When 9/11 happened, I was at work all day, so I never got to watch the actual, as it happens, news coverage (which was torture for a news junkie like me). I was limited to only radio and Internet, which in those days was much less complete than it is now. This morning, I watched the first two hours, from the time the first plane hit until the first reports of the Pennsylvania crash. Some thoughts:
I was surprised that it took so long to get street level coverage - most of the first hour and a half is just helicopter shots, with street coverage only after the collapses. It seems like there would be no problem in a city like New York to get cameras there in minutes - although it’s possible that there’s tons of footage, but it is unsafe for general distribution. I know from a friend that works for our local newspaper that they got every image I would never want to see.
I watched the ABC coverage, and it was a testament to how shocking it was, as Peter Jennings refused to recognize that the first tower collapsed for a few minutes. At first, he thought the dust plume was another fire/explosion on the ground, and then said that some debris had fallen from the tower. It was only after a producer on the ground nearby confirmed that it had collapsed that he realized it, and even then he was looking for another explosion at the base of the building.
it was hard to watch, knowing in retrospect exactly what happens. I remember at the time, I watched wall to wall coverage in the evening and on into the wee hours, and there were still big, giant questions - practical questions, not ones about Al Queda. Like where everyone was, and what the hell was going on, for hours and hours. And the searches for survivors, and the stories of what was going on in the planes. That first few hours must have been a nightmare for people involved, not just because of the death and destruction but the sheer hell of being totally disconnected.
it was only 12 years ago, but the technology now is so advanced, I cannot imagine how the coverage would be different if it happened today. There would be more information available, but would it help or hinder? I can see tons of good, accurate information from citizen reporters being buried by an avalanche of bullshit.
****I don’t want to talk about My Pet Goat or Iraq or the 9/11 Truther bullshit. Take it elsewhere, and if they end up here anyway, please ignore them.
I guy in the next office was watching on TV. I saw one of the buildings collapse.
An asshole at work giggled and said how quit it was without all those airplanes making noise.
I’ve mentioned it before, but it was distant until an ET from Tennessee was on CNN, and I heard the accent of my Mother speaking about it.
I remember watching all the paper falling and fluttering and thinking we’d all finally get paperless offices.
Also that the world had changed in profound and disturbing ways and we would not understand ramifications for decades.
Half right isn’t even a passing grade, I suck as a prognosticator.
For some reason I am fascinated with watching the annual coverage in September. I know I got up early, though I was on maternity leave, and I think I heard the radio talking about how airports were shut down locally. So I turned on the t.v. If it happened around 8:00 a.m. there, it would have been 5:00 a.m. where I was. I was probably up around 7:00 a.m., so I guess I probably didn’t see the second plane crash “live,” though I thought maybe I had.
My focus has often been on Flight 93 and my burning question of how on earth did it just disintegrate like that??
Also amazing that the ERs were not filled with patients.
I can’t watch it. I was home from work that day. The TV was on in the other room. I was watching almost from the time the first plane hit. When I saw the second plane hit I silently left my wife on the couch and started packing my duffel bag. So many things are still vivid from that day. Driving towards my armory and seeing the plume of death rising from Manhattan. Getting on the completely empty NJ Parkway and being waved through the tolls when they saw my uniform. The smell.
One part of the coverage I will never forget. A reporter had grabbed a few people who had been able to get out of the Towers. All were talking about how they got out and what they were doing. Then one woman said that while they were going out the FDNY were going in. I was stunned. I should have realized it but before that moment I was not thinking about that.
I lost a cousin that day (FDNY). My girlfriend lost one of her best college friends that day (Navy, Pentagon). I made myself watch the French documentary once. I watched the movie World Trade Center once. Both times I had tears in my eyes the entire time. I can not watch coverage of that day dispassionately and probably never will.
I’m on the West coast, so by the time I heard about it, things already happened. I was up that morning playing Starcraft and around 10am PST, my mom told me to turn on the TV and something big was going on. I spent the rest of the day watching. I heard Howard Stern had a really riveting morning show that day.
Portions of Stern’s show from that day are on YouTube.
As for me, I live out west as well, woke up just before 6 AM to hear ABC radio’s national news coverage. At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on, until the local news anchor broke in at 6 AM for a station ID and added, “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.” When I heard that, the first thing that popped into my head was some Piper or Cessna running into it, or something similar to when a plane hit the Empire State Building in the early 1940s. Then I turned on the TV and saw what had happened - and got out of the bathroom just in time to see the second plane hit.
Me too - I’m sure everyone just thought it was some terrible mechanical thing, and a plane got off course. Again, with what we know now - they were just covering some “regular” news tragedy. You can tell they were scrambling for information but not freaked out about it.
When the second plane hit, Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson were just blown away. Charlie Gibson’s comments directly afterward were striking - just basically that it was clear that there was some kind of terror attack under way, in a way that I don’t think a news anchor would today in the interest of being “objective”. He knew it, everyone knew it. And then the coverage changed mightily.
