 And we've got a really esteemed panel as you will be introduced to momentarily representing both kind of the broadcast as well as long form media. It's going to be moderated by our own Steve Handelman, Steve. Here is the director of the college's Center on Media Crime and Justice. He's also executive editor of the crime report which is a great website that's kind of the definitive what's going on now in the criminal justice world. He also has a television show, Criminal Justice Matters, which is a monthly, it's available on CUNY TV and he's a consulting managing editor of America's Quarterly. And he has an award-winning, long career as an award-winning journalist, a columnist and a foreign correspondent and he has a master's in public administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard. So I will turn it over to Steve and let him start our panel. Thanks, Steve. Thank you, Charles. So good afternoon, everyone. I first want to thank Charles and Glenn for doing this panel. I think it's long overdue. It's one of the more important subjects that you can think of. And I also want to pay tribute, and not just to the families of the victims of 9-11 who spoke earlier today, but also to the first responders who spoke after them. The work they've done, the sacrifices they made are ones that none of us should ever forget. We need them, often a lot more than they need us. I hope that we won't need them to the extent that we had the same kind of tragedy that we had in 9-11. But they're always there for us. We're going to go, I think, in a little bit of a different direction for this panel. When it comes to disasters and first responders, journalists are really right up there in terms of first responders. You could call them or us first responders, even though we don't do anything to help anybody, one would say. But we're there. We're the eyes of the world, the ears of the world when a terrible tragedy happens. I don't think there's any journalist in his or her career who hasn't been in somewhere or the other part or involved in coverage of a disaster. Most people think of journalists as the Watergate type investigative reporters, and of course we're that. We all start our career either covering disasters or smaller tragedies. I mean, I started out as a police reporter and I've covered tragedies ranging from home of city bombing to earthquakes in the Middle East and war. So I mean, I've had my share of tragedy coverage and I've seen the traumas that are inflicted upon people and upon journalists themselves who actually are the eyes and ears covering this. The issue that we're dealing with here is probably goes as close as you can get to the heart of who we are as a country, which is really the right to know. How much do we have the right to know about things that affect us? Where does the line get drawn between privacy rights and the public's right to know? Is there a need to protect people? I think we talked a little bit about this earlier today from certain bits of information. And how far do we need to go if we need to go? If there's someone should draw a line between what the public should know about an unfolding tragedy and after a tragedy happens. We think about 9-11 and the press's role. One story that comes to mind, and I'm sorry he's not here, someone I would have invited is a very good friend of mine named Juan Gonzalez, who is some of you may know the name, he was a columnist for the New York Daily News. And shortly after 9-11 happened, he covered really the first response to the tragedy. And one of the stories that he wrote, it was an investigative story. He looked at the quality of the air around ground zero and discovered that it was incredibly dangerous and toxic to the cleanup crews and the first responders. He wrote the story, in fact he wrote several stories, the EPA refused to admit it, they refused to tell him more information. It took ten years before we finally found out that what he was writing about was totally correct. People had gotten sick as a result of being exposed to the various toxins and chemicals that were left at the site. So that's the kind of work that journalists and that's the responsibility of journalists to do. And for this, and one other thing I want to mention actually is that if you look at the flyer for today's conference, you'll see it's 9-11 and there's something that looks very suspiciously like a cell phone. And that's not appropriate, right? We're in the age of cell phones. But back in 9-11, what was a cell phone then is very much not what a cell phone is today. Technology is very different. In fact, we were just talking with some of our panelists. The role that journalists used to play as gatekeepers of information is pretty much fated. I mean we're just one of the crew who are giving people information. Now you can upload, as people were talking earlier in terms of body cameras, information to YouTube. You can put it out on Twitter, you can put it out on Facebook, and there's no control. I mean a journalist is really in many ways everyone. Everyone thinks he's a journalist or she's a journalist and in some ways they are. Some of them do better jobs than the professionals do, some of them do much worse jobs. The question is, can we control what gets out? We should be able to control what gets out. We have to add that on top of the technology that's out there and that will come. That's going to change how we look at disasters and tragedies in the decades ahead. So there's a lot of questions out there to look at and to help us, we have a really stellar panel of journalists. Their bios are in your packets. I'll introduce them briefly. We have, just starting from my far right, we have Jim Hopper. A stellar prize-winning WABC correspondent. He's done lots of award-winning and news breaking stories about the quality of our buildings that are being specially. We're