Covering Terror and Tragedy
By Jill Geisler for October 2001 Communicator
On September 11, 2001, when life in the United States was at its worst, broadcast journalism was at its best. The story was chaotic; the storytellers were calm. There was a need to know and to see; television made every citizen an eyewitness. There was confusion; news leaders pressed for clarity.
At the network level and in local newsrooms across the country, broadcasters reached deep into their journalistic souls. Damn the cosmetics and the commercials, this was a time for non-stop news.
I monitored much of the early coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The next day, I debriefed local news anchors around the country about their station's performance.
Here's why I believe television performed so well September 11.
Powerful Pictures, Well Presented
You could see the conscious decision of directors; stay with the pictures, stay with the pictures. This was not a day to see the faces of anchors. Their voices sufficed. Viewers needed to see the towers, the Pentagon. Viewers were joining the story in progress. The sheer magnitude of the damage needed to be on the screen for all to see, whenever they tuned in. The story was developing. We had a need to watch over wounded.
At first, all pictures were wide shots, from a distance: Buildings, not people. As such, there was an almost video-game aura to what people were seeing live and on tape. A plane smashes a building, metal to metal. Fireball. Explosion. Collapse. Stay with the pictures, stay with the pictures.
In a gallery of chilling and brutal images, CBS found one that was both poetic and tragic: a wide aerial shot of New York Harbor, Lady Liberty in the foreground, under a clear sky. Behind her, the shape of Manhattan, shrouded edge to edge in smoke.
When cameras came to life at ground level, the pictures became human. People dazed and dusted over.
Another unforgettable image, this one on NBC: firemen, just escaped from a tower collapse. They stop to regroup. One reaches out to embrace the other. No reporter's comments needed during that touching moment of live television.
The networks used technology and creativity to present multiple images and information as many stories unfolded. They made it look easy. It wasn't.
Several news organizations elected not to air video of people jumping to their deaths from the burning towers. The pictures were true and compelling, but terribly troubling. These news organizations found other ways to tell the truths.
Knowledgeable Anchors, Processing and Presenting
On the national as well as the local level, anchors performed their duties with professionalism.
It was a day that demonstrated why those who occupy the anchor desk must be the most articulate, best-informed journalists in the newsroom. Why their skills must extend far beyond reading scripts. On September 11, the anchors' ability to give perspective, process new information, make ethical judgments, and set a tone--all on the fly--was critical to the telling of this historic event.
At CBS, Dan Rather said to viewers, "There is much that is not known. The word for the day is steady, steady." Peter Jennings was calm. Matt Lauer and Katie Couric were informed and concerned. Tom Brokaw understood that viewers needed perspective, not panic.
In Baton Rouge, LA, WBRZ-TV anchor George Ryan approached the anchor desk with the same mindset: "As I sat down Tuesday morning, I wrote three things on a reporter pad I had with me. Steady. Measured. Careful. These three words were reminders to myself. People want facts. They want reassurance. They don't want speculation. They don't want jumps to erroneous conclusions. I did my best to serve them."
In Detroit, WDIV-TV anchor Devin Scillian felt a combination of dread and confidence as he rushed to work. Scillian covered the 1993 WTC bombing. He was an anchor in Oklahoma when the Murrah building was bombed. "A few lessons from Oklahoma City likely guided me," he says. Those lessons:
In moments like these, the station and its viewers become a community. Even with so many more viewers than usual, it is far more intimate than the day-to-day routine.
The flow of information will be fast and unwieldy. Try to continually place it in perspective and provide context.
Walk the fine line between logical analysis and critical thinking and jumping to conclusions via shaky conjecture.
When your producers aren't guiding you, try to guide them. Be the controlled source of solidity in a very unstable situation."
In Montgomery, AL, WSFA-TV's anchor Kim Hendrix prepared this way: "…as I drove into the station, I said a prayer, asking God to give me the strength to do a good job, with compassion, credibility and sincerity…and prayed for the families who lost loved ones in this tragedy."
Story First, Competition Second
Decision-makers at every national television news organization, both network and cable, agreed to share all video of the day's events. A Los Angeles Times report of the unprecedented agreement credits longtime 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt with the idea. Clearly, it enabled all news providers to show important images, and to devote their energies to covering their stories rather than brokering deals or guarding copyrights.
