NEW YORK - Television viewers who want to immerse themselves in memories of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as the 10th anniversary approaches will have a staggering number of choices, and on the day itself, broadcast and cable news networks will all have their top talent on hand for special coverage.
There will be dozens of specials covering the events from every conceivable angle. Many are from networks that either didn't exist back in 2001, didn't have the capacity to cover the tragedy live or weren't aggressively making as much original programming.
Chances are that the 10th will end up being the biggest anniversary in terms of media attention: 9/11 is still relatively fresh in the minds of those who experienced it, yet time has also offered more perspective.
"It was a transformative event," said Mark Burstein, executive producer of special events coverage for ABC News. "This was an event that everyone who was over the age of 10 remembers where they were on this day. It changed millions of lives. I'm not surprised that 10 years later the world will stop and look back and remember."
Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos will anchor ABC's special the morning of Sept. 11, with coverage of the memorial mixed in with other reports. Brian Williams will anchor NBC's coverage, simulcast on MSNBC, which will also feature Tom Brokaw, who anchored for NBC a decade ago. Scott Pelley is on hand for CBS.
Shepard Smith of Fox News Channel is the only anchor who led his network's coverage 10 years ago and will be back in the same role. Anderson Cooper and Candy Crowley will be at ground zero for CNN, in a telecast that will be shown all over the world.
The historical nature of the event merits the amount of coverage being offered, said David Westin, former ABC News president. Viewers will have to decide for themselves how much is too much for them personally, he said.
"People can become too immersed in it and I've been particularly concerned about children," he said. "All of us need to be concerned about children and how they can process it."
Nickelodeon's Linda Ellerbee will anchor a special on Sept. 1 addressed to the network's young audience. It will largely be an explainer: Most of Nick's audience either wasn't alive on Sept. 11, 2001, or was too young to have any direct memories.
In the days after the attacks, Westin, on the advice of a prominent child psychologist, ordered his news division to strictly curtail reruns of the more disturbing images: the second plane crashing in to the World Trade Center; the collapse of the towers. The concern was that children couldn't process that they were reruns, and might think the tragedy was happening again elsewhere. Other news divisions largely followed suit.
Because of that judicious usage, people have not become desensitized to the pictures from that awful day, said Jay Wallace, Fox News Channel vice-president of news.
On the anniversary each year, Fox replays a segment of its coverage from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and will again this year. Wallace said it was important to remind people what it was like.
"We put that away," he said. "We don't use it as b-roll (background pictures) any other time of year. But we try to put that in context and remind people of what went on that day, the raw emotions that people were feeling."
At CBS, the Sunday morning coverage will focus on the public memorials, said CBS News President David Rhodes.
"It's an emotional day," he said. "You don't know how people are going to react. That's one reason we are going to be careful not to over-program it."
Meanwhile, 3,000 hours of global TV broadcasts during seven days of coverage in 2001 are available at The 9/11 Television News Archive.