just talking about a story that he's been doing on the New World Trade Center. He can maybe talk about it a little bit. Right to his left is Jim Robbins. It's not Jim. It's still Tom. It's Tom. I knew it's Tom. Tom Robbins, who used to be at the Builds Voice, he's now a teacher's investigative journalism at the Penny Graduate School of Journalism. And to my direct right is Dave Cullen, who some of you may know as the author of the New York Times bestseller on Columbine, talk about an early disaster and early tragedy that we will talk a little bit about today. Dave has won the Edgar Award, Bronson Over the Scarver Award, the Goodreads Choice, it's all in his bio. If we listed all the accomplishments of all of our journalists today, we wouldn't have any time to talk. So what I'm going to do, I think rather than have each of them present, we're going to have a bit of a conversation to make it, it'll be a little bit different. We're journalists, we don't like to stand up and really tell people things we'd like to talk about things and be at the behind the scenes. So I think we'll give it a start. So let me maybe start by raising the question that I raised at the beginning. Is there such a thing, and each of you can answer this from, I guess, from your own experience, is there such a thing as having too much information? And if there is, where do we draw the line? And who wants to start? You know, there was a time when I would say, no, there is not such a thing as too much information. And then there was Sandy Hook. I know that when the recordings were released from September 11th, there was really not a whole lot of debate in the newsroom as to whether we were going to air them. You know, we listened to them and there was almost total agreement that they should be aired because they can teach us something about some of the mistakes that were made that I'm sure we're already talked about here today. And they did that, they did underscore some of that and led hopefully to some improvements. There's still a lot of work to be done in that area, right, Sally? But, you know, I think in that case, more is better. In Sandy Hook, I will tell you that we struggled. We, meaning WABC, when those tapes were released, I think it was a year after the shooting. In fact, I believe the community Sandy Hook was getting ready on the day that they were released to commemorate the year anniversary of that. And in the end, as a news organization, we decided not to air any of the audio. We listened to them and the decision was made that this doesn't teach us anything other than that the first responders did an incredibly professional job under an incredibly crisis situation, harrowing event. And they all conducted themselves really, really well. So we didn't think that airing it, airing these tapes would sort of highlight any of the failures of the dispatch system or any failures of our first responders. And so we decided to use some of the transcript that we chose very carefully and we let it at that. So I guess the point is that the information was there. It was there. If you wanted it, the decision was made privately by your news organization. Right. So that really is the question. I mean, should it be left up to individual news organizations or news outlets to say, yeah, we want to run this or no, we don't want to run this? Tom, you want to? The problem is you can't be a little bit pregnant, right? Once they're out, they're out. I mean, that's the world we live in. And I would defer to a fellow who wrote a bestselling book about Columbine to talk about how these things play out in these cases. But even though your station didn't air them, they immediately went up on the internet and they became available to everybody. And I can hear an editor now saying, well, I don't want to get scooped. Right. We're in this business to make money. We're looking to get as many clicks or as many viewers as we can. So the pressure to air them just becomes extraordinary. So once it's out, it's just out. So I mean, that's one of the things that we're up against. And it is why, and we should talk a little bit. We get around to the 9-11, 9-1-1 tapes as to ways in which journalists can both be public-spirited citizens concerned about the kind of anguish that people talked about in the earlier panels and at the same time do their jobs. It's hard to say, well, you made the point about what we, one element of the decision of whether to make something private or public is whether we can learn something from it. But who makes that decision about it? And who knows what you can learn from something? I mean, we know now what we didn't know before 9-11. And there's a lot of other disasters or tragedies that happen that we have no idea what the right questions are to ask until we see the information in front of us. I mean, after Columbine, we knew more than we ever wanted to know about how kids deal with video games and whether that's an element to it. I don't know. I mean, is there, do we need to know that much about those three shooters? Well, I think the thing, can you hear me? I think the thing that you two said worked together. Oh, thank you. Worked together really well. I think the fact that when it's out, it's out helps us and simplifies the moral dilemma that you have. I think sort of in the old days where the media was the exclusive gatekeeper, and if we didn't put it out there, it wasn't out there, we had a different kind of responsibility. At that point, even if we thought, well, there's not much to be gained here, we have an obligation to get it out there. Well, now, as you said, it is out there. So people can dig for it themselves. They can call. I have two responses to what you first said. My initial inclination is there's never too much information on sort of the receiving end of having the information to dig through to figure things out, to analyze