Five years later, memories of a trying task

At Studio 1-A at Rockefeller Center, things weren’t much better. The South Tower falls live on “Today,” as Brokaw, not looking at that monitor, describes the implications of a terrorist attack. Lauer, who next to him is by his own account ”glued” to the set, interrupts to ask the control room to rerun the last 20 seconds.

“It knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Lauer says. “Immediately you start to think about all the people who were trying to rescue those people and probably had no warning that the building was coming down.”

Veteran anchor Paula Zahn was newly hired from Fox News to take over CNN’s morning show but wasn’t supposed to go on the air until May 2002. She called her boss in Atlanta and volunteered. She was told to go to CNN’s New York offices; she didn’t know where they were. When Zahn arrived, she was pressed into service co-anchoring the daytime coverage with Aaron Brown on a roof overlooking the site.

“It was very tricky territory. There was a tremendous sense of fear,” she says. “No one knew what was going to happen next. What I didn’t want to do was create fear unnecessarily.”

Every network confronted contradictory information, some putting even more stops on the information until it could be confirmed. Some bad information, like reports of a car bomb exploding in front of the State Department and an unclear number of hijacked planes, made it on the air.

“My tendency is always to put out what we hear. We qualify it, but we always put it out,” says Steve Friedman, then-executive producer of “The Early Show” on CBS. “On this particular day, the thing got so crazy, there were so many reports -- 110 planes missing, bombs everywhere -- that we didn’t do it that way.”

In the hours after the initial attacks, Fox News correspondent Brian Wilson reported that there was another plane believed to be in the air headed for Washington.

“It turned out to be Flight 93,” Scott says. “I remember getting chills down my spine because it seemed like nobody had a handle on where these planes were coming from or how many of them there were.”

The networks would remain on the air, without commercial interruption, for days, chronicling what had happened and the massive rescue and recovery efforts in Lower Manhattan, a hill overlooking Washington, and a reclaimed strip mine an hour and a half outside Pittsburgh. The story was so enormous that many journalists recall the concern they had about whether they could tell the full story.

Dividing the work
Each network mobilized everyone in the news division. CBS, like the other networks, assigned “The Early Show,” “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours” chunks of the day to program so that no one would have an overwhelming load.

“Especially on that first day, you were really just going to whomever had a piece of information,” says “48 Hours” executive producer Susan Zirinsky, whose team produced the primetime coverage that first night. “You were getting cameras up, you were putting people in place, you were trying to wrap your brain around it. You wanted to step back and synthesize some of the information, which is what we were trying to do ... At that point, we thought there were many more dead, and it was still a search-and-rescue mission. It was a very, very complicated day to try to give context to.”

ABC’s Gibson recalls the show’s concern about “Good Morning America” and whether they would be able to tell the story adequately in what would become a free-form five-hour broadcast.

“Really the only thing that mattered was the tone of the broadcast that day,” Gibson says. “And I remember thinking when I walked into the studio that the tone really had to be that it was awful, it was terrible, but that we would get through this. That we as a country would survive.”

In some ways, TV news has changed little since that day five years ago. The summer of 2001 was marked by shark attacks off the Florida coast that made national headlines. A missing Senate aide, Levy, was in the headlines, and President Bush was visiting a Florida school when the attacks occurred. There were no serious stories that hit the news in a long time. Today, there is still the tabloid element in mainstream, and stories like the false breakthrough in the JonBenet Ramsey murder trial and the pictures of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ baby can clutter the airwaves. But there also is a realization that, in a very real sense, things haven’t been the same since Sept. 11.

“Television journalism has evolved into the church of what’s happening now,” CBS’ Friedman says. “The problem with some of that is that there are very little analytics going on. With cable and the Internet and with things going like they are, there is no news cycle. You’re on the treadmill 24 hours a day. It has changed the way we cover things and the way we present things.”

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