“No one is able to grasp the enormity of what we are looking
at, what we are dealing with,” Judy Woodruff said. It was early on the
afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 11-a few hours after a pair of passenger planes had
ripped into the two World Trade Center towers-and the CNN news anchor, like
many of her colleagues in the media, was trying to put the unspeakable into
words.
No words, of course, could adequately describe what
happened. The images alone from downtown Manhattan
were astonishing, terrifying. Shortly before 9
a.m., stations started carrying live shots of the fire inside the
first World Trade
Center tower. Initially, it was
unclear what had happened. Was it an explosion? A tragic
airplane accident?
But then, at 9:04, live cameras picked up a second airplane
as it swerved across the Manhattan skyscape, barreling south and-after a haunting
pause that felt like forever-tearing into the guts of the other Trade Center
tower. The image was shocking, impossible to fathom, and briefly confusing. “I
didn’t even see the plane,” said WPIX
11 cameraman Keith Lopez. “I saw the explosion.” Only after reviewing the tape
did he notice the aircraft. “Usually in this business, you get there
afterwards, but to see it happen is unbelievable.”
Meanwhile, news teams scurried for information on what was
quickly becoming the most catastrophic news day in New
York City history. Ms. Woodruff’s CNN colleague, Aaron
Brown-brand-new on the job-commandeered a south-facing deck on the 22nd floor
of CNN’s headquarters at 5 Penn Plaza near 34th Street, the billowing cloud of
destruction over his shoulder. Shepard Smith, a correspondent for Fox News,
held tight in his chair and delivered reports as intercoms in News Corp.’s Sixth
Avenue headquarters urged employees to evacuate
the skyscraper.
As the chaotic day progressed, television networks, both
national and local, alternated between serving as news-delivery outlets and
public-address systems. With phone lines jammed, people relied upon their
televisions-as well as radio-news outfits across the dial-for information.
“Nobody moves, everything’s shut down, bridges and tunnels are closed,” MSNBC’s
Brian Williams said sternly.
Newsrooms, both local and national, were in chaos. Virtually
every staffer was assigned to the task. There were the heavyweights like Tom
Brokaw, who urged calm, but even those staffers not typically associated with
hard news pitched in. Dave Price of WNYW, usually a comic foil, delivered a
sobering man-on-the-street report during the mid-afternoon. One of his
interviewees broke into tears. “It has torn at the emotional strings of anyone
who has seen it either in person or on television,” Mr. Price said.
In covering the tragedy, some members of the media community
placed themselves in direct danger. People were hurt, and there were also
scattered, unsubstantiated reports of missing news personnel in the downtown
area, especially after the collapse of both towers. Reporters who work every
day in the financial district were also put in danger. Bloomberg News said that
three staffers who had appointments in the area were missing after the blasts.
Describing his calls to friends and sources in the financial community, Herb
Greenberg, a columnist for TheStreet.com, wrote that he felt “numbness and
fear.” He added, “Everyone, it seems, knows somebody, directly or indirectly,
who is most likely gone.” Barbara Olson, a frequent legal commentator on CNN,
was one of the first known media casualties, killed as a passenger on the
aircraft that crashed into the Pentagon.
Those who returned safely
to work described an awful scene. On WCBS 2, a 60 Minutes staffer described being shielded by a New York City fireman when a fireball rolled down a narrow
street. Fox News replayed harrowing footage from a cameraman who held his (or
her-it was not clear at press time) ground as an explosion hurled smoke and
debris into the camera’s lens.
Bill Muller, a cameraman for WPIX 11, said he rushed down to
the World Trade
Center as soon as he heard about
the incident. “I was two blocks away from the World
Trade Center
when it exploded,” said Mr. Muller. “The third time it exploded, I just turned
and ran-there was a few-hundred-foot-tall tidal wave of black behind me.” Mr.
Muller said he jumped inside a building as the smoke blasted by. “I saw it go
by me.”
Jonathan Fine, a cameraman for WB 11, was taping footage of
a triage area set up directly beneath the World
Trade Center
when the first tower collapsed. “I heard what I thought was a third plane
exploding,” he said. “I turned around and, like an avalanche,
there was a wall of soot like the fucking movies. All I could think of was Pompeii,
and I was going to die in this fucking ash.”