With video parity on all news outlets, journalists were able to focus on fact-finding, investigating and storytelling during a time of national emergency.
At the local level across the country, newsrooms had to reassess their "breaking news" competitive strategies, tempting as it was to have their own anchors and reporters at the forefront. Scott Libin, news director of KSTP-TV in Minneapolis, says his early discussions of his newsroom's mission enabled the station "to keep our competitive and marketing urges under control, and to keep our customers--our viewers--first among our priorities at all times. That meant resisting the sort of standoff mentality that would have had us stay local until our competitors went back to their network. Our cut-ins were brief and carefully timed. Our 5 and 6 p.m. newscasts were shorter than the competition's. We had more local angles but returned sooner to network coverage than our competitors."
Tony Shute, an executive producer at WLS-TV in Chicago, explains: "We called in all the troops and immediately hit the streets as people evacuated the Sears Tower and other downtown office buildings. The Loop became gridlocked, but by 2 p.m. the heart of Chicago was like a ghost town. We forced ourselves to step back and look at the big picture. Most of all the information we had was trivial compared to what was going on in New York, Washington and outside Pittsburgh. So, we decided to stay with network coverage, and we did five-minute cut-ins at 4, 4:40, 5 and 6 with network coverage in a box next to our product."
Local Coverage, Well Told
Local stations relied heavily on "crawls" to keep viewers alerted to hometown information. Most understood their mission: to be hyper-local and succinct. Sam Dick, lead anchor for WKYT-TV in Lexington, KY, says, "Boy, am I proud of our news crew. Among the local stories we covered: a huge outpouring at the blood center, local airport closed, local Muslim centers vandalized, local Pearl Harbor survivors talk, people buy flags, gas price gouging, long lines at pumps, state capital security increased, local army depot security increased…church services, candlelight vigils…I've heard very few complaints about us cutting into national coverage."
Sometimes the stories were hard news, indeed. Says Ginny Ryan, anchor of WOKR-TV in Rochester, NY, "I made contact with the first family (in our area) that lost a loved one. It was a tough call, but the family thanked me this morning for handling it the way we did." At WGHP-TV in High Point, NC, veteran anchor Neill McNeill told me the day after the story broke, "We have a local flight attendant who is one of those missing in the Pennsylvania crash. We've not knocked on her family's door, although we have sent message through close friends that if and when the husband is ready to talk, we're here."
All News, No Business
At a time of budget strain, layoffs and cutbacks, networks took the high road and dropped commercials, forgoing millions of dollars in revenue. Local stations largely followed suit, even as they poured untold dollars into overtime, satellite bills, and the care and feeding of crews.
At a time when many news people worry that journalism is cheapened by bottom-line pressures, this investment in quality gives them hope. George Ryan, the steady-measured-careful anchor from Baton Rouge, says, "The ownership's commitment to go commercial-free sent a message to the newsroom that maybe, just maybe, there are times when money isn't all there is in this business."
--Jill Geisler heads the leadership and management group at The Poynter Institute.
