ABSTRACT
Journalism students learn in their first reporting course that the standard formula for writing a news story is to answer the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. When America's leading news organizations covered the biggest event of the early 2000s, they dutifully reported answers to the first four of these questions. By the time the nation's news organizations finally began, in earnest, to answer the why question with the depth and nuance it required, a critical mass of the American public had already accepted Bush's easy-to-understand explanation for the 9/11 attacks. One way to discusses an assessment of how mainstream journalism covered 9/11 is to look at how the most influential news organization in the country reported on the event. A Gallup Poll found that, by early 2005, a majority of Americans believed Bush had "deliberately misled the American public" about the reasons the country should go to war.
