For many people, it was the first sign that the world had changed forever.
When CNN broadcast the shocking image of the North Tower engulfed in flames at 8:49 a.m. on September 11, 2001—just three minutes after the first plane struck—morning anchor Carol Lin delivered the devastating news.
Twenty-five years later, Lin remembers the shock of that morning, the events that followed and the profound effect they had on her own life.
When the first plane hit, Lin was away from the main desk making small talk with author Amy Tan, whom she was preparing to interview about a new animated series launching on PBS.
‘It was near the end of our morning show, as we were approaching 9 o’clock, and we were in a commercial break. I was warming up the guests,’ Lin recalls.
‘Suddenly, one of the CNN executives ran past me toward the control room. I asked, “What’s going on?” because nobody runs in the CNN newsroom. But this was different. She said, “There’s a report of a plane into the World Trade Center…”‘
‘My first thought was that it was a small plane. That’s where my mind went, because imagining anything else seemed impossible. Then the executive producer spoke to me through my earpiece and said, “Get back to the anchor desk. We’re going into rolling coverage.”‘
Lin took her seat without a script and glanced down at the preview monitor built into the desk.
‘It showed the full-screen image we were going to put on after the commercial break: the North Tower, with a huge hole in it and flames pouring out,’ she recalls.
As CNN went live, Lin told viewers: ‘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 footage would later appear in numerous Hollywood films and documentaries about the terrorist attacks.
Like everyone else in the newsroom, Lin was stunned. At first, no one knew whether the crash had been an accident or a deliberate act.
She was also aware that family members might be watching the screen, desperately wondering whether their loved ones were inside the building.
‘What you saw, I saw. What you knew, I knew,’ she says. ‘We knew nothing. While I was speaking, I was also looking at my computer and trying to find basic information: which train lines served the World Trade Center, how many people worked in the North Tower and what buildings surrounded it. I wanted to offer some context while we waited for eyewitness accounts.’
Carol Lin was anchoring CNN’s coverage on the morning of September 11, 2001
CNN was still headquartered in Atlanta, but executives based at the Turner Building in New York had a direct view of the World Trade Center.
One of them, Sean Murtaugh, the vice president of finance, called the control room and confirmed on air to Lin that the aircraft was not a small plane but a large passenger jet.
Amid the confusion, Lin concentrated on asking questions while describing the horrifying scene without moving beyond what had been confirmed.
‘Twenty-five years ago, broadcast journalism followed standards and practices that were very clear: we did not report anything we could not verify,’ she says.
‘The difference was that what viewers were seeing was undeniably catastrophic.’
The CNN newsroom, like newsrooms around the world, was struggling to process what was happening.
‘I have been in newsrooms when wars have broken out, and you could hear a pin drop. Everyone was silent,’ Lin says. ‘But that day, people were standing, gesturing and shouting. Especially after the second plane hit, that was when we collectively understood that it was terrorism.’
CNN viewers saw this image as news of the attack on the World Trade Center broke at 8:49 a.m. on September 11, 2001
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As the morning unfolded, a stream of unverified rumors began arriving, forcing editors to decide what could responsibly be shared with viewers.
Among the claims were reports that New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was ordering 10,000 body bags, that a car bomb had been found outside the State Department and that the White House was already being evacuated.
‘Today, there is more of a philosophy that you should say something and correct it later if necessary,’ Lin says. ‘That was not the standard then. We chose to hold back information until we had the facts.’
‘So, although the newsroom was chaotic, I was extremely careful about what I said on air. I felt enormous pressure to be precise and to wait until we could speak with eyewitnesses who knew what was happening.’
Lin continued anchoring the coverage for several weeks before traveling to Quetta, Pakistan, near the Afghan border. The Taliban did not issue visas to female journalists.
During the assignment, she saw how porous the border was and concluded that Pakistan’s assurances it would be a reliable US partner in the war on terror were a ‘fallacy.’
‘There was no real border,’ she says. ‘If Osama bin Laden was using the southern route to travel, he could have crossed it easily.’
Mourners gather at the north reflecting pool as flowers are placed beside the names of those killed, at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum on Friday, September 11, 2020, in New York
For Lin, as for countless others, 9/11 became a defining turning point. It set her on a deeply personal path described in her memoir, When News Breaks: A Memoir of Love and War.
At the time, she was married to journalist William Robinson Jr., whom she had first met while covering the campaign trail in Iowa. The attacks prompted the couple to decide they wanted to have a child.
‘When the attacks happened—and I have heard this from many people reflecting on how 9/11 affected them—we were surrounded by death, destruction and despair,’ she says.
‘The images from New York of mothers holding photographs of their children at the chain-link fences around Ground Zero made us think about how we wanted to live.’
‘Could you create something? Could you bring life into the world while surrounded by so much grief? We decided that the time was right.’
‘When we became pregnant, after about a year of trying, we were overwhelmed with happiness and gratitude.’
Six months into the pregnancy, however, her husband was diagnosed with a cancer that would prove fatal.
Carol Lin’s memoir explores her personal journey in the aftermath of 9/11
‘That’s when the universe laughs,’ she says. ‘How many stories do we cover about people at the peak of their careers or lives, having achieved everything they dreamed of, only to lose it all to an earthquake, a tsunami, a war or cancer? That is where my personal story truly begins.’
‘I had devoted so much energy to building a career and asking what came next. Then I had a child after 9/11, while the war on terror continued and colored alerts made personal safety seem like something measured on a government chart each day. Eventually, I realized that it did not take a terrorist to teach me that life offers no promise of tomorrow. I think that is part of 9/11’s legacy.’
Today, Lin gathers and publishes other people’s stories on Substack, exploring how the attacks changed their lives.
‘Hearing from these people is extraordinary,’ she says. ‘There are people whose supervisors refused to let them leave, so they quit. There is someone with all the money in the world, a high-powered financial analyst, who suddenly realized there had to be something more.’
‘These are untold stories, made up of small moments of reflection, courage, heroism and tribute.’
The 25th anniversary, she says, offers an opportunity to ‘really reflect on how much has changed, whether anything has changed and how it changed me.’