I did get a chuckle - about an hour and a half into it, Peter Jennings reported that a senior official of the Palestinian Liberation Group had denied any involvement. I bet, as the towers fell, it was a strenuous denial.
I’m in the Cental Time Zone, and since I go to work so early I didn’t hear about the crashing planes for almost an hour, because I had no radio and I was alone. The next two people that came in told me about it. The one guy’s car had it on the radio. We all went into the big reference room(I work inside a library) where there were TV’s. A small group of people were clustered around. The second pland had already crashed. When I saw a replay of it, with the huge fireball that belched out of the opposite side of the building, I thought to myself it looked like a movie special effect.
A guy at our church lost his brother on 9/11. The brother was in one of the towers, above where the plane crashed. The two men even talked, by cell phone I presume, but the one never had a chance, because he couldn’t get down below the site of the explosion.
For the next two days, when I went to work, I put a blank VHS tape in the VCR, and recorded any news on CNN. I still have those tapes. Lots of repeats of course, but still a sort of time capsule.
I’m working my way through some guy’s seven hours of coverage on You Tube. I think it’s so important to have that available.
In the book Contact, Carl Sagan references a television channel called (I think) Yesterday’s News, that just replays news broadcasts from the past. That would be great - no documentary story building, no commentary, just as it happened. I wish someone would do that.
I was off work that day since it was my daughter’s first day getting on the school bus, and I wanted to see her off. My friend had emailed a group of us that a plane had crashed into the WTC, and like most people I thought it was going to be a small plane. I had CNN on minutes after the first plane crash. I saw the second plane crash live and the whole paradigm shifted.
As a Canadian, I was shocked and riveted to the TV. Once the second tower fell I went out to cut the lawn.
I was numb. The comparisons to Pearl Harbor were immediate in my head. New York is about 400 miles south of here and I kept looking to the south expecting to see a plume; I never did.
I remember telling my wife (at the time) that this was going to be a world-changing event.
I heard it on the radio at least four hours after it happened (I’m in CA and I don’t have a tv nor do I listen to the radio except in the car). I was alone that day; I remember my first impulse was to find an open church and pray. After I did that I went to the grocery store and was amazed at all the young people who weren’t talking about it, acting like it was a normal day. Then in the check out line a guy as old as my dad (old enough to have fought in WWII) looked at me gravely and said, “everything’s going to be different now.”
I didn’t watch video footage of the event until ten years had passed.
One of the eerier videos I saw was of a camera facing the wall of dust and ash and junk coming down the street. The camera holder turns and runs into a narrow store front, a restaurant. Everyone is at the back, as far from the street as possible. Out in front you see a bright sunny morning, until the cloud comes rolling by. Kind of like a horror movie. It gets pretty dark in there.
I was leisurely getting ready for my coffee shop shift when I turned on NBC in time for the second plane. I remember standing in the middle of my living room and yelling. After I worked through the shock enough to have a seat and watch some more, I remember thinking, “the movie people got it right. Damn.”
Then I went to work. I really didn’t want to, but we had to be there and there were just two of us so I couldn’t leave the other girl stranded. I was just incredulous through my whole shift and rude to customers, thinking it was unbelievable these people were just going about their day and buying stupid coffee when this was going on. We even tried to hear the President’s speech in the evening with a borrowed radio and I couldn’t believe the customers who trotted in and out without any apparent care. A couple stayed and listened with us, but not as many as should have.
Watching the footage from that day, I’m stunned that even after the second plane hit, a few people still assumed it was an accident. In one clip I’ve seen, one newscaster even speculates that perhaps there’s some problem with the navigation equipment. It was just inconceivable that anyone could pull off such a brazen attack.
I was in my apartment in Moscow, listening to the 5:00 PM BBC news broadcast. I had spent the whole day writing a translation, and was getting up to take a shower and get dressed, since I had to give a sample lesson that evening at an Open House being given by the language school where I was teaching.
I was reaching to turn off the radio when the announcer said “We now switch you to New York, where something is happening at the World Trade Center.” At that time, they were still speculating that a small plane had accidentally smashed into the first tower, then they said a second plane had hit.
I went into the living room and turned on CNN; they were about to rerun the videotape, so I rang my ex at her office and asked her if she knew what was happening. No sooner had I gotten the words out when they showed the second plane crashing into the tower in what was obviously a kamikaze attack.
When I got to the library where the Open House was being held, I accessed the BBC and CNN websites, but they were swamped with hits; the only information I was able to get was that first one and then the other tower had collapsed.
In a rare display of sympathy for my nationality, people kept coming up to me all evening saying “Sorry for the tragedy.” When I got back home, I stayed up until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning watching the CNN coverage.
I remember something similar - a bright blue sky seen through a plate glass front window, and the camera holder capturing the cloud rolling down the street, and a weird little bit of drama: a woman standing outside watching it and someone else grabbing her and pushing her inside. She protests, yelling at the guy that was pushing her… and then the cloud envelops the street and she stops talking for an instant, and then quietly says, “Oh, shit, you saved my life.”
