Just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, on October 23, 2001, then-ABC News President David Westin told journalism students at Columbia University that his journalistic neutrality required him to “not have an opinion” on whether or not the terrorist attack on the Pentagon was “legitimate” or not. In a session later televised on C-SPAN, Westin instructed that as journalists: “Our job is to determine what is, not what ought to be, and when we get into the job of what ought to be, I think we’re not doing a service to the American people.”
After the Media Research Center publicized his quote — which was picked up by the New York Post and Rush Limbaugh — Westin apologized. In a statement e-mailed to the MRC on October 31, 2001 Westin conceded: “When asked at an interview session at the Columbia Journalism School whether I believed that the Pentagon was a legitimate target for terrorists I responded that, as a journalist, I did not have an opinion. I was wrong....Under any interpretation, the attack on the Pentagon was criminal and entirely without justification.”
