Crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan at sunset, there is a sweeping view of the Upper West Side down to the long, urban expanse and the spires of the financial district. On a recent drive, I found my eyes still searching for that place on the horizon where the fallen towers of the World Trade Center once stood.
I covered the long trail of local stories in New York City and New Jersey that would ultimately lead to the toppling of the towers on September 11th, 2001, and an era of international terrorism. It was a war that was global and local, and I believe it ended on Sunday with the joint U.S. and Israel attack on Iran.
We are now entering a whole new global struggle with a completely different threat matrix and a different kind of peril than we have ever seen before. I want to share why I believe that to be the case, but this is part of a series of columns about local news and the existential threat it is facing in America and why we all should care about that. That is what put me on a journey of reflection about the crossing of the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge, a road that will circle back to my coverage of 9-11 as a local story by a local news organization in New York. Thanks for joining us on the journey.
Crossing the steel expanse of the George Washington Bridge brings it all back: Forty years ago in the Spring of 1986, I began commuting every work day from my apartment on 105th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan over to New Jersey for my first newspaper job at The Record of Hackensack. I had a 1965 Volvo 122S that rumbled over the bridge every day as I set out to cover local municipal elections and endless meetings like the Zoning Board of Adjustment and the School Board in the corrupt waterfront hamlets that were my beat in Hudson County. My muse back then was a local political boss named Joe Mocco of North Bergen. Mocco and his henchmen were characters straight out of The Sopranos. I will come back to Mocco, and the fate of The Record, a once great, family-owned newspaper which is now a shadow of what it used to be, later on in this journey.
Back in those early local reporting days, I would come home over the George Washington Bridge at the end of the day looking out at New York and dreaming of working in the big city. I got my shot when I landed a job in 1989 covering the Bronx for the New York Post. The feisty tabloid had a new owner in real estate magnate Peter Kalikow and had pretensions to step up its reporting and a group of young reporters bought that pitch and took jobs there, enlisting into what we would later see as the last, great newspaper war with The Post, the Daily News, Newsday and the New York Times fighting for survival.
I covered the emergence of crack cocaine as it ravaged the city, and the paper even sent me all the way to Medellín, Colombia to cover the cartels and the narco wars. I was sent to Belfast to cover The Troubles and a story of an IRA fighter who had been arrested in New York and whose name was emblazoned on green sashes in the St. Patrick’s Day parade while his lawyers fought extradition by the Reagan administration. I broke a story that was considered the first national priest sex abuse scandal in the country. It was a big exclusive about a legendary street priest, a celebrated star of the New York Archdiocese, who turned out to be a predator.
That reporting landed me a job at the New York Daily News where I covered cops and courts for what was then a muscle-bound newsroom that had more than 1.2 million readers of its print edition, making it the largest circulation daily in America at the time. The Daily News building was a prodigious Art Deco skyscraper at the corner of 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue that spoke to a very different era of local journalism in New York. It was a cathedral of street-smart storytelling, the home of the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Jimmy Breslin, and a storied stage set for Superman where mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent would transform into a super hero. A world globe creaked as it spun on its axis in the marble atrium of the lobby, turning day by day through the American century from the Great Depression, through World War II, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights movement and even chronicling the earliest days of an upstart real estate mogul chasing publicity on its gossip pages: Donald Trump. It was hard not to be taken by the theater of it all at the Daily News and to see how the place inspired The Daily Planet of Superman fame.
I was part of a team that covered two trials of the mafia boss John Gotti and I was assigned to cover the Gulf War when it broke out in August of 1990. Yes, there were stories about the world and national stories, but the real competition was in the city. It was local.