whether that's journalists, researchers, academicians, FBI people. There's a threat assessment group at the FBI right now, and I worked with these people this summer, who that's all they do is try to figure out who the next shooters will be, how to identify them, working with groups. They need as much data as possible. So there's all sorts of groups that we don't know about who are using this data. That's great. But in terms of presenting it to the public and pushing it out, that's a completely different question. And having it available, where you can Google it, freezes up to be much more selective. And I've got two different examples when too much is too much. With Columbine, it all depends on your perspective and your audience. With Columbine, the local people initially were really pissed off at the national press, as they typically are. But that changed. After about two or three months, they got really pissed at the local press, and particularly the two papers, then there were two, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, who were relentless in running stories. And I can't remember the exact numbers now, but I looked through the book and they had them on their websites, it was easy to see. They had a story every single day, both papers for months and months on the end. And by the end of the summer, which is about three or four months out, they were still averaging something like three news stories a day. Which was completely unnecessary. There wasn't that much happening. And if you were a member of the community, it was like you couldn't flip through the paper. TV was better, but there was too much for them to turn on the TV with constantly being bombarded with it. And that was their feeling like, you know, we want to heal. Some of us want to keep talking about it. Some of us need to just, you know, let go shut up for a while. You couldn't. It was always there. And that was really pissing them off. And it was completely gratuitous. You know, we weren't learning a lot. I'm sure there were things coming up and maybe every week or two, there was, you know, you could have a great piece, but like, every day, come on. That's just milking it. So that was completely excessive. That encourages people to say, well, let's just cut the press out. Yeah, exactly. Which is what they did after a while. You know, exactly. It goes back and forth. They turned on us. Well, in fact, they turned on us faster. Columbine happened on a Tuesday. It was Thursday. I was starting to feel the rumblings pretty strong by Friday and Saturday. Most of them were turning on us. And by Saturday, they were like ready to spit on us because they had already seen how we were taking. What they were saying and using it against them and making that in that case, making them feel like co perpetrators. Because within about two days, the storyline was these two kids were horribly harassed. And they were like they were students at the most heinous high school in America. This, you know, toxic atmosphere, this horrible place of horrible people who drove these two kids to do something in retribution, which meant these 2,000 kids are the 2,000 most horrible kids in the world. I mean, that's how we were painting them. And they were suddenly like, they'd be completely open with us. And they were saying like each night they go home and turn on the TV or something. That's how they were being portrayed, which is completely asshole behavior on our part. And they soon got it. Like, okay, you guys are assholes and not to be trusted. And like, fuck you. And when the school reopened, they actually had a take back the school rally where they had parents and community members do a human shield around the school. Yes, we're like, what's the human shield? Human from what? It's like from you guys so that we couldn't go in or even see them or just, you know, it was just a very collective fuck you of like, we're walling our kids off from you assholes. So 10 years later, though, they might have been willing to join the fact that they might be on a reality show. High school confidentiality. Yeah, yeah. Which they would have controlled it. Yes, exactly. Exactly, exactly. Or so. Your story lost my water. Do you say that you've got your own lines? You want to hear me? What do you tell your students? I mean, when you, you've got your graduate students coming out and saying, I want to go out and, you know, change the world. I want to bring down presidents and right wrongs. I mean, is there a limit detail in terms of how far you can draw? You can cross privacy lines? Or is everything open? Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, I think, ethical and just careful sensitive issues that come up all the time in terms of just trying to educate folks about, you know, there's a difference between interviewing a public official or somebody who's in the public eye and who understands what off the record means and what on the record means versus a mother in an apartment who's had some terrible domestic incident that you're being interviewed for and who has no idea what on the record or off the record means but starts spilling your guts out to you and saying everything. I mean, you try to sort of give people some ground rules. I think it's one of the hardest things to impart to people because everybody is like, you know, jumped up and ready. I want to get the story. I want to get the story. Let me first show the story. It's one of the most typical things I think any journalist has to do and usually we end up doing it when we start out in careers is interviewing the victims, survivors of a tragedy. I mean, it's, you know, my, I remember city agents would tell me go out and get the picture. You know, it's a child would die in an auto accident and you have to go get his picture. You have to go knock on the door of the family and say, sorry, you know, usually they'd slam