How Radio Covered the Story
- ABC News Radio: We received a news tip at our New York headquarters that a fire was burning at the World Trade Center at about 8:50 a.m. We aired our first special report at 8:52 a.m. and began continuous anchored coverage at 9:00 a.m. We offered various programming options to our 3,800 news affiliates. In addition to the six scheduled newscasts every hour, we provided our stations with 91 hours of anchored coverage through the first weekend. In addition, we provided status reports to our affiliates every 10 minutes during the first two days after the tragedy. Many stations that regularly carry music and entertainment programming suddenly switched to news and information. We also decided to make our news programming available as a public service to stations that were not affiliated with the network. We estimate that some 3,000 stations were carrying some part of the anchored coverage during the hours immediately after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. -- Chris Berry, vice president
- CNNRadio: The report of the fire in the first World Trade Center building made it into the 9 a.m. newscast, the second attack into the 9:30 a.m. The addition of special reports at :15 and :45 after the hour began at 10:15 a.m. and have not stopped since; they are expected to continue indefinitely. That's 96 newscasts a day, 24/7. As for CNNRadio correspondents, New York reporter Gary Baumgarten could not make it into our Manhattan offices, but fortunately, lives in an apartment in New Jersey that had a clear view of the World Trade Center. His home is equipped with ISDN capability, so Gary began filing for the network and affiliates immediately. In fact, he was live with one of our affiliates when one of the collapses occurred and he reported it as the tower was crumbling before his eyes. I was in Nashville preparing for the RTNDA convention that we canceled, and at one point, had called Atlanta to make sure one of our Washington correspondents, Dick Uliano, could go to the White House where we expected a meeting of the National Security Council to take place. Atlanta informed me that would be fine except for a "fire" at the Pentagon and that Dick had diverted his attention to that incident, though at the time we had few details. --Robert Garcia, vice president
- WBAL-AM, Baltimore: I left Nashville at 2 p.m. Tuesday, and after a 708-mile drive, got home at about 2:45 a.m. I was on the phone with my station manager and news staff almost non-stop at first word of the attack, and then almost hourly, as cell phone access would allow. My colleagues (David Louie of KGO-TV and Bob Salsberg of Associated Press) and I monitored developments all the way up the road on ABC, CBS and CNN. We were able to pick up WCBS most of the way through Virginia. It was very compelling radio, and I couldn't help but feel a bond with my parents. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, they relied on the radio for information. And because of the circumstances, I too was forced to rely solely on radio. Recognizing this story would likely be a marathon and not a sprint, we immediately canceled all vacations at WBAL and put everyone on 12-hour shifts--12 on and 12 off. We put the office staff on extra shifts to assist with cancellations, closings and postponements. We canceled all syndicated programming and brought in additional talent to program local talk throughout the evening all week long. Also, we were in the middle of producing a documentary on the career of Cal Ripken, Jr. We immediately suspended that, of course. We worked on coordinating our coverage with our sister TV station, WBAL-TV, and our network, ABC. We also immediately worked to form the "Baltimore Cares" Red Cross Relief Fund with WBAL-TV, WBAL-AM and WIYY-FM, along with area banks. I was proud of not just my own staff, but all of the people working to keep the radio audience informed that day. --Mark Miller, news director
- KYW-AM, Philadelphia: CBS Radio Network was first to get word down its "voice cue" circuit that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We got a 60- or 30-second warning and led into the live coverage with our bulletin sounder. Shortly after 9 a.m., KYW reporter Tony Hanson, who was driving in from his home in New Jersey, was diverted to New York. While he was en route, we got word about the closure of bridges and tunnels to Manhattan. We redirected Tony to Liberty State Park across from lower Manhattan, where we knew he would get a view of the destruction. The park turned out to be a landing spot for evacuees being ferried from the disaster scene, so Tony got early survivor reports on-air in Philadelphia by shortly before 11 a.m. He was the first Philadelphia broadcast reporter to go live from near the attack. Meanwhile, reporters dispatched in Philadelphia covered the closure of the airport, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell pavilion, as well as the evacuation of the two tallest city skyscrapers--all within 60 minutes of the first report of the disaster. We stayed in continuous coverage and commercial-free for about 48 hours.--Steve Butler, programming director
- WTMJ-AM, Milwaukee: Imagine: The biggest story of your lifetime and you're not around. You're shocked and saddened, worried and upset, like everybody else in America. But you're also frustrated as hell because you're 562 miles away from your newsroom and there's no way to get back. When the terrorists attacked, I was at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville for an RTNDA board meeting. RTNDA2001 was to have started the next day. I used my room phone to call our station's listen line. I put it on speaker and left it there. With one ear on our coverage, I put my other ear to a cell phone and called the newsroom. I wanted to see if anyone had any questions or needed my help. I did not want to interfere unless I had to. And I certainly didn't have to. Never before had I found it more necessary--and more rewarding--to have a staff full of excellent people, led in my absence by 19-year veteran ABC News Radio, correspondent Jon Belmont, who came to work for us in January. Talk about network-quality local coverage! I gave Jon advice on staffing issues. Then I turned my attention toward getting home. No planes, trains or automobiles. No buses, either. However, my good friend and fellow board member, Bob Priddy, had driven to Nashville. I hitched a ride with him as far as the St. Louis area. Friends picked me up there and brought me back to Milwaukee. After 12 hours on the road, driving through the night, I finally got to my newsroom at 4:00 a.m. Wednesday, September 12. --Dan Shelley, news director and assistant program director
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