Who Was the First Network TV Anchor to Report 9/11 Live?

It was the first televised signal that life as the world knew it had shifted irrevocably.

At 8.49am on September 11, 2001 — just three minutes after the first aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center — CNN cut live to the horrifying sight of the North Tower burning, as morning anchor Carol Lin began delivering news that would stun the globe.

Now, 25 years later, Lin is looking back on the chaos, disbelief and lasting impact of that morning, recalling how the September 11 attacks unfolded in real time and how the tragedy reshaped the course of her own life.

When the first plane struck, Lin was not seated at the main anchor desk. She was off to the side, chatting with author Amy Tan ahead of a planned interview about a new animated series debuting on PBS.

‘It was towards the close of our morning show as we were approaching the 9 o’clock hour, and we were in commercial break, and I was warming up the guests,’ Lin recalls.

Then, without warning, the atmosphere inside the CNN newsroom changed. ‘All of a sudden one of the CNN executives ran behind me towards the control room. And I said, “What’s going on?” because nobody runs in the CNN newsroom. But this was something different. And she said, “There’s a report of a plane into the World Trade Center…”

Like many hearing the first reports, Lin initially imagined a much smaller incident. ‘So, my first thought was, small plane, that’s where my brain went, because to conceive anything else just seemed impossible. Then, the control room, the executive producer, was talking to me in my earpiece, and she said, “Get back to the anchor set. We’re going to go into rolling coverage.”‘

Lin hurried back to the desk with no prepared script and no clear sense yet of the scale of what was happening. As she took her seat, she glanced down at the preview monitor built into the anchor desk.

‘It’s a full screen of what we’re going to show the audience first after a commercial break, and it was a full screen shot of the North Tower with a giant hole in it, on fire,’ she recalls.

As CNN went live, Lin told the nation: ‘This just in. You are looking at, obviously, a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.’

The clip would go on to be used in many Hollywood movies and documentaries about the terrorist atrocity.

Lin recalls how, like everyone else, the newsroom was in shock, and initially had no information on whether it was an accident or deliberate.

She knew there would be family members looking at the screen, wondering whether their loved ones were there.

‘What you saw, I saw, what you knew, I knew,’ she says. ‘We knew nothing. I’m turning to my computer screen and, while I was talking, I’m also trying to look up information like, what are the train lines that feed the World Trade Center, how many people work in the North Tower, what are the surrounding buildings, so that I could at least provide some context while we waited for eyewitness testimony. In my mind, what I could do is at least give viewers the context of the area.’

CNN was still based in Atlanta but had executives in the Turner Building in New York, who could see the World Trade Center,

One of those executives, Sean Murtaugh, the vice president of finance, called into the control room and confirmed to Lin on air that it was not a small plane but a large passenger jet.

Amid the shock, Lin recalls focusing on questions and balancing describing the devastating scene and sticking to the known facts.

‘This is 25 years ago, there were standards and practices that were very common in broadcast journalism, we did not report what we could not verify,’ she says.

‘But the difference being that, what you were looking at, was absolutely catastrophic.’

In the CNN newsroom, like everywhere else, everyone was stunned.

‘I can tell you that I have been in the newsroom when wars have broken out, and you could hear a pin drop, it’s silent,’ she says. ‘But, that day, people were standing, they were gesturing, they were shouting, because especially after the second plane hit, that’s when collectively we knew that it was terrorism.’

Then, wild rumors started to come in and decisions had to be taken what to share with viewers, and what not to.

The rumors included that the Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, was sending 10,000 body bags, that there was a car bomb outside the State Department, that the White House was already being evacuated.

‘There’s more of a philosophy today of let’s say it and then we can always correct it later,’ Lin says. ‘But that was not the standard at the time. We still chose to withhold information until we could get the facts.

‘So, in that sense, even though the newsroom was chaotic, I felt very cautious about what I was saying on the air. I felt a lot of pressure to be very circumspect and to wait until we could get people on the phone who were eyewitnesses to what was happening.’

Lin continued to anchor for several weeks before heading for Quetta, Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. The Taliban would not give visas to female journalists.

There, she saw how porous the border was and how the assurances of Pakistan that it would be a good partner to the US in the war on terror were a ‘fallacy.’

‘There was no border,’ she says. ‘And if Osama bin Laden was in fact using the southern border to travel, he would be able to make it through easily.’

As for many people, 9/11 proved a major turning point in Lin’s own life, sending her on a deeply personal journey which she recounts in her book When News Breaks: A Memoir of Love and War.

At the time, she was married to the journalist William Robinson Jr, who she had first met on the campaign trail in Iowa, and the attack spurred their decision to have a child.

‘When the attacks happened, and I hear this from many people who consider how 9/11 affected them personally, we were surrounded by so much death and destruction and despair,’ she says.

‘The scenes that were broadcast out of New York, of mothers holding pictures of their children at the chain link fences that surrounded Ground Zero, really made us think about how you want to live your life.

‘You know, can you create something? Can you create life when you’re surrounded by so much grief? And we had come to that decision that now is the time.

‘When we got pregnant, and it took us about a year, we were so over the moon and grateful.’

But, six months into the pregnancy, her husband was diagnosed with what would be a fatal cancer.

‘That’s when the universe laughs,’ she says. ‘How many stories do we cover of people who are at the height of their career, or their life, or everything that they’ve ever dreamed and lose everything in, you name it, an earthquake, a tsunami, a war, a cancer, and that’s where, personally, the real story begins.

‘I had spent so much energy on building a career and asking myself what’s next, and then having a child post-9/11, when the war on terror continued with these colored alerts, when every day your personal safety is measured by some government graph of how safe are we on any given day. And then you realize, wow, it didn’t take a terrorist to tell me that life, there’s no promise in tomorrow, and I think that that’s been the legacy of 9/11.’

Today, Lin collects and shares on Substack stories from others about how 9/11 changed them personally.

‘To hear from these people, it’s incredible,’ she says. ‘People whose supervisors refuse to let them leave their job so they quit, or a person who has all the money in the world, is a big money financial analyst, but has an epiphany that there has to be something more.

‘These are kind of these untold stories but they’re just small moments of reflection, and bits of courage and heroism and tribute.’

The 25th anniversary, she says, is the time to ‘really reflect on how much has changed, if anything’s changed, how it changed me,’ Lin says.