The 36 reporters who brought us the Twin Towers explosive demolition on 9/11 include, by network, ABCs George Stephanopoulos and Cynthia McFadden; CBSs Harold Dow, Tom Flynn, Mika Brzezinski, and Carol Marin (appearing on WCBS); NBCs Pat Dawson and Anne Thompson; CNNs Aaron Brown, Rose Arce, Patty Sabga, and Alan Dodds Frank; Fox News David Lee Miller and Rick Leventhal; MSNBCs Ashleigh Banfield and Rick Sanchez; CNBCs John Bussey, Ron Insana, and Bob Pisani; WABCs N.J. Burkett, Michelle Charlesworth, Nina Pineda, Cheryl Fiandaca, and Joe Torres; WCBSs John Slattery, Marcella Palmer, Vince DeMentri, and Marcia Kramer; WNBCs Walter Perez; New York 1s Kristen Shaughnessy, Andrew Siff, John Schiumo, and Andrew Kirtzman; USA Todays Jack Kelley; and two unidentified reporters (1 and 2) who attended a press conference with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki. Video clips of each reporters statements on 9/11 can be viewed below. ***
The widely held belief that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of the airplane impacts and the resulting fires is, unbeknownst to most people, a revisionist theory. Among individuals who witnessed the event firsthand, the more prevalent hypothesis was that the Twin Towers had been brought down by massive explosions.
This observation was first made 14 years ago in the article, 118 Witnesses: The Firefighters Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers. A review of interviews conducted with 503 members of the New York Fire Department (FDNY) in the weeks and months after 9/11 revealed that 118 of them described witnessing what they interpreted that day to be explosions. Only 10 FDNY members were found describing the destruction in ways supportive of the fire-induced collapse hypothesis.
The interviews of fire marshal John Coyle and firefighter Christopher Fenyo explicitly support this finding. Coyle remarked in his interview, I thought it was exploding, actually. Thats what I thought for hours afterwards. . . . Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up. Similarly, Fenyo recalled in his interview, At that point, a debate began to rage [about whether to continue rescue operations in the other, still-standing tower] because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges.
News reporters constitute another group of individuals who witnessed the event firsthand and whose accounts were publicly documented. While many people have seen a smattering of news clips on the internet in which reporters describe explosions, there has never been, as far as we know, a systematic attempt to collect these news clips and analyze them.
We decided to take on this task for two reasons. First, we wanted to know just how prevalent the explosion hypothesis was among reporters. Second, anticipating that this would be the more prevalent hypothesis, we wanted to determine exactly how it was supplanted by the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse.
In this article, we present our findings related to the first question. In a subsequent article, we will examine how the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse so quickly supplanted the originally dominant explosion hypothesis.
Television Coverage Compiled
To determine how prevalent the explosion hypothesis was among reporters, we set out to review as much continuous news coverage as we could find from the major television networks, cable news channels, and local network affiliates covering the events in New York.
Through internet searches, we found continuous news coverage from 11 different television networks, cable news channels, and local network affiliates. These included the networks ABC, CBS, and NBC; cable news channels CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNBC; and local network affiliates WABC, WCBS, and WNBC. We also incorporated coverage from New York One (NY1), a New York-based cable news channel owned by Time Warner (now Spectrum), which we grouped with the local network affiliates into a local channel category.
Source-based Reporting
Source-based reporting is when a reporter reports on the possible use of explosives based on information from government officials who said they suspected that explosives were used to bring down the Twin Towers.
Here is an example of source-based reporting:
Pat Dawson, NBC, 11:55 AM: Just moments ago I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department . . . [He] told me that shortly after 9 oclock he had roughly 10 alarms, roughly 200 men in the building trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in there, and that basically he received word of a possibility of a secondary device that is, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said that there was another explosion which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. So obviously, according to his theory, he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. . . .
But the bottom line is that, according to the Chief of Safety of the New York City Fire Department, he says that he probably lost a great many men in those secondary explosions. And he said that there were literally hundreds if not thousands of people in those two towers when the explosions took place.
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