CHANNEL SURFING
Local TV scrambles schedule
Within minutes of the attack on the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m., Channels 3, 6, 10, 17, 29, 57 and CN8 had live coverage.
By LAURA NACHMAN A day of terror was a day that will never be forgotten by employees of the
local television stations.
It was a hectic day for all the news operations.
Steve Schwaid, news director of NBC, 10 said, "we've never seen anything
like this in our lives. There were people crying in the newsroom."
In a rushed conversation, Rich Scott, news director of WB17, said the
newsroom was in disbelief.
At Fox-Philadelphia, a staffer blurted out that they were in "crisis
mode."
A newsroom employee at NBC 10 said "everyone was running around like
their heads were cut off." And a KYW-3 employee called it "a very
intense atmosphere" in the newsroom.
Within minutes of the attack on the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m., Channels
3, 6, 10, 17, 29, 57 and CN8 had live coverage that continued through the day
and night.
"Action News," which is an ABC station, had an expanded edition of
the noon news, and aired extra newscasts from 2-3 p.m., 4-6:30 p.m., 8-8:30
p.m., and 10-11:30 p.m. around the ABC news coverage.
NBC 10 was mostly network with Tom Brokaw, but provided local cut-ins
throughout the day.
Channel 3, a CBS affiliate, had cut-ins at the top of every hour then used
sister station Channel 57 to provide local updates at the bottom of the hour.
Fox-Philadelphia got its national news from Fox News Channel, along with
local cut-ins.
WB17 took feeds from CNN or WPIX, the WB affiliate in New York City, and
provided local cut-ins.
Plucky CN8 went live most of the day with their own coverage, and their
call-in talk show "It's Your Call with Lynn Doyle," had a special
two-hour edition at 8 p.m. Every station used the ubiquitous crawl to provide
local information when the networks took over.
Since Philadelphia happened to be in the vicinity of the attacks, the local
stations were quickly able to dispatch crews to North Jersey, Washington, D.C,
and Pittsburgh.
Pennsylvania Cable Network pre-empted its Frank Rizzo special and ran a feed
from CN8. Comcast SportsNet benched its programming and ran the CNN feed.
At 10 p.m., WB17 expanded its newscast to an hour, Fox-Philadelphia, which is
normally an hour, went 15 minutes overtime, and CN8 increased its news an extra
hour.
After the 11 p.m. newscasts, "Nightline," was pre-empted with ABC
news coverage, "The Tonight Show" was canceled and replaced with news
on NBC, and "The Late Show with David Letterman," which was scheduled
to be a rerun, was replaced with CBS news coverage.
Network titles of the tragedy included "Terrorism Hits America" on
Fox, "America Under Attack" on CNN, and "Attack on America"
on CBS and NBC. ABC chose not to give the events a name.
It was continuous coverage on the cable news stations CNN, Headline News,
MSNBC, Fox News Channel, C-SPAN, and CNBC.
QVC, HGTV and The Food Network put up disclaimers temporarily suspending
their broadcasts, the Home Shopping Network ran news, the Fox Family Channel ran
regular programming, but had a continuous crawl directing viewers to Fox News
Channel, the Fox News Channel was simulcast on FX.
Pax ran the NBC feed, ESPN had no baseball to air since the games were
canceled, but ran a crawl giving sports-related news about the tragedy, VH1,
MTV, UPN, TNN and BET used CBS news, and TLC ran BBC America. News of the day
was provided in Spanish on Telemundo.
In this marathon of very real programming, Nick at Nite chose to continue
with its "Un-real-a-thon,"with "Three's Company." Non-news
programming could also be found on A&E, Comedy Central, Lifetime, Bravo and
E!
Thursday, September 13, 2001
Courier Times
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