Thoughts upon Watching Coverage of 9/11

I’m not suggesting any change of course, just making an observation about the ability of news organizations to cover 9/11 vs. the Kennedy assassination.

Which event made the larger impact on our lives? 9/11, maybe, for our security precautions, but, I think a lot of the muddle of vietnam, hippies, an overall rejection of blind patriotic allegiance stemmed from the Kennedy killing.

Again, not trying to change the subject. I was watching news, as usual, in the TV room while my wife slept late, as usual, when the first plane hit. Like many, I presumed a horrible mistake…then we spent the next two days glued to the TV. Amazing that no more than 3000 people died. Amazing the dedication of responders to rush in while others rushed out. All the while, asking ourselves…‘did we deserve this?’.

I’m from Northern Ireland so the events happened at around 1400 hours GMT. I was working nights at that time and had gotten up much earlier than usual, brushed my teeth, went into the living room and turned on the TV to the BBC News channel and the first thing I saw was the second plane hitting (I still don’t know if I saw that live or if it was a repeat very shortly afterwards), my first thought was, “Those special effects are really good, what movie is that?”

I have relatives in New York, some of them firefighters and police officers so it was tense few hours until we found out they were OK.

I sat with my mum and watched events unfold for the rest of the evening, my dad and brother came home and we all sat watching it, discussing it and trying to contact our American relatives.

When the news came in about the strike on the Pentagon I thought we may be watching the opening moves of World War Three, there was a real feeling of, “Where will this all end?”

One odd thing is I didn’t see any footage of people actually throwing themselves out of the towers, I’m definitely not complaining about that but it is one of the things that sticks in peoples minds about that day, perhaps it wasn’t shown on the BBC which was the channel I watched.

I was a sophomore in high school when it happened. That morning, like every morning, I stumbled out of bed and turned on my TV to the Today Show, so I could pretend like I was listening to the news in my sleepy haze as I put on way too much eyeliner (I was a teenager, don’t judge me!). I saw a building on fire on the TV and was half listening, but I assumed it was somewhere over there. You know what I mean, right? I’d regularly turn on the TV in the morning and see stuff blown up or on fire, but it was always in Israel or Africa or just not here.

When it registered to me that this was the World Trade Center I had been at two months before, I went and woke my mom up, who freaked the fuck out and almost didn’t let me go to school. I insisted, as I had a physics test. So, off I went.

In every single class, we just watched the news. In English class, we sat in front of the big screen TV in stunned silence as the towers fell. Some people were crying. Everything was really stoic. But yeah, every single class was just watching the news.

Except physics. That bitch made us take our freaking test.

Then again, Kennedy was killed by one dude who was caught rather quickly, and there was no trial, so the pain didn’t drag on and on and on.

I was listening to the radio at work and surfin’ the Dope.

The only positive thing I can come up with about that day is its always said that you remember exactly where you were when you first hear about tragic events like this. I was driving a car that I really love and will always remember it because of that. I still have it, by the way.

My nieces were aged 6 months and 23 months at the time, and the older one could tell something awful was going on; she probably picked up vibes from the adults around her. :frowning: I have told them that I hope they never have a similar pivotal event in their lifetimes (that they can remember, anyway) and also that we all got to see something that day that they won’t in the footage shown nowadays, and that’s all the people who jumped.

I was off work that day, and decided to set my alarm to 9am (Central Time, in Iowa) because I had a 9:45 doctor’s appointment about a mile from my house. I recognized the voices from the BBC World Service, which my local NPR affiliate broadcasts when they have problems with the feed, and just couldn’t comprehend what I was hearing. What do you mean, a tower has collapsed? (see footnote) I got up, turned on the TV, and sure enough, they were right.

I figured if anything was going to happen here, it would whether I went to the doctor or not, so I kept the appointment. I was driving by the nursing home down the street when the announcer said, “The second tower has just collapsed.”

Before going to the appointment, I shoved a tape into the VCR and hit “record”. I still have it.

