Fox’s Jon Scott Anchored for 8 Hours on 9/11 — One Moment Still Gets Him
After roughly eight hours on live television, Fox News anchor Jon Scott finally left the studio and began walking toward Grand Central Terminal at around 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.
Sixth Avenue was completely deserted. He stepped into the middle of the normally bustling Manhattan thoroughfare on a sunny late afternoon and turned towards downtown. He could still see the smoke pouring from the site of the World Trade Center three miles away.
Scott continued on to Grand Central and boarded a train out of Manhattan. Sitting across the aisle from him was a man who asked to borrow another passenger’s cellphone. The man took the phone, dialed up his wife, and told her the two words every New Yorker wanted to hear from their loved ones that day.
“I’m alive.”
The Fox News anchor remembers that phone call on the train with great clarity.
“Normally you call home and say, ‘What’s for dinner?’ or ‘I’ll pick up the dry cleaning,’” Scott — now the anchor of the FOX Report — told Mediaite in an interview ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. “And this guy calls home and tells his wife that he’s still alive.”
He began to choke up.
“See, now I’m getting a little emotional,” he admitted.
For eight hours on air that Tuesday morning a quarter-century ago, Scott fought those emotions. He was determined not to break down.
Scott — a Fox News original who joined the network two months before its launch in 1996 — certainly wasn’t expecting to struggle when he reported to work that day. He was anticipating an ordinary show, preparing for a lineup that included a book interview and a musician.
As he opened the studio door, he heard an urgent message from his producer that a plane had struck 1 World Trade Center.
“It didn’t compute because we had just never seen [anything like it] before,” Scott explained. “It’s hard for the human brain, or at least my human brain, to wrap your mind around things that you’ve never experienced before.”
Early reports suggested a small plane had crashed into the tower, and an aviation expert on the phone with the anchor walked through reasons it could have been an accident live on air.
As hosts across broadcast platforms scrambled to provide important information to their viewers and listeners, Scott had some unique insight to offer. He was working toward his pilot’s license at the time. And with his knowledge of aviation, he found the theory about a possible small plane crash hard to square with the enormous hole and smoke visible on screen.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a second jet swoop into the frame.
He paused mid-sentence on television as he watched another fireball erupt from the towers. Because of the WABC-TV helicopter camera’s angle, the two towers were aligned in the footage.
“For a second, I thought that our director had somehow cued up a replay,” he said.
Then the helicopter moved.
“I saw that both towers had gaping holes and pillars of smoke coming out of them,” Scott recalled. “I knew then that this was no accident.”
He quickly mentioned Osama bin Laden on air as a possible suspect — a conclusion that would ultimately prove correct, but one he immediately worried had come too soon.
“As soon as I said it, I thought, ‘It’s really too early to be naming suspects,’” he disclosed.
But since the attacks, Scott said he’s become friendly with an Air Force flight nurse who told him he had been watching Fox’s coverage that morning alongside military superiors. They had also suspected bin Laden, and when the anchor said his name on air, those in the room looked at one another and asked, “How did he know?”
That morning, though, his decision to name a suspect was actually in an attempt to maintain composure.
After the second plane struck the South Tower, a floor director in the studio began “bawling out loud.” Seeing her cry nearly broke his own resolve.
“I decided me getting emotional wasn’t going to help get the story out, wasn’t going to help communicate to anybody who might be watching,” he said, deciding instead to focus strictly on the facts.
Scott believes experience helped him navigate the chaos. Before joining Fox, he had been a correspondent for NBC’s Dateline and reported on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, touring the complex and learning about its security.
Yet 9/11 changed the way he experienced the breaking news that followed. Two months later, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in Queens, Scott was at home when one of his bosses at Fox called.
“Looks like they’ve hit us again,” the anchor recalled being told.
“I just got this rock in the pit of my stomach because I thought we’d been attacked again,” he said.
That crash was not an act of terrorism, but as Scott explained, “9/11 was still very raw.”
And it can still feel that way to Jon Scott, even 25 years later. He’s one of the very few anchors who is still with the network where he broadcast on 9/11. One of the few who is still with the same outlet where he brought us the images that we haven’t forgotten.
But the memories that have endured in Scott’s own mind were the ones that came after he stepped outside the studio to take his first look at a city that had forever changed: An empty Sixth Avenue. A train out of Grand Central. A stranger making the most basic phone call imaginable.
“That,” Scott said, “was the kind of day it was.”
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The post Fox’s Jon Scott Anchored for 8 Hours on 9/11 — One Moment Still Gets Him first appeared on Mediaite.
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