I was living in Manhattan on 9/11/01, and like everybody else I went home from work and watched TV. Also like everybody else, I didn’t scan around the TV to see what was on; I just watched in horror and shock.
Does anybody out there remember surfing their TV to see if any other channels - Food Network or Nickelodeon or whatever - had anything other than 9/11 coverage?
I have a vague recollection of channel surfing and coming across the local PBS affiliate, and being surprised that they were showing their usual children’s programming.
Normal progrmming on almost all cable channels. WTC coverage only on stations that had the right to carry programming from the news networks that were covering it. The Home Shopping Network and the Lifetime Movie Channel did not scramble their own news teams, and had no contractual rights to carry any other network’s programs.
My mother watched Game Show Network that day, just to get away from the endless coverage. (Personally, I turned off the TV.)
The programmed channels that have no live programs, no news division, just kept on going with their programming. I don’t recall what the major pay cables did differently, if anything.
OTOH, when JFK was shot all 4 of our channels switched to full time news coverage for about a week before resuming anything else (at least during the hours I was allowed to watch TV back then).
As I remember, some of the channels that you wouldn’t expect to be covering a news story were doing so. MTV, for example, covered it either using their own staff or simulcast from a sister station.
I remember that being only a half-week – from the assassination until the funeral on Monday.
I lived outside DC then, may have been a local thing.
MTV carried coverage from CBS News. Both networks were divisions of Viacom in 2001.
As I recall, many cable channels (including VH1) simply broadcast a message that they had suspended normal programming, due to the day’s events. However, there were several whose programming didn’t change, esp. pay channels.
When I couldn’t stand to watch the news anymore, I flipped through channels and wound up watching some old movies on Turner Classic–the 1930s version of Pride & Prejudice, and something with Jimmy Cagney (White Heat, IIRC).
Kids channels like Nickelodeon and Noggin definitely kept their regular programming. Which was nice - our daughter was too young to understand what was going on and why we were so upset, so she wound up with a bonus day of TV.
I also remember they had no commercial breaks that day.
The Sky is Falling
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My son was two at the time, the only other thing on my TV were sticky little hand-prints.
OJ on the freeway with the cops behind him seemed to be on every station as well.
I recall that at least one of the basic cable channels had a scrolling message at the bottom of the screen, stating that bad stuff was happening and if you weren’t already aware of it you should switch to a channel with live news coverage.
I worked as a video game programmer at the famously-unsuccessful 3DO company at the time. I had a TV on my desk that was normally just used as a monitor for a PS2 devkit, but it turned out that even with no antenna, we could tune into the local Vietnamese language news station (or something along those lines). They were just broadcasting the CNN feed, with occasional interruptions to say something in Vietnamese.
(Side note: the game we were working on at the time was a Godzilla game in which huge monsters knocked sky scrapers over, and if the sky scrapers tumbled down to the ground they could crush the little civilians… you can bet that THAT game got cancelled in a hurry…)
I was watching TV with a large group of people at the time and remember telling someone that it was two planes and not one–so it wasn’t an accident–on the way out of the public lounge. I really don’t remember anything else from that day.
PBS later said they’d made a deliberate decision to provide a safe haven for children’s viewing that day.