I second Keeve, if only because my strongest memory was of how strange it was that every channel was showing the same thing, a horse drawn carriage, and my cartoons weren’t on. And everybody was sad, I think I remember.
I was unaware of the assassination day, for some reason, and have no memory of it.
IIRC, I saw my first post-9/11 commercial on Thursday.
In between, on 9/12/01, that was the day my church was scheduled to serve dinner at a local soup kitchen. (We still do it, too.) As we were setting up, some of us wondered if the people there knew what had happened the day before. Yes, they all did.
There were some reports (and I can’t find anything to back it up) about how some irate women were calling up TV stations because their soap operas weren’t on.
My older niece was 23 months old, and she could tell SOMETHING was going on. 
So was the trial, for months and months afterwards. My first thought when I heard about the Oklahoma City bombing was, “So, how long will this knock OJ off the top of the news?” The answer? TWO DAYS. :smack:
Around this time, Newsweek mentioned that the sequestered jurors were having all media censored to remove references to OJ, and a letter writer asked where he could subscribe to this service. 
In the months before 9/11, there was a commercial for flexible eyeglass frames where planes would approach cartoon skyscrapers made out of this material, and the building bent over to allow the plane to pass. There was also a commercial for a finance company which depicted Manhattan skyscrapers tilting like dominoes until they reached this company’s headquarters, which creeped me out because I knew the intent of the 1993 bombing several years before that information was released to the public. I had always kind of figured the terrorists had intended to do more than turn the WTC towers into quarter mile high smokestacks.
Edit: Plane, not plant.
The dirty little secret of an event like 9/11 is that there was - on the day - about 90 or so minutes worth of actual news.
8:46:30 Flight 11 hits the North Tower. This is pretty much the first moment that the TV newsies can be expected to begin coverage.
8:48:08 First TV news coverage begins.
9:03:02 Flight 175 hits the South Tower. Most media are covering the previous crash and catch this live.
9:37:46 Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon.
9:58:48 South Tower collapses
10:03:11 Flight 93 crashes in Pennsylvania
10:28:22 North Tower collapses
After that it was all speculation, confusion and press announcements. There are occasional things that pop up that would count as news but mostly it’s the need for news broadcasters to find reasons to continue speaking and discussing the attacks. It’s always amazing to me how long such events can capture the public eye.
I hope it wasn’t White Heat. A very chilling choice, given how the movie ends.
Well, yeah, by that same reasoning the Kennedy assassination had a few seconds of actual news.
On September 11th, 2001, there was actual stuff happening all day:
and, of course, they had to keep an eye out for further attacks, deciding on all the wacky reports coming in.
There was news about the rescue efforts and people escaping the rubble and dust clouds throughout the day. This is a case where the wall-to-wall coverage was justified.
We had pretty much wall to wall coverage too. I first heard the news on the radio as I was driving at the time. The program was interrupted and the news and comments continued all afternoon (It would have been around 2pm here)
In the evening there was again much coverage on TV, but I think that they switched to wider news, and then back to the regular schedule when it became clear that there was not much more to say.
When JFK was shot, I was living at home with my mother and younger brother. I well remember him having a tantrum because they cancelled something he wanted to watch. I read later that all the senior broadcasters in the BBC were at a dinner, and they were much criticised for their poor coverage.
A few days after JFK, this came out TW3 - Death of President Kennedy - YouTube
I believe it was a best seller in the USA.
Several years? Didn’t we all know way before?
What line of work are you in?
Oooh! Oooh! I have one!
There was this summer reality program/game show on FOX called Murder in Small Town X. I won’t go into the show as it was stupid, but a group of people had to solve a murder before the murderer “killed” them. My wife and I followed this show because we vowed to watch at least one of these new “reality” shows like Survivor so we can see what the hype was about.
This thing was such a turkey that FOX hurried the final episode one week early, ending the show on September 4th, 2001 with a double-header.