the door on their face. Although often they were very nice and they'd say, you know, you were traumatized as well. But when it comes to mass tragedy, and I know maybe some of the families here can chime in on this. Is there when you're dealing and interviewing people who've been victims of horrible tragedies, is there some kind of, I don't know how to put it, some sort of way of going about it that, you know, the public wants, the things the public should know about what happened and about the victims themselves and the, and there are other places where you would draw the line. Have you had that experience of interviewing victims of tragedies? Yeah, no, it comes up all the time. I mean, this is like, you know, this is sort of like reporting 101. And I think it goes back to the same issue we were talking about in terms of, you know, what you say to an editor who's demanding you if you get the story, you know, versus how you deal with a grieving family. And if you don't come back with that picture or with the story, you're probably not going to have a job too much longer. So, you know, either you act like the New York Post, which goes into the home and literally rips off the photographs if the family isn't looking to give them up. And yes, they do do that, you know, versus, you know, somebody who's going to go at it from a much more polite way and possibly leave disappointed, you know, you've got to figure out a way to thread the needle. I mean, you know, I would like to talk a little bit about the 9-11-9-1-1 stuff. Because I mean, that's the, to me, that was the, where the rubber really hit the road on this issue. And there's going to be folks here who are, you know, much more expert than me in this. But the lawsuit that was filed by, originally by Jim Dwyer in the New York Times and joined by these real heroes here, Sally Regan Hart and the other families who joined with her on this. And I saw Norman come in the room. But that lawsuit, I mean, I think, you know, is an example of the press aided and supported by the family trying to do, I think, exactly the right thing, the business of journalism, what the Times wanted to do, as I understand it. And you should read Jim and Kevin Flynn's book, 102 Minutes, and you can read their magnificent description of how it played out. They were looking to use the tapes to try to identify where people were at the time they called and what was happening. And they believed that if they could identify where they were and what they were saying, that it would help point towards the reforms that the city had to address in the wake of what happened there. Why was it Jim wanted to know over and over again that the 1968 Building Code for New York, which would have commanded them to have six fire exit stairs in the World Trade Center, was whittled down to half that number? Why did that happen? And how did that happen? That was their goal, was not to be able to put it out and to be able to have it like some, you know, over and over again for the sensational value. The idea was to be able to use it to be able to do the investigative reporting that you needed in order to find out, well, was there public culpability in this that our own building codes contribute to this? And I do believe that the decision by the Court of Appeals was ultimately political. I don't think that it was anything other than but a political decision by a government which did not want to say yes to something that would obviously be denounced by a lot of folks because of the fact that it would have been used. It would have been out there. It would have been prurient material that would have run the judge who gave the majority opinion. The father of a very prominent journalist, by the way, wrote the decision saying that without doubt this will be sensationalized and it will be all over the internet within hours after it's released. And the dissenting opinion by, by the way, another Republican appointee said, well, you know, that might happen but there's ways to minimize it. You know, you could do transcripts. You could do something. You could do some piece of it. You could take out if there had to be the identifying. And the majority wasn't willing to go there. And as near as I can tell, and, you know, Glenn Corbett can correct me if I'm wrong, the drive to get those reforms that really should have happened in the wake of what we learned about the lack of fire exit safety never happened in this city. That's a remarkable fact. But we'll go down to 20 Pine Street and start to count the exits. You know, had those tapes been released and had they been able to create, I think, the kind of database and the kind of analysis which would have led to that report. I think that we might be talking about a very different building code in New York and hopefully, you know, not to repeat the same tragedy. So that's a really good example of a case where the press, families, the legal community are a lot. I mean, they're all on the same page. They're working together. Not all families were together, right? Not all families. Generally speaking, they were. But it doesn't always happen. Usually, I mean, the tendency increasingly seems to be that to look at the press as an enemy, as a threat, and you increasingly see efforts, and correct me if I'm wrong, to block information and prevent more information from getting out. I'm thinking most recently in the Ferguson, Missouri events, where you had, as it turned out erroneously, an air ban where helicopters could not go over the area of Ferguson. People said it was dangerous. But in fact, as we found out later, it was because they didn't want the press, press helicopters over there. But increasingly, there's a feeling that the press is too much out front, particularly in protest as like an occupier in Ferguson. It seems to me that's a dangerous trend. I don't know whether you guys agree or