There are moments in history when a medium becomes more than entertainment. It becomes a lifeline.
September 11, 2001 was one of those moments.
As Americans watched smoke pour from the World Trade Center, learned that another plane had struck the Pentagon, and struggled to understand reports coming from New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, radio stations across the country abruptly abandoned normal programming.
Music stopped. Commercial schedules became irrelevant. Morning shows turned into newsrooms. Disc jockeys who had expected to spend the day introducing songs suddenly found themselves trying to explain an event that almost no one could comprehend.
Veteran radio historian and videographer Art Vuolo, widely known throughout the broadcasting industry as “Radio’s Best Friend,” preserved an extraordinary record of that day.
The accompanying video is a collage of how New York radio responded as the September 11 terrorist attacks unfolded.
Art Vuolo’s remarkable video collage captures the voices, confusion, fear and professionalism of radio broadcasters as the events of September 11, 2001 unfolded in real time.
What makes the video so powerful is that these are not voices looking back with the benefit of history. They are voices from the moment itself.
Broadcasters are hearing reports at virtually the same time their listeners are hearing them. Information changes from minute to minute. Early reports are incomplete. Rumors circulate. Details are corrected. And gradually, the horrifying scope of what has happened becomes clear.
You can hear the transformation.
What may have begun as another ordinary morning in New York City suddenly becomes something entirely different. The familiar personalities behind the microphones become witnesses, reporters and, in many cases, companions to frightened listeners.
That was particularly important in 2001.
Smartphones did not exist as we know them today. Social media had not become the instantaneous news network it is today. Streaming video was primitive by modern standards. Millions of Americans were driving to work, sitting in offices or away from television sets.
For them, radio was immediate.
A person could turn on the radio in a car, a store, an office or a kitchen and hear what was happening.
And on September 11, virtually every format became a news format.
Rock stations, Top 40 stations, talk stations, country stations and oldies stations all faced essentially the same question: What do we tell our listeners now?
There was no script.
That is part of what makes Vuolo's compilation so compelling 25 years later.
It captures radio before history had been organized into documentaries, timelines and commemorative programs. The broadcasters in these recordings did not know what the next hour would bring. Neither did their listeners.
There are moments of confusion and disbelief. There are long pauses. There are voices struggling to maintain composure.
There is also extraordinary professionalism.
Broadcasters repeat emergency information. They bring listeners breaking developments. They connect with eyewitnesses and news organizations. Some simply acknowledge that there are moments when there are no adequate words.
And perhaps that is where radio's greatest strength emerged.
Radio has always been unusually personal.
Television speaks to an audience. Radio often seems to speak to one person.
A familiar voice comes through the dashboard or bedside radio and creates a connection that is difficult to duplicate. On September 11, that relationship mattered.
For millions of people, broadcasters they had listened to every morning were suddenly sitting beside them emotionally as the country absorbed one terrible development after another.
Art Vuolo understood that these moments deserved to be preserved.
For decades, Vuolo has documented American radio personalities, stations, conventions and broadcasting history with a video camera seemingly never far from his reach. His enormous archive has captured a medium that is otherwise surprisingly easy to lose. Radio happens in the moment; once the microphone is turned off, much of it disappears.
This video prevents one particularly important chapter from disappearing.
It also reminds us that the story of September 11 is not only contained in photographs of the Twin Towers or television footage that has been replayed thousands of times.
It exists in sound.
The breaking voices.
The stunned pauses.
The hurried news bulletins.
The broadcasters trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.
And the millions of Americans listening.
Twenty-five years later, those voices still carry us back to that morning.
For anyone who remembers September 11, the video is powerful.
For those too young to remember it, it provides something equally important: an opportunity to hear history as it was actually happening.
On that morning, radio did what it has done during wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, assassinations and national emergencies throughout its history.
It stayed on the air.
And it talked America through the unthinkable.
(Jim Hampton is publisher of CityWatch and co-publisher of the USARadioMuseum.com.)
(Art Vuolo is a radio historian and videographer known as Radio's Best Friend.)
