembled a comprehensive blog post critiquing the new policy.  It includes this prophetic moment, from a segment on the Mark Steiner show featuring Guglielmi, former Sun reporter David Simon, ACLU attorney David Rocah, and Bob Cherry, head of the Baltimore FOP:

At one point, Simon told Guglielmi: “State officials cannot go against state law.”

Guglielmi: “David, nobody is going against the law.”  He added, “that’s why we have courts.”

Rocah: “You might find yourself there.”

And thanks to the brave remaining journalists over at the Sun who are still fighting for the public’s best interests, he has.  My hat is off to you today.  This will be a fascinating one to watch.

Today I stumbled across a report that was compiled in the wake of the BELIEVE campaign, the famed public call-to-action by the O’Malley administration that called Baltimore citizens to fight against the ills of drugs in their communities.  The report I found was a self-congratulatory assessment of the campaign by the advertising firm who worked with the city on the project, Linder & Associates, Inc., based in New York City with offices on Park Avenue.  You can view it here.

As part of their campaign, Linder & Associates conducted surveys to get a feel for where city residents stood on the problem of drugs.  Two particularly interesting statistics:

- “Caucasians in Baltimore are less likely than African-Americans to see Baltimore’s drug problem as their own problem, at least to the extent that they need to take some action to oppose it.”

- “Only 47% of Caucasians polled said they were likely to take some action as a result of BELIEVE appeals compared with 76% of African-Americans.”

Of course I realize that this was an advertising firm conducting a survey, but this is still revealing, and I think captures a fundamental breakdown in Baltimore’s efforts to right itself and truly change.  BELIEVE was a flawed effort but one thing it had right was that for Baltimore to make progress in the fight against drugs, the city will need everyone’s help, not just those living in neighborhoods most affected by the drug trade.  This is a complicated problem, but if time has taught Baltimoreans anything it’s that fixing this problem is going to take sustained effort on everyone’s part, not just those who are most directly at risk.

There are many passages in the report that time has made compelling, and I won’t rehash the full contents, but I felt that one section needed to be highlighted for irony’s sake:

“In the words of Baltimore’s Mayor, Martin O’Malley, BELIEVE is a call to the people of the city to rise up and ‘risk action on faith.”

According to a survey of 1800 Baltimore residents by the Schaefer Center of Public Policy at the University of Baltimore taken earlier this year, there is a disconnect between declining crime stats, and how safe city residents feel about crime in the city.

The Mayor’s office has decided that people’s perception of Baltimore as an unsafe city is incorrect, citing declining numbers of violent crime, down 7 percent.  In the Sun story, Mayor Dixon also offers the obligatory and ill-informed slam against the media, blaming them for the city’s image problem.

This story is an example of a breakdown in the Mayor’s office, and a refusal to handle the city’s biggest problem in an honest way.  Instead of fighting to change the perception with any number of measures (increased visible police presence, comprehensive cime prevention campaigns, frequent press conferences to keep the public informed on progress in their neighborhoods, etc.), Mayor Dixon is clinging to any statistic that shows numerical progress.  What the Dixon administration chooses to ignore is that people in Baltimore have been hearing how safe their city is for years from politicians, in the meantime they are getting mugged on their way home from work, having their cars broken into in a regular basis, and living with the spectre of crime every day.  People don’t want more statistics.

In this case, perception is reality.  Baltimore City leaders would be wise to traffic in it more often.