whether you think there's a way to get around that. When you cover over the NYPD here in New York, I mean, do you see yourself constantly fighting to get the kind of access that you used to have? I don't think we've ever had a great deal of access, in terms of especially 911 tapes, filing of any freedom of information with the NYPD. I have a vision in my head when it arrives in their desk that they're doubled over and laughter. Another foyer from Jim Hoffer, he's never going to see the light of day. I can't recall any foyer that has been answered by the NYPD. I know getting 911 tapes is extremely difficult, even though we know that in recent incidents, recordings of 911 have sort of shown some kind of glaring flaws in this new $2 billion system. We know in the case in April, there was a fire in Queens where two four-year-old siblings died while waiting for the arrival of an ambulance. It took 21 minutes for that ambulance to get there. In fact, the Department of Investigation recently came out with a study. They listened to the 911 tapes. They analyzed them. They were able to piece it together and found that there was a series of delays in fire and EMS dispatch. It took seven minutes for the ambulance to even get dispatched to go into fire. They had their own GPS coding, but that was up on that. We know in the aerial Russo, which is a case from the previous year in June of 2013, there again it took I think four minutes before the ambulance was dispatched. Despite the fact that these recordings can often underscore or highlight flaws in the system and perhaps show us how to improve the dispatching system, it's very, very difficult to get those recordings in New York City. Can I go back to something that Tom said about the decisions and sort of the decision-making between your description of those to the decision in the sense. What I hear there from your capsule summary is a failure on their part and a lot of people's part, I think, really to make the distinction between push and pull information or whatever we're calling it right now. And I don't think it's all the same. So when there's something out there like 911 tapes, which will be very painful for people to hear. So it goes out on YouTube and millions of people are watching it. That doesn't necessarily hurt the victims of the people who can choose not to listen to it. That's very different. So the information that you have to pull in, where you like Google it, you go to YouTube, you go looking for it. Of course, I'm sure there are family members who are going to be disgusted knowing there are people out there doing that. So that's one element. But that's the sort of secondary element. The main thing is whether it's pushed into them. The bigger question is whether people like you or ABC News or whomever are using it when they're just watching their TV or they're calling up today looking at the New York Times homepage or wherever they're out there consumers of information that's coming at them. That's what, from my time with victims, they're much, much more bothered. 99% of the time, the bombarding of the information, just knowing that some asshole or some curious high school kid or whatever is listening to tapes and going, like, okay. Yeah, there's a definite distinction. That's not really the impact. So I hear the judge sort of not getting that and thinking, okay, well, this is going to be Puritan. Puritan stuff can go on without hurting the people who are really at the biggest stakeholders. I don't think there's that much you can do about it. Yeah, but my point is you can release it, have it out there with people using it for Puritan things without, as long as people like you are having some, actually having those good conversations saying, evaluating a new town or whatever, okay, we've reviewed it. There's not really much useful that can come from this so we don't have to put it on the air. We don't have to bombard them with it or if it had gone the other way, well, there's actually some really important stuff where we do need to get out. Well, then you do and you do it for a night or two, but you don't keep milking it for weeks on end. But will they always act responsibly, the mass media? No, no, no, well, yeah. Which is sort of, we'll get ourselves in our own trouble. I listened earlier to Steve Souter's description of how he deals with them in Fairfax County and I thought, if I could believe that there was a Steve Souter in NYPD who was actually listening and going through it carefully enough, I'd feel a little bit better about how these decisions are being made. But I just repeat what I said about, this was a political decision. It wasn't a decision made on the law. The freedom of information law in New York State has these beautiful words that say that it is built upon a presumption of access to records, these gorgeous words. It goes on the assumption that all records are open and public unless it meets these different limits. And one of them is unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. And that could go either way. And if you read the dissent, which I would encourage people to take a look at, Judge Rosenblatt, who was trying to figure out a way to thread the needle just like you were just saying, how do we make this happen without everybody getting into a tether about it? He suggested a way to do it. It wasn't perfect. It would have been transcripts. It would have omitted names. But it would have allowed people to at least see any, oh, I'm on floor 101. I'm on floor 102. We would have been able to see that, which we didn't get. Not every operator, I don't believe, repeated back the information that they were getting. A lot of them just took it in and then said other things. So we don't know what the caller on the other end was talking about. But I believe that if we don't set the precedent out there, that A, that it should be out