Brit Hume and Charlie Gibson may have put on a brave face while broadcasting live on Sept. 11, but on Friday they discussed just how impotent they felt trying to report the news that day. As Fox News Channel’s Hume described it, he and his brethren were just “disembodied voices” trying to calm and comfort the public as pictures flashed on the screen.
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“I can’t resist telling this one story,” he laughed. “It gives you an idea of how pompous I can sometimes get.” Hume explained how after the Twin Towers were hit in New York City there were reports that the Capitol building was being evacuated because a plane was coming up the Potomac River. At the same time, Hume was broadcasting with a view of the Capitol building right out the window.
“My wife, Kim, who is the Fox bureau chief, comes in and says, ‘We’re moving you,’ ” Hume said. “I started this speech about — I’m embarrassed to tell this — about how this is the work I signed up to do.”
But that wasn’t the point. “She said, ‘Brit, if that plane hits the Capitol, we need to have the shot,’ ” Hume recalled.
In New York earlier that morning, ABC’s Charlie Gibson was broadcasting live when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. “I saw it come into frame. … This is forest fire season in California and I thought maybe it’s one of those planes with the fire-retardant bucket hung underneath it, but then I thought, ‘Where do you get that in New York?’ ” He also mistook the second plane as simply a traffic copter. “Those two thoughts went through my head,” he said. “And then it hit.”
Hume and Gibson were joined by former CBS anchor Dan Rather and Frank Cesno, who coordinated CNN’s coverage on Sept. 11, to film an episode of “The Kalb Report” Friday night entitled “Anchoring 9/11: The Day and the Decade” at the National Press Club.