Mr. Fine, like his colleague Mr. Muller, tried to outrun the
ash, but only got half a block before it overtook him. He jumped into a
vestibule as the area became pitch-black with soot. “I [couldn’t] see a thing,
so I turned on my camera light and aimed at the ground like a headlight in the
fog,” he said. With his camera light leading the way, Mr. Fine was able to get
to safety.
As their colleagues in Manhattan
were filing from the field, networks were also trying to deliver the national
picture. By mid-morning-after a third aircraft had smashed into the Pentagon
and a fourth crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania-it
was evident that the hijackings and crashings were indeed an organized
terrorist attack. There were initial, frightening reports of other possible
hijackings-early, uneasy reports estimated four to
eight additional lost planes. President Bush went on TV in the morning and
sternly pledged to “hunt down and punish” the perpetrators.
Despite the understandable emotions in the wake of the
attacks, the networks showed reasonable restraint with the hype and wild
speculation. CNN chose “AMERICA UNDER ATTACK” as its tag for the event. MSNBC went with “ATTACK ON
AMERICA,” and Fox News
used “TERRORISM IN AMERICA.” Most of the on-air commentary was muted and sober,
though it occasionally grew high-pitched. “This is an act of war against the
American people,” Newt Gingrich said on the Fox News Channel. “We have to react
as we did in 1941 after Pearl Harbor.” Other voices
heard throughout the afternoon included Senators John McCain and Orrin Hatch,
and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Mayor Giuliani was a constant
presence on television, boldly walking down the streets with an army of
reporters in tow.
It is patently absurd in
an event such as this to declare one network’s coverage superior to another, as
if it were a hurricane or a horse race, but it is
worth mentioning the impressive performance of the city’s local news operations
during the crisis. Local news teams justifiably take a lot of grief for their
shallow approach to the news, but on this day, the performance of these
operations was almost uniformly superb. Of particular note was WCBS Channel 2,
which was the only broadcast-television news source for many people in the city
without cable, since the explosions knocked out the signals of stations with
transmission equipment atop the World Trade Center. (Later in the day, the city’s local stations
were also among the first to telecast incredible amateur video of the
explosions taken by freelancers in the streets.)
As their television colleagues grappled with the news in
real time, the city’s print reporters were busy on the scene, too-and again,
risking their own lives. Robert Ingrassia, a reporter for the New
York Daily News ,
was walking over the Brooklyn Bridge
when the first tower collapsed. “I saw it go down and I thought, ‘This is the
biggest story of my life,'” he said. The
New York Post made plans to come out with an extra edition by 6 p.m., but canceled Page Six for Wednesday’s
paper. The Daily News canceled Tuesday’s edition of its afternoon free paper,
the Daily News Express , but planned
to publish a morning paper on Wednesday, Sept. 12. The New York Times also planned to publish on Wednesday. Because of
the emergency, there were early concerns about how the city’s papers would be
distributed in Manhattan. As the
day progressed and some bridges reopened, those concerns began to be
alleviated.
But
there was at least one paper where publishing was the smallest of concerns. Dow Jones and The
Wall Street Journal lie in the shadow of the World Trade Center, blocks away at 200 Liberty Street. The company ordered its offices evacuated by 9:15 a.m., shortly after the second plane attack. Staffers
exited to the Hudson River and then walked north or south. Authorities also
evacuated Dow Jones’ offices in Jersey City, where the paper’s newswire staff is based.
Later, a skeleton crew from downtown Manhattan and Jersey City gathered in the company’s office in South Brunswick, N.J.,
outside Princeton. A spokesman for the paper said The Journal
intended to publish on Wednesday.
Internet news sites also provided a wave of coverage during
the morning and afternoon. CNN.com stripped its site to its bare bones, offering
a flurry of breaking, bullet-pointed stories. Newsday.com’s site headlined its
Web coverage with an ominous “WHAT WE KNOW.” The New York Times sent e-mail updates to its subscribers.
By afternoon, there was
more information, as well as video, on Web news sites. And predictably, there
were emotional reader reactions on their message boards. “We here in the U.S. better wake up,” one reader posted on CNN.com.
“This is just the start.”
-With reporting by
Sridhar Pappu and Petra Bartosiewicz .
