From TV News Tickers to Homeland: The Ways TV Was Affected By 9/11

There is a long list of ways America was transformed by the terrorist attacks that destroyed the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. But the question of how TV itself was changed – particularly in ways still relevant today – is more complicated.CNBC anchor Shepard Smith, who covered the attack and its aftermath when he worked at Fox News Channel, points to a small but impactful TV innovation: the constant presence of an , scrolling through headlines, on cable news channels. It may not sound like much today, given how so many of us now juggle multiple screens at once. But in 2001, the idea of crowding TV screens with changing bursts of information was relatively new – required by the deluge of data pouring into newsrooms regarding the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. "We had an information overload back then, the likes of which we never really experienced before," says Smith, now anchor of on CNBC. In the flood of 24/7 continuous news coverage that followed the attacks, he remembers Fox News Channel founder Roger Ailes insisting back then that the channel had to get more data in front of viewers."He thought that CNBC"Arguably, [9/11 news coverage] was one of the last examples of a common news culture, where the country was knit together by these horrendous attacks... united by a common enemy," says Andrew Heyward, who was president of CBS News during 9/11 — noting that broadcast networks shifted into cable news mode, offering continuous coverage, with no commercials, from the attack on a Tuesday through to Saturday.