The Day America Needed Journalism Most

“You’re just trying to keep your head because the whole world is watching you. You were traumatized, but you had to put that in the back of your head, and you had to keep going. That part didn’t matter because you would deal with it later. You had a responsibility to tell the news, to get the facts on the air.” – Jodi Fleisig, CNN

The memory of Sept. 11, 2001, is stamped into the minds of Americans, no matter where they were and no matter what they were doing at 8:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the moment the first plane flown by al-Qaida-trained hijackers hit the World Trade Center.

For the journalists who were most closely involved, specific moments from that day still bring back vivid images. It was a shocking event, the biggest story imaginable, and they were thrown into it. Their role was critical. It was a day when the American public, terrified and angry, needed information more than most people could remember.

To mark the 25th anniversary of this world-changing event, Penn State journalism students interviewed more than 20 reporters, writers and photographers about their memories of the day, of covering the story, and what they see as its importance today.

A FINAL PHOTOGRAPH

The weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks were relatively quiet on the national news front. It’s a period now sometimes called the “summer of sharks” because of the intense coverage of several shark attacks in Florida.

Tom Franklin was a staff photographer at the Bergen Record of New Jersey at the time and was headed off to the Dominican Republic on Sept. 2, just nine days before the attacks. He caught an early-morning flight out of Newark.

Franklin: “I’m sitting there in the terminal and I see this beautiful orange sunrise, and I see the World Trade Center Twin Towers framing that sunrise, and I was like half asleep, kind of groggy and I said I got to take a picture of that. So, I pulled out my long, 300-millimeter lens and shot a picture of it and that was the last photo I took of the World Trade Center with the two towers not on fire. It’s funny, as a photographer, you know, you’re sometimes faced with these decisions whether to take the picture or not to take the picture, and I’m glad I took that picture.”

Franklin returned on Sunday, Sept. 9. Two days later, he and his colleagues had an early-morning meeting scheduled in their Hackensack office to discuss the project that had taken him to the DR. It didn’t happen.

An editor ran into the photo department and said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

THIS JUST IN

It didn’t take long for the word to spread, but the news was so horrifying, and breaking so fast, it was hard for journalists to grasp the enormous implications of what they were seeing.

At 8:45 a.m. CNN anchor Carol Lin was interviewing bestselling author Amy Tan about cartoon cats. Four minutes later, coming out of a commercial break, Lin told the world from CNN’s breaking news desk that a plane had hit the World Trade Center: “This just in…”

Lin: Remembers saying to herself “just don’t say anything stupid, Carol. Don’t make assumptions, because the temptation is to fill the air, but I don’t know anything.”

Frank Scandale was eight months into his job as editor of the Bergen Record, after previously working for Denver Post. He had covered the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado back in 1999.

After dropping his kids off at school, Scandale put the radio on when he heard the second plane hit.

Scandale: “I remember just punching the gas on Route 4 which is not a road you can (do that on), and I was just speeding into the parking lot and running into the newsroom. We just had to start assembling.”

He immediately started putting together an Extra Edition of the paper, which the Record hadn’t done since the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Carol Marin was a news correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” working at the office on 57th Street in Manhattan. She initially thought the first crash was a freak accident but when she saw the second plane hit while watching TV monitors at CBS, she immediately headed out to get a cab. But the driver let her out early — he didn’t want to go the whole way — and people were “pouring” out of the Twin Towers when she arrived, she said.

Marin: “What I knew in three years of experience is, when something’s happening you get down there before police lines go up. Reporters, in many ways, are first responders. I don’t mean to compare myself or us to police or paramedics or firefighters, but we are a first response kind of line as well.”

Ron Fournier was the chief White House correspondent for The Associated Press. He heard the news and initially thought it was just another “top story” of the day.

Fournier: “I thought to myself, ‘Okay, this is probably going to be something I'll need to get a comment on later,’ but that wasn't (major). That was a case for anything important that happened in the world. Anything that was newsworthy had a connection, always had a connection to the White House.”

Robert Burns was the AP’s Pentagon correspondent. As he was going up the escalator to the Pentagon from the subway, his pager went off with his editor asking for him to call.

Burns: “And the next thing I knew, we were standing in a doorway along this corridor (in the Pentagon) and one of my colleagues, a TV reporter, stuck his head out of the doorway and shouted. And really shouting, ‘Has there been an explosion?’ And at that point, the plane had just hit the building, and this happened in a different part of the Pentagon.”

Elise Young got to the Bergen Record’s office in Hackensack earlier than normal for a scheduled computer training. The newsroom was quite empty, reporters typically arrived around 10 a.m., so Young, as a rewrite reporter, was put on the story.

