Memories of September 11 are still overwhelming for many New Yorkers, but NY1 anchor Pat Kiernan finds value in looking back on that indelible day 25 years later.
“It’s worthwhile for me just to refresh my memory on what played out at what moment, and also kind of to put yourself back into that moment,” he told Deadline in an interview at New York‘s Paley Center for Media. The center hosted a panel with Kiernan and six other current and former journalists recalling the day’s coverage on the anniversary.
Unedited YouTube footage of Kiernan’s morning broadcast was posted earlier this week to X by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter Daniel McFadin and has racked up 10.4 million views. “You get 15 minutes of news from the Before Times,” McFadin wrote in his post. “Then the world changes.”
As that blue-sky morning took a radical turn, reporters scrambled for actionable intel in a dial-up internet age. “We got very lucky that we had two quality eyewitnesses call in in the first couple of minutes,” Kiernan recalled. “That allowed us to stay on the air, speak to them, get their descriptions at the same time as we were mobilizing the team.”
Watch on Deadline
Word of an incident at one of the World Trade Center towers reached the newsroom during a commercial break. “The next commercial break on NY1 was three weeks later,” he remembered.
While Kiernan and others initially referred to the situation as a fire, with wide shots of the towers showing puffs of smoke coming out of the north tower, it soon became clear that a plane had hit the building. (One caller noted a plane’s tire had fallen to the sidewalk below.)
“My mind immediately goes to how different it would be today between social media, FaceTime, pictures from anywhere with a layer of AI and not being sure if the pictures are legitimate,” Kiernan said.
Paley Center
His boyish looks notwithstanding, Kiernan is now one of the deans of New York television, approaching his 30th anniversary on NY1. The network launched in 1992 as a news outlet only available to subscribers of Time Warner Cable, now Charter Spectrum. Then, as now, the cable system reached only the five boroughs of New York City, giving NY1 a loyal, concentrated audience of more than 1 million daily viewers in the capital of media and finance.
“As the story went on, it developed very quickly and there was a national news lane and there was a NY1 lane,” Kiernan said. “We were fully focused on what was happening in the city.” Part of that responsibility was to attend to the thousands of New Yorkers whose loved ones were unaccounted for, with their hand-made fliers becoming one of the indelible images of the tragedy.
“The thing that we could do that was helpful to the community was to be in lower Manhattan, to be down with the families in Greenwich Village that stood at that wall with a picture of their missing loved one,” the anchor said. “We did that for hours, literally almost handing the microphone to them and saying, ‘I know your situation is desperate. Here’s here’s your chance to speak to the city.’ Which was compelling for our viewers and therapeutic for the people who were in that desperate moment.”
Other participants in the Paley panel, which was moderated by former CNN anchor Paula Zahn, recalled the significant limitations of technology 25 years ago. “Half the staff had a Blackberry, the other half had a Nextel,” said Nina Pineda of WABC-TV. “We couldn’t even take pictures.” She recalled detouring en route to the burning towers to relay a bystander’s camcorder video to the station newsroom, with the resulting delay becoming moot when her station’s antenna was lost in the Trade Center’s collapse.
Jonathan Capehart, an MS Now host and PBS political analyst who was working for Mike Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign on 9/11, joined other panelists in recalling how difficult it was to confirm information. “We were hearing the rumors,” he said. “But you couldn’t corroborate.” John Miller, then a leading national reporter on ABC News, included a mention on air of a car bomb being found at the State Department – a detail that later proved inaccurate, Capehart noted.
Kiernan in the Deadline interview was asked about how a 9/11-scale event would be covered in today’s media landscape, which is marked by smaller media institutions along with Substackers, influencers and an atomized chorus of voices.
“There are two offsetting trends,” he said. “The favorable trend is that it is possible to get information and move video from anywhere in the city and anywhere on the planet. So that allows us to be in more places, more quickly, to verify stories, to get information to our reporters, to get information from our reporters. That’s offset by all of the impact of declining audiences and changing audience habits.”
Traditional media’s infrastructure, he added, “is not as robust as it was.” At NY1, “We’ve been lucky that we have retained a lot of that audience, and we’ve still got a sizable team. But you look around the city, we had two 24-hour all-news radio stations at the time that this happened. We had an active newsroom at Channel 9 that doesn’t exist anymore. … The Times had a metro section and more reporters who were on the ground familiar with these stories. So, that’s the team that knows how to step up in a moment like this. And collectively in the city, there are fewer people who are in a position to do that.”
Barbie Zelizer, a professor at U. Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, emphasized on the panel the potency and durability of the coverage on the day of 9/11. Still photographs, she emphasized, such as those taken by fellow panelist Matthew McDermott, were “instrumental” because they were “able to present something real.” They “bore witness” to the tragedy but also “invited people in” to understand it in a way that video or text never could.
Zelizer also said things are not quite as different as they may seem 25 years after the attacks.
“There are different platforms, there are different technologies, there’s a different speed at which we get information,” she said. “But we’ve always had misinformation and disinformation alongside real information.”