Footnote: I know a man who works in the elevator industry, and he told me the intent of the 1993 bombing several years before it was known to the public. I kinda figured there was more to it than turning the World Trade Center into quarter-mile-high smokestacks. Yes, the intent was to knock them, and any other buildings in the area, over.

The next day, it was my church’s evening to serve dinner at the Salvation Army soup kitchen, and as we set up, some of us wondered if the clients there knew what had happened the day before. They all did.

I didn’t see much of that on CNN either. I think you had to look very carefully to see anything like that. I believe they were actually trying to be somewhat respectful of this during the live coverage.

well,

I lost my life savings in 2 days…

had $5. left…

just put 7k in that account that week (an inheritance).

(that was a lot of cash then)

actually called off work for a couple days sick…

never again.

My husband worked in a building one block east and one block south of the WTC, but his office was on the far side of the building, facing east; he could not see the WTC from his window.

We lived in NYC, but in Queens, pretty far from Manhattan. I was at home that day.

My husband called me not long after the first plane hit, but he did not know at that point what had happened. He just saw all this paper flying past his window, and wanted me to turn on the tv to see what I could find out. (I don’t remember for sure, but I think he was having trouble connecting to news websites online.) My first thought was that it was a ticker-tape parade in the Canyon of Heroes, but my husband said no, the paper was too big – entire file folders, not confetti.

So I turned on the tv and saw the reports about a plane hitting the first building. Like so many other people, I assumed it was a small plane – I thought maybe a pilot had had a heart attack. I reported that to my husband, and got off the phone. I can’t even remember now whether I saw the second plane hit, on tv or online. I think not, although I just can’t remember. But I clearly found out about it at some point, and by then it was clear that this was not an accident.

At one point I walked over to my younger child’s school, to see what was happening there, and to make sure he was okay. All the adults at school knew what was happening, but they were keeping it from the kids. I decided to leave my child there; I thought it would be more upsetting for him to be with me, because I would have a hard time hiding how upset I was. While I was at his school, in the administration office, another parent I knew said that one of the towers had fallen. I assumed she meant that the top of it had fallen off; I could not even conceive of the entire building collapsing.

When I got home again, I did see the second tower collapse, live on tv. It was not until that tower collapsed and I realized there was nothing there, that I finally understood that the other tower had completely collapsed as well. (I thought that the reason I could see only one tower before that was just that the second tower was blocking the view of the first tower – not that the first tower was no longer there.)

At that point, I went to school and picked up my kid. It was just my instinct to have him with me.

One of the things that I recall about that morning, before all flights were grounded, was how little everyone knew, and the fear that there was no end in sight – that more and more buildings would be hit, and planes would keep going down.

Another thing I remember about that morning was that it was a piercingly beautiful day, weather-wise. To this day, when I go outside and realize that it is an absolutely beautiful day, my first thought is invariably that it reminds me of 9/11, even after all this time.

I was at work listening to my usual morning radio show (around 9am EST/8am CST) and the regular show was interrupted with news of a plane hitting the first tower. I thought it was an accident, who wouldn’t? I didn’t know at the time it was a perfectly clear day in NYC, of course, or I might have been somewhat suspicious. I, too, thought of the B-25 hitting the Empire State Building many years before.

I kept listening and researching my letters I had to write that day when the second plane hit. As soon as I heard it, my first thought was “Al-Qaeda” because I was and still am a news/geopolitics junkie. I knew of Bin Laden from an NBC news interview a couple of weeks prior, and that the day before (or maybe two days prior) that one of the Afghanistani leadership had been killed by fake news crew with explosives, so it was fresh in my mind.

I spent the rest of the morning surprising my co-workers with my Kreskin-like predictions and analysis (which was only possible because, again, I Pay Attention). I called the next attack on the Pentagon, then either the White House or Capitol Hill because they were striking the three pillars of American power (economic, military, political). I was, however, surprised about the tower collapses and initially thought there must have been a secondary device in the basement a’la 1994 because at the time I figured if a tower was going down it would have right after the first impact. I’ve since learned that was incorrect.

