Aaron Brown recounts anchoring 9/11 coverage, revealing how his authentic calm masked newsroom chaos and noting that national unity fractured after the 2003 Iraq War. He critiques modern polarization caused by consuming only confirming information, citing his refusal to cover Natalie Holloway's disappearance as a stand for integrity over ratings. While praising investigative journalism like the Weinstein exposé, Brown argues "fake news" often stems from disagreement rather than falsehoods. Ultimately, he urges viewers to curate media diets that challenge their beliefs, emphasizing that maintaining personal integrity remains vital in an ephemeral industry. [Automatically generated summary]
And now, more importantly, joining me today is the former anchor of ABC's World News Now and CNN's Newsnight, as well as a former professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
And when I got to know you, and I think when millions of other people got to know you,
was on September 11, 2001.
You were anchoring CNN's morning coverage that morning, which you probably thought was
just going to be like any other morning, and then very quickly it was not.
There's a rumor out there that you've already started correcting me before we started here, but that was actually your first day at CNN, but you're telling me that's not the case.
Yeah, so the main thing and the reason why I wanted to have you on, and I've actually been trying to track you down for quite some time, is that as someone that lived in New York City during 9-11, I mean, all of us, you know, we would go out for groceries, but basically, beyond that, we were glued to the television and not just people that lived in New York City, everybody that lived in America.
Thank you.
and really across the world.
But there was something about your demeanor.
There was a calmness and a decency to it that is so, I would say, the complete 180
of so much of what cable news has become now.
And I'm wondering, is that just something that is sort of personally part of who you are?
Is that sort of what you wanted your television persona to be?
unidentified
Or did it all just sort of unfurl as it were live?
I mean, the first plane hit, I wasn't on TV, so I don't know.
The second plane, when the second plane hit, I knew what was happening.
Yeah, first plane, I thought, I don't know, maybe somebody had a heart attack.
I mean, I'd come into LaGuardia hundreds of times, and you would come up the river, and you'd go past the Trade Center, and I thought, well, I don't know.
I mean, crazy stuff happens.
Somebody crashed into the building.
When the second plane hit, Then there was no question anymore.
I said, this is an attack on the country.
This is al Qaeda.
No one else has the wherewithal to pull off something like this.
There was no war on terror as such, but this is the war on terror beginning.
I know that, for example, I mean, I was on the roof of a building, of our building on 38th, And it wasn't a studio.
They were trying to throw up lights, and just crazy stuff was going on.
I'm afraid of heights, and guys are on scaffolding, so I'm afraid someone's going to fall off.
And it was nuts.
And the control room, I was pretty sure it was crazy, because I've been in control rooms.
But the control room's job, in case you don't know, you probably do know this, Yeah, right.
However crazy they are at any given moment, they do not transmit that insanity to you.
Because what you need to know is information, and that everything is under control.
It's not And there's some part of you that knows it's not, that things that were supposed to work aren't working, that someone who was supposed to be ready isn't, that somebody says something stupid you're going to have to correct.
All those things are going on and they're yelling at each other.
I remember I was doing the weekend show at ABC and I brought my daughter and she was probably seven or eight years old, maybe a little older.
And she was in the control room and after the show, She came down and she was a seven, eight-year-old who watched a TV show.
Not that she cared that her dad was doing the TV show.
It was just the magic of it.
unidentified
And she said, Dad, do you know they say the F word up there?
There's all sorts of crazy stuff going on, none of which has to do with the fact that 3,000 of my countrymen So, despite your calm demeanor and the professionalism, did you ever have moments where you thought you were going to just break up while on air?
I mean, I remember there were moments in days and weeks after where people would just be crying on the street.
You know, I was playing basketball near Gracie Mansion a couple weeks later.
A bunch of us finally went out to run around and then one guy just started crying on the basketball court.
Um, I, I, I, I wasn't necessarily a happy New Yorker before 9/11.
Um.
It's where I worked.
I was honored to have the jobs I had, for sure, but I'm kind of a small-town guy.
Post-9-11, I thought I started to understand New York better, that it didn't seem quite as balkanized to me, that I did see a sense of community that I hadn't seen I felt more a part of it.
I felt better about it.
I was proud of my fellow New Yorkers and I was proud of how the country took New Yorkers into their bosom and tried to help them heal.
