THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 23, 1995 TAG: 9504230027
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
When the bomb exploded in Oklahoma City, journalists across the country mobilized to tell the news as quickly, clearly and gracefully as possible.
At The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, when a national news story breaks a half-continent away, we rely primarily on wire services such as The Associated Press and The New York Times News Service.
We also look for local connections and reflect on local implications. So when Virginia Task Force 2 - a team of Hampton Roads rescue personnel - was ordered to Oklahoma City to assist in combing the wreckage for signs of life and in removing the dead, staff writer Mike Mather and photographer Paul Aiken went along to tell their story.
Beneath the bustle and purposefulness of our work, we, too, sometimes confront a sense of powerlessness in the face of unfathomable horror.
The Oklahoma City bombing brings to mind William Faulkner's speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949:
``Our tragedy today is a general and universal, physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question, when will I be blown up?''
As Faulkner makes clear, despair is not a useful response. In a time of crisis, journalists work to convey and explain - through information, insights and images - the threats and opportunities we face individually and as a community.
Our words, photographs and graphics are intended to sustain and nurture the daily rites of conversation by which civilized people make sense of the world.
We understand the world in its particulars, in telling the tales, in specific moments. Good writers and photographers listen so that you may hear. They empathize so that you may feel. They look so that you may see.
And so you see the figures of a hulking firefighter, Chris Fields, carrying the body of 1-year-old Baylee Almon out of the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
And you understand the pain.
Television news brings a lot of value during stories like this - immediate updates and pictures that move. But Friday night, NBC, CNN and other outlets took time to recognize and show the still photographs by amateur, wire service and newspaper photographers.
These were the images, they said, that help you understand the pain. And the heroism. And faith. And frustration.
In stories like these, journalists strive to fill the crucial role of writers, articulated by William Faulkner at the conclusion of his Nobel address, when he declared that man will not merely endure amid the troubles that challenge us, but will prevail against them because, ``he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.''
``The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion, and pity, and sacrifice, which have been the glory of his past.
``The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.''
KEYWORDS: BOMBS EXPLOSIONS FATALITIES TERRORISM
OKLAHOMA CITY RELIEF by CNB