Young: “I went to the (conference room) and Frank (Scandale) said to me, ‘Start writing. Just start writing what we know, and we'll have everybody feed you.’ So what I tended to do in big breaking news situations was I grabbed other desk phones which were on long cords, and I put about four of them on my desk so that I could make calls. And then if people called me back, they wouldn't get a busy signal.”

Patrick Schuur, a general assignment reporter for WTAJ in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, typically reported out of the Altoona / Blair County area, but on Sept. 11 he was filling in for someone at the main newsroom.

Schuur: “The newsroom in Altoona heard on the scanner that there was a plane with a ‘terroristic device on board.’ That was the wording, and there were a couple of things that I remember very specifically and other things I don't remember as specifically, but the wording ‘terroristic device on board,’ I remember very specifically, had been diverted from Cleveland and was headed this direction, meaning Central Pennsylvania.”

At 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville,. and Joe Little, a news reporter for local TV station WATM, ABC 23 in Johnstown, was coincidentally in the area for an interview for a different story. He got a call from one of the anchors saying a plane crashed right near him.

Little: “(I thought) this has got to be just a freak out, this is nowhere Pennsylvania. I've never even been to this part of the state. And we have, we have no phones, no nothing to look up and guide us to. I'm like, we have no idea where we are (but then) a fire truck comes blazing out. I'm like, ‘Mike, just follow that fire truck.’ And so he gets behind the fire truck, and (eventually) we're just blocking the fire trucks (that were) running red lights like, I'm like, ‘Don't go run the red light.’ We drove across someone's yard (to get out of the way). I feel bad about that.”

Little was “one of the first humans” at the crash site.

CHASING THE NEWS

The story became the priority. Emotions were put on the backburner. It had to be that way, there was a job to do, getting information and uncovering details was the only option.

Lin (CNN breaking news): “We’re all begging to throw away the scripts, let the teleprompters go blank and just tackle the story. Once you hear that breaking news, you go into this natural mode. You zoom in, you’re laser-focused, listening actively for instructions.”

Marin was walking West Street, covered in ash from the collapse of the first tower, when a firefighter screamed at her to run in the opposite direction.

Marin (CBS): “The ground began to shift. I ran. I stumbled and fell. He grabbed me by the waist, threw me up on my feet and took me to the overhang of a building which protected us as the second tower fell. And then it went from light to utter darkness of the debris from that second tower, including pieces of people, and not just desks and pens and computers but the horror of blowing up a tower of people.”

She never knew the name of the firefighter who saved her and it still “drives me crazy to this day.”

John Mancini oversaw all New York City news as the metropolitan editor at Newsday. He was on the phone with a reporter near the World Trade Center when the towers collapsed.

Mancini: “We’re watching people die. It was chilling.”

At the time, The Associated Press’ office was located at Rockefeller Center, and Jerry Schwartz, a national reporter, was starting the AP’s story. At first “there were more questions than answers.”

Schwartz: “As a rewrite (compiling material gathered by others), always my policy was to be absolutely cool even if I’m just tearing up inside, even if I’m just going through ‘Oh no, what are they giving me now’ because I always figured that if I got upset, the people around me were going to get upset.”

The New York AP office was in constant communication with the news service’s Washington editors and reporters. Eugenio Hernandez, a news assignment manager for the AP, was making his way toward the Pentagon, following the sound that he could only describe as “the same sound as when the plane is taking off or landing.”

Hernandez: “I got into the shoulder of the road, and then I just parked the car right in front of the impact, Came out of the car. I looked around, you know, and then all of a sudden I saw a tourist with a little camera. And so I just walked towards him, I pulled out one of my business cards, as I said, ‘Hey, I'm Eugenio Hernandez. I work for the AP and I need your camera.’”

Fournier (reporting from the White House): “As I’m talking to (the Department of Justice), I typed out a news alert on my computer, ‘FBI believes attack in New York was a terrorist attack.’ Within 30 seconds we had told the whole world.”

The White House was then evacuated but Fournier didn’t leave: “I wasn’t going to leave my computer, my phone.”

Tim Lambert, a Shanksville native, just moved back to Central Pennsylvania and was three weeks into his new role as local host for public radio’s “All Things Considered,” on WITF in Harrisburg. Not long after Flight 93 crashed, he got a phone call from his father.

Lambert: “(His father said) ‘Those are our trees. I grew up on that land, I have an idea of where that is and I’m sure that is our property.’ My head was spinning, I was like ‘What?!’”