Oddly enough, while my co-workers were trying to get updates online and failing as internet traffic exploded, I was just listening to my radio and continued to work until they sent us home. Got a couple of cases wrapped up while everyone else was shell-shocked. Guess I’m an ass.

I will never, ever forget standing in the front yard around 11am CST that day, in the direct flight path of Love Field and DFW, and for the first time in my life not seeing or hearing an aircraft in the sky. THAT is my indelible memory of that day.

Everything happened late at night here so the first I knew of it was when I turned on the TV to catch the 6am news and got a barrage of images: the second plane hitting, both towers collapsing, the Pentagon.

It was overwhelming.

My best friend was working in New York at the time, when I got to work that morning I sent him an email to check in. It took about a week for him to get back to me, had no idea if he was Ok before that.

He and his co-workers had watched the second plane fly past their building and into the WTC. He said it was surreal watching the event unfold and getting the live commentary from the TV behind them.

I was working at home at the time, on the East coast, about 300 miles from NYC, and for some reason I pulled an all-nighter just then, couldn’t sleep, so I was sitting at my computer, coding, with TV on CNN in the background, when they announced that a Cessna-type small plane just hit one of the towers and switched to show the tower, under blue sky, with smoke coming out. Then they discussed how sometimes there are planes flying low in NYC, and how this dangerous practice should stop, and then boom - the second plane hit. That was just the biggest shock. I called to my wife to wake up and come watch, then called my parents who were on vacation in Las Vegas at the time. Told them to turn on the TV. They asked which channel. I said “any channel will do”… Then I just sat there and watched for hours and hours. In the end parents had to rent a car and drive from LV home in a few days I think.

Every time 9/11 comes around and some TV stations show repeat coverage, I can’t watch. Just can’t. Turn it off.

It was at night here, 11 hours ahead of New York, and I was checking out the news online on the laptop the wife used and which was checked out of her office. That was our only computer back then. I saw a Breaking News blurb about a plane running into the World Trade Center. I thought that was odd … as well as reminiscent of that one time a plane ran into into the Empire State Building, and I thought it was something similar. Then a later blurb said it was a passenger liner and that a second one had hit the other building. That’s when I turned on the TV, and all the Thai channels carried live coverage all through the night. Stayed up watching.

I guess that’s positive.

Which makes you wonder which channels were showing it, and I agree with you that it was more respectful not to cover it.

Like several other people in this thread I recorded the news that day, I came across those recordings a few months ago and watching it took me back again to just how surreal the events were, it will take a lot for something to top that spectacle and drama-wise in our lifetime.

A nuclear attack might do it, not that I want to see that either.

I’m not sure there were - at least not intentionally. What I remember my wife saying (I didn’t see much before both towers had fallen, as I was on my way to work, then trying to follow it on the internet at work while getting little done, then driving back home when they closed work), was that a talking head on whatever channel she was watching (probably CNN) asked an on-the-ground reporter what those occasional sounds were, and the answer was it was the sound of bodies hitting the ground - people were throwing themselves off the roof.

I, too, thought it was a general aviation small plane at first, but I found out it was a much bigger event in a different way. I saw the news of a crash on the web at work, then got up to use the restroom. When I was walking back, I glanced at the break room and there were a bunch of people there watching the TV. At that point I knew it was a major event.

I was just arriving at work a little after the first plane hit. Walking from the elevator to my office I passed a small meeting room which was full of people watching a TV set up in the room and I stopped to see what was going on. It was a couple of hours before I actually made it the rest of the way to my office. I remember how silent everyone was, no comments, just some shocked exclamations when the second plane hit and when the first tower collapsed. Just silence for the second collapse.

I lived in Seattle at the time, which usually has seaplanes buzzing all around, as well as larger planes taking off/landing from Sea-Tac, and that is one of my strongest memories too: How silent the sky was.

It was a little different around here. F-16s are not silent.