Rosemary Pennington | Sept. 5, 2011
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| Photo by James Brosher |
| Doctoral student Rosemary Pennington now works as program coordinator for Voices and Visions, producing podcasts for the series that seeks to promote better understanding of Muslim culture. |
Doctoral student Rosemary Pennington was a student journalist at Ohio University when the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, sent the country into shock and panic. Here, she recalls her emotions that day as she worked as a TV and radio journalist, performing tasks that helped her cope with the day's news.
The morning of Sept. 11 was my first day off in months. After graduating with my bachelor’s degree from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, I’d spent the entire summer working at WOUB, the combination public radio/television station in Athens, Ohio. Most days I’d be in by 5:30 in the morning, working on radio stuff until about 10. From 10 until about 7 in the evening, I was on television duty, either producing or anchoring or, most often, reporting. We were incredibly short staffed and those of us who were in Athens did everything. I even anchored sports once or twice, that’s how hard up we were.
Although the 11th was my day off, I had gotten up early. One of my best friends at the station was working the morning shift and we were planning on grabbing coffee at when he was done. I was headed to London, England, to an internship with CNN in October and was trying to cram in as much time with friends and family as I could before I left.
I got off the elevator and Chris, my friend, waved me into the studio. For a few minutes we laughed about something that had happened the night before and about how scared the new morning news assistant seemed to be. He began flipping through TV channels trying to get an idea of what the weather would be like when he flew past an image of a smoky tower.
“That looks like New York,” I remember him saying as he flipped back to the image. “Oh my god, it is New York.”
“This is a movie, right?” I asked.
Chris turned and looked at me and said, “No, it’s CNN.”
I don’t remember leaving the studio but suddenly I was standing in the newsroom, TV remote in my hand, putting on CNN. The assistant news director came out to say something to me and stopped and stared.
We all stopped and stared. And only a few moments later watched as the second plane flew into the World Trade Center.
Fred, the assistant news director, walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder as I stared at the TV.
“I know you aren’t supposed to work today, but we could really use you,” he said.
I nodded and told him I’d be back in 30 minutes; I had to go change.
That day. That day was the only day I ever wanted to not be a newsperson. I wanted to sit at home, in my pajamas with a blanket, and watch other news people. Try to take comfort in their reports. I didn’t want to be the one reporting.
And yet I was.
As I walked out of the station on my way to throw on a blazer and dress pants, I passed at least 50 students huddled around the televisions in our lobby. All the TVs were broadcasting images from New York. When I came back not much later, there were also images from the Pentagon and the crowd of students had grown to almost 100.
Although Athens was hours and hours away from New York and Washington, D.C., I was sent out to do a story on safety at the local airport. It was in the car with the photog that I heard about the fourth airplane, the one that crashed in Shanksville, Pa.
I don’t remember whether my videographer that day was Rebby or Max, but he turned to me and said, “This can’t be real. This can’t be happening.”
Throughout that day, as I conducted interviews and shot stand-ups and talked on the phone to my news director and wrote my script and prepared for my live shot from the key wall, I felt hollow. Nothing seemed real. I wrote my piece, I pulled sound bites of officials at the airport talking about how all flights had been grounded and what they were doing in Athens to tighten safety protocols, and I transcribed the piece for radio for later. I did all the things I did every other day.
It all felt so meaningless in the face of what had happened that morning. Here I was in Athens, Ohio, so very far from where the attacks happened, writing a story about how local officials were reacting. And I wasn’t sure why.
We’re taught in journalism school to make national and international news local for our audience. Find the local angle. Make it matter to the people in your community. But, on Sept. 11, that localization seemed both necessary and superfluous.
Necessary because people were scared, they were worried. No one was sure if the attacks on Sept. 11 were it or if there were more to come. Students were worried about their families, parents about their children who had just come back to campus.
Superfluous because of what had happened. Who would care about what was going on in Athens County when rescue workers were digging people out of the rubble in New York?
This miasma settled over me. It felt like what I was doing didn’t matter. No one can prepare you for this. No teacher, no internship, no textbook can prepare you to report during a situation like this.
Looking back, I think I went on a kind of journalistic autopilot. I knew the shots I needed, the people I should talk to, my back and forth with the anchors was scripted to tie together the local and national aspects of the story. I had been taught the fundamentals of good reporting and they helped me get through what was a rough day.
There were many moments that day when I wanted to pull a Holly Hunter from Broadcast News and lock myself in a room somewhere for a good long cry. But the cry would have to wait.
NPR carried coverage through the night of the attacks. After I was done with the TV side of things, I was asked to run the FM board during the overnight coverage. There was no one else to take the shift and, even though I was exhausted, I said yes. I wasn’t ready to go home and sleep. I wasn’t ready to face tomorrow.
So, I sat in the studio listening as NPR’s hosts, newscasters and reporters went back over the events of the day, as they interviewed experts and worked to give their listeners some sort of context for what had happened. I sat there, wide awake, trying to make sense of the tragedy; finding comfort, at last, in the reporting of someone else.
Sept. 11 became Sept. 12, and as I walked out of the station into the light of the rising sun, it felt like a morning like any other. Like nothing had changed when, in fact, everything had.
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