Shuur (at the crash site): “I was expecting to see parts of a plane. When you talk about a plane crash, you think you would see a wing or a tail, an engine, something recognizable as a plane crash, and there was nothing to see except for a smoldering crater. That to me was unbelievable. I had a hard time believing that a huge plane could be reduced to a crater.”

Search and rescue at the World Trade Center was paused around 4:30 p.m. Seven World Trade was going to collapse and the area was being evacuated.

Franklin (Bergen Record photographer): “I saw (two firemen) were trying to attach a flag to a flagpole and it took several minutes and then they hoisted it up and I shot it like a play in football. They attached the flag, they hoisted it up, they looked at it, they stepped down and I shot it. They didn’t know I photographed them.”

It remains one of the most famous photographs of the tragedy.

MAKING SENSE OF CHAOS

Of course, the journalists in New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and beyond all were processing the events they were covering. While many described themselves as proud to serve, the emotions were mixed with a growing sense of the impact of the day, some of it personal.

Jodi Flesig was a senior executive producer at CNN. Her brother worked in the World Trade Center and overslept that morning and didn’t go into work. But for the first two hours of CNN’s breaking news coverage, Flesig had no idea if he had survived or not.

Flesig: “When you’re a journalist, you have a higher calling. Being a journalist was being a journalist with a capital ‘J.’ This is why we do what we do. I think we did a great job and the best part of it is that we were such a team in such a horrible time. Everybody in that building knew we were in the middle of something you couldn’t even describe.”

Schwartz: “The AP was a place where people were accustomed to dealing with chaos because you never knew it was going to happen and we didn’t have the big staff that a lot of newspapers in those days had. We were accustomed to doing more with less, to having people pick up responsibilities right and left, you know, and handle whatever needed to be handled.”

Schwartz coined the phrase “ground zero,” but it wasn’t intentional, he didn’t put too much thought into the phrase in the heat of the moment.

Schwartz: “We choose words, that’s what we do. I never thought it would be some kind of major phrase that would go down in history.”

Mark Lennihan was a general assignment photographer for The Associated Press, and he was at ground zero well into the evening.

Lennihan: “The sun was still up, but you could barely see it through this cloud of dust. It was more of a glow, you couldn’t actually see the outline of the sun. And it kind of, I guess in a way, was evocative of a war scene, you know, something of really being under attack.”

Clem Richardson was a columnist with the New York Daily News. His apartment had a view of the Twin Towers and Statue of Liberty, he could see the smoke and the wind blew burnt pieces of paper all the way to his roof. Richardson called the news desk, and was sent to a hospital in Brooklyn, where victims were believed to have been sent. But that wasn’t the case. He went on to a spot where pedestrians would have just crossed the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan.

Richardson: “As I was leaving, one of the hospital communications staffers asked if she could walk over there with me because her husband worked on one of the 80-plus floors and he normally called her at a set time every morning, but hadn’t that day. We walked to the corner of Tillery Street and Boreum Place, where I interviewed dozens of shell-shocked dust-covered people as they made their way home. My companion’s husband died in the towers.”

Aisha Sultan was a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the school district beat.

Sultan: “I do think that in some situations, journalists who have to cover something like a tragedy, or, you know, traumatic event is unfolding, you cannot take the time to process your own reaction. What you have to do is really compartmentalize, and I think that's what I had to do in that moment, is sort of just set aside my own concerns, fears, worries, grief, you know, everything.”

When she was talking to students at a lunch table, one of the students looked at her and asked where she was from. She realized even though she was born and raised in America, she had a Muslim name of Arabic origin and was a “brown woman.”

Sultan: “It sort of reminded me that OK, well, this is something probably a lot of people are going to think right when they just look at me, which is a weird feeling.”

Young (at the Bergen Record): “The phones in Manhattan were down, and we had quite a few reporters there, and we did not know where they were. So I started to write, and I think the lead said something like, something like ‘thousands of people missing and feared dead,’ or something like that, and Frank (Scandale) is saying ‘It's too long, it's too long…’ And I said, ‘Frank, this is part of the horror of the day. We don't know, we have staff members out there, Frank, and we don't know where they are.’ And so he said, ‘You're right’ and let it run.”

Franklin: “(I get asked) was I traumatized by witnessing it? And I tell people I’m not. I had the luxury of having to view it all through a camera and I’ve always said I feel like it’s been an honor and a privilege to be a photojournalist, to bear witness to moments big and small. Sept. 11 is by far the biggest moment I’ve ever photographed but I viewed it through my camera and in some ways, that shielded me.”