Those of us who lived through it know, I mean, I drove up to go home when that finally became part of my life.
I would drive up 8th Avenue past the Port Authority and there's a fire station on 46th, I think.
And I would periodically stop in there because they had had a terribly They had taken a terrible loss.
And I would bring them stuff to sit around and shoot crap and this and that.
And I thought, no one will ever hear a fire engine the same again.
No one will ever see a fireman in New York the same again.
I mean, that's what I meant by all the little things that change, you know?
And if you live there and you know this, you live there.
that it is the little things that those people stole from us.
And they stole 3,000 lives and they did a lot of things, but they also stole the comfort of day-to-day living.
And sometimes I think that's the most unforgivable part.
I mean, it's almost twisted to think about it this way, but there was sort of a magical period in New York for a certain time after 9-11 because of the way we all kind of treated each other and cars were honking less and people were nicer.
I think there was a magical time in America that started on 9-11 and ended probably You know, March 19th, 2003, when we went to war in Iraq, I thought that period in between, we understood way better our common connections.
So speaking of the polarizing period, despite your calm demeanor, can you talk a little bit about when you're live on air and something's happening, the level of 9-11 or far less significant, what it's like when news is rushing in and you've got the IFB in and the control room guys are telling you things on the fly.
Just making sure that what you're saying is actually accurate as we live in this time of fake news where nobody trusts anything and anchors botch things constantly and news reports are wrong all the time or slightly misleading or whatever, or the headline is seemingly different than the article itself.
Just the type of pressure it is to just be getting information from the control room and actually making sure you're accurately representing it.
I want you to address the way I frame the question, though, but very quickly, for people that don't know, the Peter that you're referring to, obviously, is Peter Jennings, who is the legendary ABC News anchor for decades.
Yeah, so wait, let's back up to the way I framed that question.
There seems to be, at least, I'm on the online side of this, and there's definitely a feeling that mainstream news is not as reliable as it once was, or that it's become very sensationalistic, or that the cable news specifically, they're constantly competing for ratings, so it's more over the top, and more over the top, and more over the top.
No differently than you wanted to ask better questions than whoever it is you compete with.
So the fact that we compete, it's just the fact that we compete, it doesn't, I think, I don't want to go on endlessly on this, but I do want, there's a couple of things I'd like to say.
Sure.
One is if I look at my 35 years, I would identify two things that I think are significantly different beyond The one thing that is totally different, which is technology.
Technology is hugely different.
And I won't say it doesn't change things.
It changes everything.
But I don't think it changes substance in quite the way other people might.
So let me say the two things that I see.
One is, when I started doing this, we had a shared set of facts.
We all agreed That the earth was round.
There wasn't a flat earth channel.
Today, it seems to me that we don't have a shared set of facts.
You get to have your facts.
And I don't understand that.
But that just seems to be the way it shakes is people don't like these facts.
And honestly, you have to book someone way smarter than me.
I'm just a guy that wrote the news and reported stories.
I don't know the answer.
Maybe the first part of the answer is we have to understand better how we got into it.
At some point, if you don't understand why you got lost, you'll never get out of the forest.
My concern is And I don't know the answer to that.
I'm not pretending to know the answer to that.
I can pick spots where I thought, wow, that person is just upset with me because we reported something that is factually true.
They're not disputing the facts.
But they don't like the facts.
And And I would try and answer 50 emails a day.
And mostly you're just saying thanks, or I'm sorry we disagree.
And sometimes people would write about, they say, I can't believe that you reported this story.
I mean, yeah, it happened.
But you didn't have to report it.
It makes us look bad.
I don't know.
Don't you feel better having been in a society where people know everything as opposed to just little bits of things?
You're doing this amazing to me.
We talked a little before about the fact I've never done anything quite like this.
You're working a technology that didn't exist a generation ago.
We carry around, I have my little phone here, we carry around in our pockets the sum total of knowledge of the human race if we want it, you know, if we're connected to the internet.
We have all of this knowledge and information available to us, but we only want to hear the stuff that makes us feel good.
I mean, that actually is basically why I'm doing this show and why I try to get on people from the left and the right and pretty much everywhere else, because, yeah, we're catering it to ourselves.
And I, you know, I don't, I wish, Dave, honestly, I wish I had an answer.
I wish I could snap my fingers and make people read the editorial of the op-eds of this or that or another thing.