there. I mean, that has to be the stance. I don't think there's any other way for journalists to approach this. I mean, it has to be the stance that if 9-11 tapes, 9-1-1 tapes, are public, generally, then they should not be private, not be secret unless there are some really extenuating circumstances. And, you know, mine is a Steve Souter to be able to sit there and sift through them. You know, I think we're going to have to, like, insist that, well, the public has a right to know and go with that. But I know that there's other people who have entered the room who are going to be able to, like, explain this better than me. And I look forward to what they say. You touched on something that I think, in some ways, gets to the heart. You said you wish there was someone like Steve Souter at NYPD who was looking at all the tapes and you trust him to use the information well. I mean, we're a lot more cynical people than we are today, even more cynical than we were in 2000 or 2001. And at the same time, we don't trust very many institutions. We don't trust the NYPD. We don't trust the government. And we certainly don't trust the press. And you've got these decisions about what information to reveal made hundreds of times a day and hundreds of newsrooms around the country that are not the big issues, but are the small issues. And increasingly, there's a feeling that the press should not be trusted or even if they are trusted, there's a lot of other non-mainstream press who are doing whatever they want. And the climate, it seems to me, is changing rapidly. And we'll change, get even darker in the next couple of years in terms of the kind of information we'll be getting and we'll be able to release. Do you agree with that? I do. And the question, we're going to go to the question period in a second. Yeah. Yeah, I had that. And the lawyers are going to be able to talk to this or comment up next and then the judges and they'll be able to talk about it probably in a much better way than I did. You know, I don't know about the trend. I think it ebbs and flows. I've been working more with the Pentagon lately and they're actually sort of on an upward trajectory of allowing more partly because they allowed experimented with embeds during the recent wars which someone thought were going to be a disaster and they found out it's been a hands up for us. It worked great. But because of that and some other things, they're actually on the upswing of sharing more with us. Of course, they still have, you know, all sorts of stuff. But they're being more open. So, you know, I don't know. Where I'm working right now, I'm seeing it go in the opposite direction. I don't know about the trend. I find the Obama administration to be even more secretive than the Bush administration. It's very hard to get freedom of information from them. Very hard. I'm going to put this over to questions and comments. But we just went through a year when the question of privacy versus open information has been the top story with the Snow and Revelations and NSA and how much should we know? I mean, it's getting, I think, to a point where you, if you're an absolutist, it doesn't really carry much weight anymore. So, I mean, it's one of the biggest debates right now in our society. But we could talk about this for a couple more hours, but I think we should throw it open to the audience. I think some of the families wanted to say a few things and I'll be interested in hearing what they say about how much information the press should have. Sally? We're going to just wait until you get the microphone before you ask your question so we can get everything. Yeah, I wanted to say that, you know, really speaking for the majority of the activists who've been involved with, you know, releasing the tapes and so on, but not only that from 9-11, but all the issues, if it wasn't for the media and the press, the public would know nothing. So, we are so indebted to the media and to the press for covering our issues, for talking to us, for having us share the information that has to get out there. And so we all feel, the majority of us feel, we want to have the information out there. We couldn't save the people who died a needless and brutal death that could have been and should have been avoided, but we can protect people in the future. And if we suppress all of these issues, we are doomed to have history repeat itself. And I wanted to say something to the Columbine Wuther. You know, you know, you're, you know, in that area and you know, the people were upset and so on, but speaking as someone who's, you know, very, very remote from that area, Columbine put such an important issue on the map. Columbine is the example that other areas use to try to avoid something like this happening, to look at bullying, to look at the psyche of teenagers who isolate themselves and all of this. So it was very important. I know it was hard for the town or for the school, but you have to look at the larger issue. Everyone has to learn from these things. And that's my opinion. Can I do one quick response to that? I totally agree with you. And I was actually wanting to make the point which sort of I missed. You see an evolution over time, and I've gone through a lot of these disasters now, with the thinking of the local population who early on there is a big tendency to pull back and, you know, stop covering us to death or just, you know, pushing the press away. Over time, it usually swings back. And with Columbine, we saw the families several years out join with the Denver Post. It took seven years, by the way, a court case that went to the Colorado State Supreme Court to get the killer's journals and 11,000 pages of their information released. And it was an unanimous decision finally. The basement tapes, which the killers made, still have not been released 15 years later. But over time, nearly all the