At the Pentagon, Burns couldn’t get close to the direct crash site since police blocked it off. For a majority of the day he was at a temporary press center before later going back to the Pentagon.

Burns: “I remember walking to the press room, which I was very familiar with. Of course, a lot of the lights were out, there was a very strong smell of smoke. There was some ash on the floor and there were armed soldiers in the hallway.”

Schuur (WTAJ reporter): “They came out to me live in the field and so I was reporting on the phone, I was describing the scene to the anchor, and the state police were moving us further and further and further away from the crash site.”

Adam Lisberg was a staff writer for the Bergen Record and was only a block away when the Twin Towers collapsed. He didn’t return to the newsroom until close to midnight, and somehow managed to turn around a story.

Lisberg: “This is like one of the few times in my career that I’m writing for history and I have no gas left in the tank. I mean I had just almost gotten killed. I walked through all this stuff and I came into the newsroom covered in dust and a trail of dust behind me. Like a ghost.”

THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED

There were countless stories to tell and not much time to think or worry about anything else.

Lennihan (AP Photographer): “We’re looking down into the site, photographing the rescue workers basically digging through the rubble, looking for any survivors. And then it was basically they were removing bodies. We did that for about a month, we were up in the buildings taking pictures of the recovery effort.”

Lisberg worked on a project about 30 Port of New York and New Jersey police officers who died in the attack, interviewing people those officers previously saved on the job before Sept. 11. He coped by working.

Lisberg: “In retrospect, I was trying to sort of understand my own feelings about everything I had seen and done, and living through this and this enormously stressful and absolutely shattering experience to try and look to other people who had somewhat similar experiences to see how they had coped and dealt.”

It’s the story he’s most proud of from his career. Lisberg was diagnosed with PTSD and still has a lingering cough from the dust inhalation.

Schuur: “I didn't actually leave the site that area for days, I slept in the satellite truck and a van and one of the news vans for the first couple of nights. I literally stayed there straight through for the first two or three days because I didn't want to leave the coverage.”

Sultan wrote several columns in the days that followed and received a lot of support from her co-workers.

Sultan: “And because I was, I might have been, the only Muslim they knew through the newspaper, they just wanted to reach out to me and say, ‘No, you, your family is welcome here. We want you to be safe here, and we feel your pain,’ and that was really important and really, really affirming. And I really needed that. I really needed that at that moment.”

REFLECTIONS ON SEPT. 11 TODAY

The meaning of Sept. 11 today to the journalists who were there defies broad categories, so the Penn State reporters simply asked the people they interviewed to share their feelings. Here are some of their thoughts.

Scandale: “The kind of seismic change that happened from 9/11 was probably akin to what happened when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because that’s the last foreign attack on American soil.”

Fournier: “Great generations, including the one that has been called the Greatest Generation, come out of times of tragedy. I don't think we realized at the time that it was an attack on a democracy, and it was a successful attack on democracy.”

Burns: “And I think we're still living with that reality and struggling with that, that problem of, how do you balance you know, the need for the best security you can achieve without, you know, diminishing and really infringing on civil rights and privacy?”

Little: “Just patriotically, the days and months after 9/11 was so cool to see so many people on the same page. I really, especially these days, really miss that feeling of unity.”

Mancini: “Now, facts are not facts. If 9/11 were covered today, people would be quick to assess blame, rush to judgement and away from facts.”

Lambert: “The lesson of Flight 93 is lost. Those (passengers) found out what was happening, they all got together, came up with a plan and voted on that plan. The worst moments of their lives, and they did the most democratic thing ever by voting on a plan. From all works of life, all colors, all economic and educational levels. And now, in this hyper-partisan, divided nation, that’s all gone.”

Lin: “You can’t afford that human currency as an anchor. You’re conditioned to think of tragedy as your workday. Journalism is a transactional career. It gives you so much, but it costs everything.”

Marin: “It always comes up on these anniversaries, when people call, like you. And do I think about it all the time? No, I don't, but it's never forgotten. It's always in, you know, somewhere in there. I think for a lot of people, for the longest time, I had a kind of PTSD fear. I hear a plane and I sort of jump before I could remind myself it wasn't going to hit a tower and it wasn't a tower that wasn't going to crash in front of me. So there is a kind of reaction, but that subsides after a while, and you go on and do what you do.”

Little: “Most journalists go through their career never having that big story. We were there as it happened, and it changed our lives, personally, and we can now go, you know, not that we look for those massive disasters or those moon landings, but it's, it's kind of a feather in your cap to say that I was a part of the one of the biggest stories of history. That is true every day we document history as journalists.”