On February 26th, 1993, I was about to order lunch at a diner in lower Manhattan when a loud bang interrupted the chatter at the counter. It was greeted with a shrug on a busy morning in a bustling city. But I heard one siren after another heading down town, and so I left the diner and just started walking in the direction that so many people were running from. As I got closer to the World Trade Center, I could see smoke billowed out of the parking garage. People looked afraid and shaken, some had faces covered in soot from an explosion of some ill-defined origin in the parking garage beneath the towers. The first reports on live radio and television were of a generator explosion. I got to the ramp that led down into the garage and slipped under the police tape and walked forward confidently like I was supposed to be there, the trick of any able street reporter. Then I caught a glimpse of a crater more than four stories deep with cars tumbled into it. I knew from Medellín and Belfast what a bombing looked like, and I called from a payphone to tell our City Desk it was a bombing despite what was being said on television. Remember this was 1993, a full eight years before September 11th, 2001 would wake America up to the threat of global terrorism.
I was on a story that in many ways I have been covering ever since. I started breaking stories on the World Trade Center bombing and began stitching together threads of reporting. One was about the Palestinian cab driver who federal agents tried to tell us was among the masterminds of the bombing plot. That is, before he was arrested when he went to the Ryder Truck Rental agency in New Jersey to reclaim his deposit on the truck used to carry the explosive into the parking garage. Another fabric of the reporting was a feature about a spiritual leader of the group, an Egyptian cleric known as “the blind sheikh” named Omar Abdel Rahman, who preached at mosques in Jersey City and Brooklyn.
With these pieces, my boss, City Editor Bill Boyle asked about these immigrant New Yorkers the operative question, “Why would they want to blow up the World Trade Center?” To answer that question and figure out who these suspects were, I was sent to the Middle East and the countries from where the suspects came – Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the West Bank. It was good old fashioned police reporting writ large. And it opened a new chapter in my career that to this day has served as a prime example of why all news, even global news, is local, and why being there on the ground to tell the story is what it is all about. The difference between then and now is that back then the Daily News was a paper with the money and the ambition to do whatever it took to get a story. These days the Daily News is a hollowed out shell of what it used to be. The beautiful old News Building was not part of a distressed sale that “saved” the Daily News after the 1990 strike. In fact, the reporters there now tell me there really is no newsroom just a workspace with a few desks that face a wall.
The last quarter century in the Middle East has been defined by the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as the administration of George W. Bush called it. This week, America entered a new chapter of history in the Middle East, “a war of choice,” against Iran. No one who knows the Middle East and the horrors of the theocratic regime in Iran and the way it has spread terror and violence through its proxies would shed a tear for the clerical leadership that has been annihilated in Iran. But nor would anyone who knows the Middle East claim to know where this is now headed and where it will take us.
Today, the Daily News reporters could be helping us understand the uncharted terrain by interviewing members of the Iranian community in the city to hear their long view. They could reach out to victims of Iranian-backed terrorism. They could trace how the attacks on the United Arab Emirates impact shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in ways that will inevitably drive up costs on everything from gasoline to everyday goods shipped around the world in containers. They should be investigating the financial connections between Trump, his family and their supporters from the wealthy Gulf States through which these military operations are being staged. They should be scouring the military contracts in high tech, and in AI in particular, that have preceded this unprecedented military adventure in which the administration has not sought congressional approval nor bothered to brief senior congressmen on the specific rationale or imminent military threat that called for this joint attack with Israel on Iran. It is not known where these reporting trails would lead, but pursuing them would bring us further down the road to understanding this conflict and the ways it is different from – and the same as – past wars of the Middle East.
Yet there is almost no one left to do that job. The Daily News is owned by a venture capital firm called Alden Global Capital which has ravaged the news organization, most recently firing 16 people on the eve of Valentine’s Day, leaving only four people to cover U.S. and international news and 16 to cover the city. In a nod to some of the great old mob hits that produced classic Daily News frontpages, the union produced a mockup of a frontpage on the strike under the headline: “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” And it features another classic ingredient in a Daily News frontpage: a villain. And there’s Heath Freeman, owner of Alden Global Capital, smiling on the front page. When you put it all together, you can’t help but think Superman would have been laid off by Alden. Clark Kent would not have been offered a buyout or a pension even after all those years of dedicated service to the good fight in local news.
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This article originally appeared on charlessennott.substack.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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