families swung around to saying, okay, we want to know information, too. And the problem, I think, one of the problems we create for ourselves is when we act irresponsibly, when we do overload, when we're invasive, when we do all these negative things, we push our natural allies away and we make them so angry at us they don't want to be in league with us. Now, over time, they finally come back and say, okay, we need to work with you, we all want this information out. We create some of our own problems. But in the long run, I agree with you, and I'm all for getting the information out, too. The less jerks we are about it in the short run, the more allies we will have on our side with us. There's too many jerks out there. I just wanted to add to that what Sally was saying. I know it becomes very redundant every single day when you're opening the paper and you're reading about a situation like that. But also, people in that town, like in New York City, like our government officials should have, we have to reflect on what was happening and the government officials who wanted to suppress a lot of stuff, they said it was for the benefit of the families that they didn't want to reveal a lot of stuff, but it was protecting themselves. Because our buildings were, they went by Port Authority code, the building codes were changed for the World Trade Center. People didn't realize this, they didn't want politicians, construction workers. So they didn't want that to come out. So a lot of things when they say it's for the victims' families' benefits, it's to protect them. And the same thing with the people in New York City and all around the country. They don't want to hear anything more about what happened and any tragedy, because the more they hear about it, they have to reflect on how we can change things and what are we doing about it? We're in a very complacent world and it's not. So I mean I think thanks to the journalists that we do, I mean sometimes we don't like to hear all of it, but I think thanks that it is reported and that we can take a stand. Don't compliment us too much, we'll go to our heads. We won't trust you if you do. Okay. What are the responsibilities of the press to follow up on stories that may be politically embarrassing to the leadership of the government, in other words. For example, the FOIA request that brought the New York Fire Department oral histories to light in which 118 were reported hearing explosions on September 11th. That in conjunction with the 2008 technical papers showing the evidence of super-thermite, high-temperature incendiary and explosive, should have, what is the role of the press and why hasn't this been raised to a much more elevated discussion that gives there's absolute silence in the mainstream media about this topic. And if you don't even know what I'm talking about, that's a good example of stories that should be talked about but aren't. Political embarrassment is the main focus of the question. The only thing I would say is that actually the oral histories from my understanding were being sought by the freedom of information because that was one of the straight-out victories of the lawsuit, I believe. They were released. We know what those folks said. Court of Appeals did the right thing on that one. It is what it is. Whether or not it shows what you're saying it shows. I don't want to go there. I believe that we did get what we asked for in that case. I'm suggesting that the press is not going after certain things that doesn't want to embarrass. I'm not sure I caught what you were running out. The New York Fire Department oral histories suggest a lot of explosions on September 11th. That's 118 of them have been documented. That in conjunction with the evidence for explosives in high-temperature incendiaries hasn't been reported in the mainstream media. Is it because no one's telling you that there's a story? I'll tell you there is. Or is there a concerted effort not to embarrass people by raising these issues? Well, I would say in general, journalists are sort of the opposite. I think most journalists, the instinct is if something is politically embarrassing to someone that makes us much more excited. I'm sure there are certain corporations owning some media where we may have boardroomed people in the other direction, but I'd say 99% of journalists I've ever met were lit up by that idea. I find that that may have been true in some case, but in general, I think that's kind of a non-the last thing we have to worry about. All right, I don't know. I have the mic, so I'm sorry. As the mic has the power, we know that. As the mother of a victim, we, Aaron and I were interviewed a lot over the last 13 years and we're still interviewed. We got to choose if we were being interviewed or not. We got to choose whether or not we would answer questions. That was our prerogative. And as Sally had said, what was important in the interviews and other than one, we have accepted interviews from almost every media, every newspaper, they have been respectful, they have been honorable, except for one, and when we left, we both said, well, please don't ever call us again, but that was our prerogative. And we were very honest, we were very direct, but we got to choose and what we felt when we were interviewed, that we were representing all those people who could not do what we were doing. And so we were very careful in our remarks. We were never extreme. We were never individuals that had a platform other than what was specifically being asked. And if we didn't choose to answer it, we got to choose to say no, we're not going to answer that. And so I want to commend all of you because your job was a very difficult job. And as a former educator, my thought was the more information that was dispersed, the better it would be for everyone. And so I thank you all for your dedication, but at the same time I want you to know that anybody that you interview gets to choose. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. I wanted to know about how you determine when to say when. You know, I'm thinking recently about the Malaysian Airlines crash where CNN became all Malaysian Airlines all the time and they were criticized for that. And having, I worked in lower Manhattan when 9-11 happened. I have a brother-in-law who was a fireman on the pile and stuff. And I almost didn't want to come to work anymore because I couldn't stand the constant reminders, you know, that a lot of us wanted to get back to work. And it wasn't bad enough that we had to smell the smells and everything else, but it was like the media kept it alive in some ways unnecessarily and then we're looking for stories and sensationalist stories that didn't advance this issue or the conversation at all. And it just made those of us who were still having to come to the city every day not want to do it anymore. And a lot of people ended up leaving the city. So, I mean, how do you, as journalists, decide when to back off, you know, when to, like you were saying about Columbine, when to respect people's right not to know anymore, you know, and to be informed when something is, when you have something to say, but, you know, not to just keep saying it over and over and over again. Good question. I mean, that is a debate that we have all the time inside our newsrooms. And it's usually fairly heated. And I mean, I, you know, I lost count of how many times, you know, we throw up our hands and say, oh, I can't believe that they're assigning us this story again. You know, there is, especially initially in any kind of big breaking story or any kind of crisis story, there's a feeding frenzy about it. And that is infused with sort of a competitive edge as well. So, I think we almost always go overboard. I mean, because there's so much competition. There's so many different outlets and platforms now that you just can't help. It's hard to hold back. But as to when to say enough is enough, that is a constant debate that we have. We don't always get it right. I think a lot of times we do, though, because you start to get feedback, because now it's very two-way with social media. And you'll start getting things on our Facebook and on our website. You know, enough is enough. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the daily news. I mean, what is it? 14 days and running with Kim Kardashian now. I don't know. But it's a great question. And, you know, I don't know if we'll ever have a balance to something like that. You make a very good point about the feedback. Something that didn't happen, say, a decade ago. That's right. A constant feedback that really tells us right away. Yeah, it's helpful. You guys are crossing the line. So stop it. And we'll respond. It didn't happen 10 years ago. We were sitting up there now on our high thrones and saying, we know better than the public what it wants. That's true. I would just add that it's sort of a conundrum, because at the same time that the Deluge of coverage, the event of our lifetimes, essentially, the collapse of those towers in the attack, the coverage was relentless. At the same time, you know, Steve started out by referencing the columns by Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News, which started out with a front page story saying that there's some toxicity in the air down here that's not being disclosed. And folks like you who were going to work that day presumably would have wanted to know that, you know, and yet if you look back at the old copies of the Daily News, you'll see that those stories moved further back in the paper until Juan says, you know, they were south of the obituaries. You couldn't find them. And there was a reason for that. It was, you know, because of the fact there was enormous pressure. He writes about it in a book. There was enormous pressure brought on the publisher of the Daily News by the mayor on down to like, don't say that. We need Wall Street to get back to work. We need folks like you there. So, you know, obviously not all coverage is of that quality. You know, I wouldn't, and there is like, you know, the all Malaysia airline all the time. That doesn't tell you anything new over and over again. But at the same time, the hope is that like, you know, those folks who were sent down to do all the cleaning, all the immigrant workers who were not told a thing about it and not given any kind of protective equipment. And they were the ones who did the scrub the windows and try to clean the offices and didn't know what the material they were dealing with. You know, I mean, that was the kind of stuff you wanted to keep hammering away at. And you wanted as many reporters as possible to dig it out. I wanted to ask Jim or anyone on the panel who might know or anyone in the audience who might know how it was that the report by the Connecticut State Police was obviously a lot of the tapes that they released with the report were heavily redacted or cut and so on. But what was it? Something legal? Was it a cultural thing? A political thing? Why was it so? It was very detailed and we heard a lot of things which somebody judged and knew would be difficult for people to hear, but they were there anyway in the appendices to this report. It was just such a surprise to me when I read it. And I wondered if you knew how that came about in Connecticut. Why did that report get issued in such a complete way? I actually wrote a letter to the State Police. I forget the actual position he holds with the title saying, thank you. You've given us a treasured show. Those of us who use this not for prurient purposes, but to try to understand the dynamics of how these things work, I was stunned. I don't know the answer to that. I guess we're going to find out. Good. Thank you. Thank you.