Looking Back at How TV Anchors Covered 9/11 Live: ‘The Horror Was Relentless’

The early morning hours of September 11, 2001, were business as usual for morning shows on broadcast TV. The anchors of those programs had gotten through the day’s headlines and moved on to human interest stories, cooking segments, and other lighthearted fare. Then came horrific reports from Lower Manhattan and the first of many shocking images that soon made it was clear what seemed like a terrible accident was actually a coordinated terror attack. Here’s how TV anchors covered the news — and what they said later about their experiences that day.

Katie Couric & Matt Lauer

Katie Couric and Matt Lauer were anchoring NBC’s Today as usual on September 11, 2001, when the first plane hit New York City’s World Trade Center. Lauer, after learning of the news, cut short an interview with a Howard Hughes biographer and sent the broadcast into an ad break. By the time they got back, Couric was ready to interview a caller who had seen the first strike.

“We were talking to people on the phone for eyewitness accounts, including Elliott Walker, one of my favorite producers, when we watched, in horror, that second plane hit the second tower,” Couric wrote 10 years later, as she recapped her emotions that day for ABC News. “My hand was shaking uncontrollably. … The horror was relentless.”

Tom Brokaw

Tom Brokaw joined Couric and Lauer on the Today set that morning and kept up the coverage throughout that day, into a special edition of NBC Nightly News. On air, Brokaw said neither the Manhattan skyline nor American life would ever be the same, and he called 9/11 the biggest attack on U.S. soil since the War of 1812, per the Associated Press. “This has been a declaration of war on the United States,” he added.

Brokaw told the AP in 2021 he was trying to give viewers insight beyond what they saw on screen. “Throughout my career, I was constantly trying to think, ‘What’s the big picture here?’” he said. “I think that was especially true that day.”

Diane Sawyer & Charles Gibson

The ABC News team’s coverage of 9/11 earned a Peabody Award for “exhibit[ing] the finest aspects of broadcast journalism.” That started when Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson “displayed an extraordinarily professional demeanor to the viewers of Good Morning America, even as the enormity of events unfolded before our eyes,” the Peabody Award voters said.

Gibson was one of the anchors who reflected on that day in an episode of The Kalb Report on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. “You have to level with your audience that you don’t know anything more than they do,” he explained at the time. “You are in this together. You had to think about the tone. You had to be reassuring. I said to Diane, ‘If one of us starts to cry, the other has to pick up.’ You can’t break down.”

Peter Jennings

ABC’s Peter Jennings was the first of the primetime anchors to reach his desk that day and “guided viewers throughout the day, bridging reports from the field, from research units, and from government resource agencies,” according to the Peabody Award commendation for ABC News.

The ABC World News Tonight anchor ended up manning the network coverage from 9 a.m. that morning to 2 a.m. the next day. “It’s not the rest issue here, quite frankly,” he told ABC News colleague Elizabeth Vargas as he signed off in the early hours of September 12, according to The New York Observer. “It’s important to get away and appraise what is happening in the country from a broader perspective than just sitting here.”

Bryant Gumbel

Bryant Gumbel was hosting the CBS morning show The Early Show, a precursor of CBS Mornings, alongside Jane Clayson on September 11, 2001, and cut into the scheduled segments with a CBS News special report.

Early in his reporting that morning, Gumbel expressed a hope that the early hour would limit the human toll. “Obviously, the timing of this is important. It comes before 9:00,” he told viewers. “Perhaps, perhaps — and we say that in hopeful fashion — perhaps not everybody was at work. Because if that building was, in fact, crowded with workers, we’re looking at probably some casualties…”

Dan Rather

Dan Rather, then the anchor of CBS Evening News, joined the CBS coverage around 10 a.m. that morning and ended up spending 16 hours on air on September 11 and each of the three days afterward. Throughout his coverage, Rather was quick to point out what was fact and what was speculation, per the Associated Press.

“My first thoughts were, ‘This is all so unbelievable. We have to double- and triple-check it. Can it be true? Are we absolutely sure a second plane hit?’” he told Texas Monthly later that year. “We have a credo at CBS, whether you believe it or not, that says: ‘I’d rather be last than wrong.’ Then again, when you get into this kind of coverage, you have a deadline every nanosecond. There are going to be mistakes. The most responsible thing you can do is keep them to a minimum.”

Regis Philbin & Kelly Ripa

Live With Regis and Kelly’s studio audience that morning wasn’t aware of what happened, just minutes before the syndicated show went live that morning. Those audience members cheered when Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa came out on stage, then gasped when the ashen-faced hosts shared the news and showed them a live feed one of the towers on fire.

“The situation had gotten much worse by the time those helicopters had gotten downtown, and they were showing these images of people trapped and waving frantically out of buildings, and then, one by one, you could see clearly people jumping,” Ripa later said in a Pop Goes the Culture TV interview. “And you think, ‘This is the worst. This is the worst day ever that I’ve ever witnessed in my life. This is the most horrific.’ And that’s when all of a sudden we saw another explosion.”

Honorable mention: Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart, who has since been a fierce advocate for 9/11 first responders’ healthcare, brought Comedy Central’s The Daily Show back online nine days after the attack, and his nine-minute monologue in that return broadcast ended with a personal anecdote that turned profound.

“The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center, and now it’s gone,” Stewart said between tears. “And they attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.”

Jon Stewart’s post 9/11 monologue
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