FREAKY COINCIDENCE #1: The man who won the show, NYC firefighter Angel Juarbe,died in the 9/11 attacks exactly one week after his winning episode aired.
(ALMOST) FREAKY COINCIDENCE #2: Had the show done better in the ratings, the final episode would have been aired on its original date, 9/11/2001. Obviously it would have been preempted, but then you now have FOX sitting on this episode that shows a man who died in the terrorist attacks winning a quarter-million+. Could you imagine it? We would have had 3+ weeks of “Watch ‘America’s Hero’ Angel Juarbe in his heartbreaking final episode of Murder in Small Town X” commercials and teasers… and, worse, half the country would end up watching part of the episode.
My grandmother used to say “the Lord works in mysterious ways”, and when I think about MISTX’s bad ratings and how we missed a brutal run of uber-patriotic 9/11 exploitation by FOX by this much… I can do nothing but nod my head and think “Yes he does, Grammy, yes he does.”
I know for a fact that in early afternoon, central standard time, E! was doing it’s normal programming with not a peep about the attacks; I worked second shift at the time and tended to sleep late. I woke up, turned on the TV and started watching News Radio. I was about halfway through the second episode of the block when a buddy of mine called me up and asked if I was watching TV… when replied in the affirmative, he started going off about if I thought there were any more planes and what not - I thought he was drunk or crazy for a second. I spent the next couple hours before work watching CNN, amazed that [edit: the E! network] didn’t even have a crawl or a public service announcement about what was happening in the real world.
I was laid up from an operation the day before, watching TV all day. Probably movies on HBO. Didn’ t know anything was going on until my wife called an told me to tune to the news. I even heard a boom that may have been the plane hitting the Pentagon but didn’t think anything of it.
I can believe this. In 1991, I was working Master Control at the AFRTS affiliate in Tokyo. When the first Gulf War broke out, we switched to a live feed of CNN, and carried it for about eight hours. We got hundreds of phone calls from all over Japan, asking and demanding that we resume our regular broadcasts. Most of them came when the soap operas would have been on.
I was at work on 9-11, at Goodfellow AFB in West Texas. All the local stations took their national feeds, butt I seem to remember seeing cooking shows when I got emotionally exhausted and looking for anything else to watch.
Speaking about lingering effects on TV, the pilot episode of 24 was recut to make the hijacking and in-air-explosion of an airliner less prominent. And of course that show, perhaps more than any other major piece of pop culture, ended up being broadcast a world that viewed in a very different way than the world it was originally created for.
I don’t remember what, but yes there were other things on.
See, I worked 3rd shift at that time, getting off work at 6 or 7am.
I lived with my brother, who was a single father keeping a more normal schedule.
I would use the computer and watch a little tv before going to bed, which also meant the kids could spend some time with me after they got up.
From 10 to 11 am we would watch Perry mason on the local Fox affiliate. Before that, we would have something on, but didn’t really care what.
I distinctly remember changing the channel to watch Perry mason, and finding instead they were showing Fox News (which wasn’t available on cable in our area). Prior to changing the channel, we had no idea anything was happening.
So yes, there were channels that weren’t covering it at all.
(Side note: my brother’s earliest memory is being a small child when a major news event preempted other tv programming, and thinking that it was boring and that if just one station were showing cartoons instead every kid in America would be watching that station. He was 3, and it was John F. Kennedy’s funeral.)
Yeah, at first I thought I was watching coverage of a tragic accident.
Then the second plane hit, and I turned to my brother and said “That wasn’t an accident.”
It was maybe 20 minutes before I thought to call anybody else to make sure they knew.
I had been catching birds on that beautiful day, but when we came back in from the field, everything went surreal. I left work in a daze after the fighter jets flew over.
At the time, I didn’t have cable. I turned on the TV and found nothing on channel 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 28… Transmission had been from the top of the north tower. 
I think there was something on channel 56. It took a day or two before the rest of the channels came back.