Yeah, I spent the better part of a day going through a lot of that archive and I found ABC’s coverage to be the most informative. Peter Jennings and John Miller were terrific (as was Charles Gibson) in what must have been a very intense situation. I’m glad the networks made this coverage available as I also was stuck at work and saw none of the original news reports that morning.
I spent a good half of my day going through that archive.
Most of the networks showed the first tower collapsing live while they were talking about something else. I wonder how surreal that must have been for the people watching on TV. Another surreal moment was ABC’s coverage of the second plane hitting. The reporters reacted to a clear live shot of the second plane crashing into the tower. I believe “oh my god” was the universal response used by all the news reporters to describe the major news breaks.
“Holy shit” was what you heard in the streets of Manhattan.
It looks like Peter Jennings was fastest to the anchor chair. I wonder how long it took for the Rather, Jennings and Brokaw to realize they had to get to the newsroom. Did they start getting ready after the first tower was hit?
The length of time that it took ground reporters to alert the newsroom of recent events was insanely fast. It seemed as if a BBC reporter used the phone of a random New York store to report the second plane hitting the tower. He said the shopkeeper was trying to kick him out and close the store. It would be cool if there was a behind the scenes look at what happened at the major networks during the whole event.
BBC had the most eloquent description of the events. Especially by Mike Wooldridge in the News Summary video. The US anchors appeared to be at a loss for words.
I’ve posted this before, I’m sure…
Here on the other side of the planet, it was pretty weird. Most people were asleep, but at 10:15pm or so, I’d just got home from work. I turned on the news, which is a scheduled bulletin at that time anyway. This shit had just happened. I missed the planes hitting by minutes, and watched this “lead story” as it became the entire half hour bulletin, as it became “we will be extending this bulletin” to days of coverage.
A few things stuck in my mind:
- The SDMB. America was a foreign country to me until six months previously when I signed up here. I know you guys. So that thread was something I’ll never forget.
- Feeling scared, even here. Watching the planes hit or crash one by one, and the nervous time after the last wondering when it would stop. Was it in fact going to be much, much worse than it already was?
- Watching the first tower fall live on the screen behind the newsreader’s head, and the strangeness of seeing her continue to read the autocue not realising what was happening until somebody must have told her.
- My news junkie sister ringing me the next morning and being upset that I hadn’t phoned her to put the TV on. I will never regret NOT phoning her, and I wished I’d seen it after it was over too.
- The idle thought, "And they said Diana was our generation’s JFK!
And also Handy’s post. I know a lot of people didn’t like him, but he just posted:
“Another shitty day.”
I always found that quite poignant, and highly doubt he was being a smartarse.
I watched the show and remembered parts of it, sitting in a conference room two blocks from the Sears Tower. One of my co-workers had a brother that worked in the towers, but he was not there (we found out later in the day). I think by the end of the live show we were evacuating downtown and heading home on the train.
I was also struck by how the anchors didn’t seem to be watching the monitors. It seemed like no one noticed when the first tower fell. And it seemed weird that early on they kept talking about air traffic control should know if the first plane was a commercial jet.
One of the WABC-TV newscasters, on a feed carried by CNN, seemed to be on the verge of realizing this was a coordinated terrorist attack:
CNN quickly switched back to their own coverage and a different local feed.
I remember reading something like that on the BBC website and posting it in the thread here, then as events unfolded, feeling pretty stupid for ever believing it. I think it turned out to be figures from the '93 bombing that got mixed in with all the other confusing reports that were coming in.
I remember some newscaster saying “It looks like part of lower Manhattan has collapsed” like it was the land that fell into the river.
My supervisor came in with a great “Oh, so what?” attitude. I said to her “Look the World Trade Towers are gone. Can you please explain to me how the Wolr Trade Towers can not be there?”
A thousand thank yous for this. I’ve been looking for a few years, a similar site shut down before I could see it all.
Another bit of footage I have never seen is the playing of the Star Spangled Banner during the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, something that had never been done before. If anyone stumbles on that while going through the archive it would be great if you could post a link.
Just wanted to quickly post (without yet having read the entire thread as I usually do), I watched this too and, since I was in downtown Manhattan that day (4 blocks away) and didn’t see my first television report until I got to a bar around 1:30pm or so, it was quite fascinating for me to the “as it happened” broadcast.
It was also fascinating how quickly the broadcasters mentioned al qaeda, given all the obsfuscation that went on later.
Also, given what was unfolding around them and everybody else, they did a remarkable job, as has been said. Besides, what good would it have done for them to start screaming and speaking incoherently?
Re: seeing the 2nd plane – I, too, thought they were a little slow but, remember, at this point we know to start looking for a second plane; they didn’t.
I never saw this on TV, but heard it on NPR on 9/12 (maybe 9/13). I don’t know why, but I found this incredibly moving.
What was the most surprising to me (but probably shouldn’t have been) on watching all of the original broadcasts, was how many eyewitnesses got major details wrong. Most of the networks had eyewitness callers reporting on what they were seeing or had seen, and a lot of them were convinced that the plane they’d seen was a small commuter plane, or that “it was definitely not a jet”. It was also surprising in retrospect that it took most of the anchors so long to realize what had happened when the first tower fell. There was a lot of, “We are getting reports that something major has happened to the first tower, possibly a large piece of it fell off,” or “It seems there has been a large explosion at the first tower.” I guess the dust and debris obscured the image to the point that it was difficult to see what was really going on.
I’m glad that the footage is available online; I was on the West Coast on 9/11/01 and didn’t start watching coverage until around 9:30 eastern time, so I missed the first bit. (My mom called from Ohio and woke me up because she was worried and didn’t want me to go to work that day as my workplace was in Redmond, WA and she was afraid the terrorists would bomb Microsoft. Which sounds ridiculous now, but at the time it seemed marginally plausible.)
It was interesting to see the DC based networks and how their focus was on the Pentagon strike. I wish they had some of the non-DC network coverage on line so we could see what the rest of the country saw.
I was also struck by the length of time it took them to realize that the first tower fell. The false rumors of the car bomb at the State Dept. and the misidentifying of the plane as a small craft were interesting as the anchors tried to sift fact from fiction live. It was impressive, if I was in their shoes I’d have been making tracks away from NYC as fast as I could.
None of the networks are based in DC. Maybe you mean DC-based stations?
You are correct and I misstated. The network affiliates in DC are what I meant.
I remember when the first tower fell - I think I was watching NBC - I said (to myself) “Holy shit! The whole thing collapsed!” and immediately wondering how many workers and rescuers were still inside. It seemed like a long time – but it was probably less than 10 seconds – before the newsperson on TV noticed that the building had fallen.
The south tower fell at 9:59, and NBC didn’t report that it had fallen until 10:07. Before that there was talk of a “section” of the tower falling.
It’s up on Youtube. (Short though, nothing before or after.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwrX-LN9-L0
Damn, that just made me cry at work. I had no idea that had happened.