Max Frankel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who rose to become executive editor of The New York Times, died last week at 94. He wrote the following essay as the foreword to “September 11, 2001,” a collection of 150 front pages from newspapers around the world, published by Poynter in November 2001. His words about the power of news feel just as urgent today.

The Oxygen of Our Liberty

By Max Frankel

Here lies a souvenir of horror, a blazing obituary of American innocence.

But you are also holding a testament to news, tangible evidence that urgent and reliable news is no more obsolete than hate and heroism, fear and favor. Here atop the rubble lies a reminder that news remains the oxygen of our liberty.

Can you imagine September 11, 2001, without the oft-scorned “media”?

Some might argue that the world’s great communications network served to invite this nightmare, that the terrorists were looking not only to kill random thousands but also to produce a spectacle whose imagery would instantly humble the strong and empower the weak.

But only honest and reliable news media could instruct the world in its vulnerability, summon Americans to heroic acts of rescue, and ignite the global search for meaning and response. Only trusted news teams could discern the nation’s anxiety, spread words of hope and therapy, and help to move us from numbing fear toward recovery.

Here, then, lies above all the ultimate demonstration of the danger that Americans invited when they lost their interest in the world beyond the self and in serious news coverage of those other realms. Another generation has been awakened, summoned to recognize that dependable news occupies a precious but vulnerable place in our society.

Every page of this book proves that news is not mere rendering of lifeless facts. (Facts galore inhabit the phone book, but not a shred of understanding.) News is the portrayal and ordering of information in vivid image and narrative. News is the transformation of facts into stories so that they can be understood and remembered in ways that inform and instruct, even as they delight or dismay. News not only portrays events, it ranks them in some order of importance as defined by public needs and interests. And besides recounting events, meaningful news digs to discover their causes and to assess their consequences.

News is not neutral. Like literature, the most important news dwells on stories of conflict, on the rivalries and casualties of life. Yet while conflict is universal, so is the human desire to avoid and reduce it. And so news also serves the armies of reform and implicitly holds out hope and a faith in progress.

Since a free and open society is, by definition, a constantly self-correcting organism, it is constantly nourished by news that exposes flaws and failures and so stimulates debate about how to overcome them. News is the enemy of certainty, and therefore of tyranny.

This precious news does not, however, grow wild, like poisonous rumor. It must be expensively harvested and effectively distributed. News, therefore, is a dependent of technology, the product of an industry. And there’s the rub: the paradox that a most vital public service needs to be sustained by private profit.

Time and again in American history, that industry’s pursuit of profit has threatened to overwhelm its capacity for service. The years before September 11, 2001, were such a time.

Journalists grow up with the idea of serving the public. They assume it to be their duty to arm the citizenry with the information it needs to select its leaders, define its problems, and grope for remedies. But most of the costs of good journalism, on television or paper, are borne by advertisers and investors whose commercial interests often diverge from those who gather the news. Investors demand profits and require advertisers who demand large audiences, crowds that may respond more readily to entertaining theater than to informative news. And as Russell Baker once put it, when the citizenry is deemed to be merely an audience, the journalist becomes a hustling barker, “like the guy who used to stand outside tents working his mouth to draw a crowd.”

When in the ’90s Americans found themselves liberated from hot and cold wars, they rapidly shifted attention from sober news to facile entertainments. And our great media companies indulged them without shame.

Television had become the nation’s principal medium of information, but news ceased to be its proudest product. Indeed, as television companies were swallowed by ever larger corporations, their news departments became ever weaker cogs in the enterprise. Pressed to show a profit, they largely withdrew from the world and treated five billion people beyond our borders as inconsequential and irrelevant. Blaming the audience for these choices, they lavished money and attention on sports and celebrities, petty scandals, and crowd-pleasing fictions that they cynically defined as “reality.”

Many newspapers followed the television trail toward the trivial. Unable to command the attention of young readers, the papers blamed young people’s loss of interest in public affairs instead of their own failure to make the important interesting. And the many papers that were gobbled up by large media corporations were too often forced to reduce their staffs and ambitions to enhance the income of distant masters. Editors trained to be teachers were hounded into being marketers.

Technology accelerated these trends. Cable, satellite, and Internet transmissions carved audiences into “niche” markets that undermined all sense of community. Impatience with public service drove political news almost off the tube. Documentaries about great national issues totally disappeared. Foreign correspondents were brought home and given parachutes to cover an occasional coup or royal funeral. And even at home, candidates for public office were given short shrift and forced to sell their souls to pay for crude and canned campaign commercials. On the eve of the World Trade Center attack, many newsmen had begun to wonder how long the major networks would bother to retain prime-time news programs.

Would the media recover in a single blow? Will important news once again prevail over commercial interests as it did so dramatically on September 11 and successive weeks? Will instructing the public about remote and perplexing affairs take the place of beclouding the screen with shouted opinions?

Journalists were quick to return to their roots and assert their claims. The terror attack “helped all of us regain our focus,” said Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time magazine and new chairman of CNN. “It’s injected a note of real seriousness. And the things we think of doing to chase ratings now pale in comparison to the importance of doing this story seriously and reliably.”

But other stories? Erik Sorenson, the president of CNN’s all-news rival MSNBC, blamed the decline of seriousness on “a national fog of materialism and disinterest and avoidance” and seemed unsure how long our present clarity would last.

Fear is the great engine of news. It focuses minds. It demands a ranking of dangers. It searches near and far for paths to safety. That is why news of terror trumps the fear of growing fat or losing the pennant, and why as fear recedes so will the thirst for relevant news. Still, an informed intelligence should also want to discern the risks and benefits that lie beyond the horizon. It wants to inspect the ground that breeds a terrorist long before he crashes cruelly into our lives.

After we have sung the hymns to heroes who dig in the rubble and wage war, where will we find the media heroes who will sacrifice some profit to nourish us with news?