DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

There was a time when tragedy brought out the best in journalism. No one who lived through it will ever forget the impact of television coverage during the two or three days after John Kennedy was murdered.

But things have changed over the years and our exploitive journalism is no longer capable of showing the greatness it once did. That terrible day five years ago this week produced nothing like the proud body of work that earlier such calamities had given us. The first thing that always comes to my mind when I think of news coverage of September 11 is CBS repeatedly reporting a rumor that there was a suspicious truck parked in front of the U.S. State Department in Washington. Then we stopped hearing about the truck and it was never mentioned again. That typified much of the sloppy and inflammatory coverage we got.

There were exceptions, though, and one of them came from the New York Times. For the Times, Sept. 11 was a home town story and for three months after Sept. 11, the New York Times ran a special section entitled "A Nation Challenged." (The newspaper postponed its coverage of its own 150th anniversary on Sept. 18.) The news about September 11 began on the front page and then jumped into the special section. The coverage of the tragedy, honchoed by editor Howell Raines, was up to the Times' usual high standard, but there was one feature that was truly remarkable. The newspaper published a portrait of every one of the victims of September 11--all 2,752 of them. Day after day, week after week, there they were. And they leavened the September 11 news coverage without overwhelming it.

There were usually between 10 and 20 such portraits each day, as I recall, about 180 to 200 words each. They were not capsule biographies or traditional obituaries. They were just short pieces to tell something about each person what she was like, what he liked to do. One was about a broker who had also been profiled by his Massachusetts hometown paper when he was ten and who fashioned fishing lures with silken fabric and super glue. Another was about a woman who began sharing an apartment with her two sisters shortly before the tragedy and how she liked to spend time with her nephews and nieces, encouraging them in their school work. One of her sisters died of cancer soon after Sept. 11, leaving one surviving sister. Another was about a West Virginia woman who came to the big city and became a financial analyst on the 89th floor of one of the twin towers.

The Times described victims and how they fell in love, chose their professions, felt about their families, spent their spare time. We learned about the music they listened to, the teams they rooted for, the babies they had too little time to know or never knew at all. And by getting to know the victims, we got to know the victims' survivors the spouses and parents and siblings and friends left behind.

The special section came to an end two and a half months after it began, on Dec. 31. But the newspaper kept publishing the little portraits as the names of additional victims became available. (The research and writing took an emotional toll on the journalists producing them.)

Not everyone liked the special section. An editor of the Wall Street Journal complained that the Times, by putting Sept. 11 news in the second instead of the first section, had changed the "hierarchy" of the news, demoting the most important stories, even though they continued to begin on page one. Novelist Thomas Mallon said the portraits "operated according to their own quickly developed set of tropes, substituting, in most cases, treacle for essence" (unintelligible detractors are definitely the ones to have).

The London Guardian said of the portraits, "The stories are heartbreaking, but the privilege of the briefest of glimpses of the lost lives is also revealing and inspiring. So this is New York! So these are all Americans, these stunningly diverse people from Wisconsin and Alabama, Thailand and Albania, these people speaking Polish and Hindu, these tycoons and bus boys, these heroic firemen and clerks and commanders of fortune."

One death is a tragedy, Stalin reportedly said, and a million deaths is a statistic. The Times portraits helped keep the victims from disappearing into statistics.

"A Nation Challenged" remains a section on the New York Times Web site (www.nytimes.com/pages/national/dayofterror/index.html). Some features are available only with an online subscription, but the portraits are freely available for reading.