It was the moment television first told the world that nothing would ever feel the same again.
At 8.49am on September 11, 2001, just three minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, CNN cut to the startling live image of smoke and flames pouring from the skyscraper. On air, morning anchor Carol Lin became one of the first voices to deliver the devastating breaking news.
Now, 25 years later, Lin is looking back on the disbelief, confusion and fear of that morning — and on how the September 11 attacks reshaped not only global history, but the course of her own life.
When the first aircraft struck, Lin was not even seated at the main anchor desk. She was chatting off-camera with author Amy Tan, preparing for what was supposed to be a light morning segment about a new animated series debuting on PBS.
“It was near the end of our morning program, just before the 9 o’clock hour,” Lin remembered. “We were in a commercial break, and I was getting the guests ready.”
“Then suddenly, one of the CNN executives rushed past me toward the control room,” she said. “I asked, ‘What’s happening?’ because people don’t run through the CNN newsroom. This felt different. She told me there was a report that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.”
“My mind immediately went to a small plane,” Lin said. “That was the only thing that seemed possible. Anything beyond that was unimaginable. Then my executive producer came into my earpiece and told me, ‘Get back to the anchor desk. We’re going into continuous coverage.’”
Lin returned to the set with no prepared script, sat down behind the desk and glanced at the small preview monitor built into it, trying to make sense of the unfolding scene in New York.
‘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.
Lin Recalls Shock Inside the Newsroom
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.
Cautious Reporting Amid Newsroom Chaos
‘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.
Turning Point in Lin’s Life
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.’
Lin Reflects on the Legacy of 9/11
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.