I wish I could say to them, instead of watching this channel today, watch that channel today.
And I spent some time working for the Mayo Foundation doing work about health care and health care reform.
I didn't know anything really about it, but I learned a lot.
And one of the things I learned is really a lot of good ideas that don't Progressives have a lot of good ideas, and conservatives have a lot of good ideas, and none of them seem to be perfect ideas, but if we're only listening to one set of ideas, we're missing another set of ideas that may help us get there.
I mean, if we have a shared goal, of making sure that every one of our fellow citizens has health, affordable health care, then why wouldn't we listen to every responsible idea to make that happen?
And traveling around the country for Mayo helped me understand that there were lots of ways to do it.
And some of them work, some of them don't, some of them have big-time flaws, frankly.
To me, you might not think they're flaws, but I think they're flaws.
You know, someone else might not think they're flaws, but I think they're flaws.
And this is the way it's supposed to be.
We're supposed to have a set of values that we think are important, and then we find ideas that help us achieve those things.
Like, here's a crazy one.
I think every American child should have a good school.
I'm embarrassed at our mediocrity.
How can the United States of America have mediocre public schools?
That's insane.
So that's a value of mine.
Or I'm truly embarrassed that a child born today in Havana, Cuba, is more likely to reach her first birthday That's crazy.
I'm an American.
That's not supposed to happen.
That's a value of mine.
So I would put money in there.
I'd fix that.
I don't know how I'd fix it.
I mean, I'm not that smart, but other people would look at other things.
Do you remember when cable news sort of, like a moment or a period of time when it started getting more sensationalistic?
Because I do remember when you were on CNN and Larry King was on CNN.
There was a sense, one of the things when I was doing a little research on you, the phrase cerebral came up a couple times.
And it's like when, I think there was a time when you watch cable news and you actually felt that you were gonna learn something, you were gonna get a little smarter.
And now, and we don't have to pick a network, I won't pick on anybody.
But generally, I find when I watch cable news, I don't feel smarter.
I got a partisan talking point.
Why do I watch?
Well, I don't watch that much, to be quite honest, but I watch, you know, little bites here and there that I usually get through Twitter.
But do you mean that if you had done that more that maybe CNN, you know, doesn't bring in Anderson Cooper and, you know, Newsnight with Aaron Brown is still on 15 years later?
Yes, and she wasn't a blonde, but she was missing.
And that had some, that had elements, you know, it had a congressman, it was, you know, And I remember thinking when I was doing the Santa deal, are you really prepared to do this night after night?
It's funny, I read a piece where you described it, you described anchors as leading men, as character actors, and it's so interesting to me because of that authenticity, which is just, it was obvious then and it was obvious now.
So it's almost like you did all this work and then almost stumbled into the anchor thing somehow.
We can debate whether I was good at it or not good at it.
I don't even know sometimes.
But I know I wasn't a leading man.
That I know.
But I was a real guy.
I did have a kind of boy-next-door quality.
And when I settled that that's who I was going to be, that Aaron Brown on television was going to be Aaron Brown off television, good things happened to me.
You know, one of the questions I get most when I tour and I go to colleges and things, I find this really at colleges more than anywhere else, students will ask me who I trust.
I mean, there are a lot of people who write for both the Post and the Times, who I think as reporters and as someone who has, in some cases, competed against them, and in some cases, I'm glad I didn't compete against them, I think are terrific.
In this moment that you and I are talking, okay, it's a great little example of something.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Toohey are touring the country promoting their book on the Harvey Weinstein story, which is really a story of investigative journalism and how they came to write the story.
We can fuss about Me Too and that there's much we haven't settled in Me Too, which I think is true, but we can't argue the journalism of that story.
And Pharoah also deserves big pats on the back.
So, I look at the news environment differently, I think, than perhaps you do.
I see a lot of people whose work I admire, and part of it is there's so much out there.
It's like you go to a restaurant, You actually only eat like two things, but there's like 20 things on the menu.
You go to Cheesecake Factory, there's like 1,000 things on the menu.
And the challenge for the consumer, it seems to me, getting back to an earlier part of our conversation, is not to stop going to the Cheesecake Factory, though I'm, believe me, not recommending that to anyone.
To find the people who make sense to you.
And if Chris Cuomo is not one of those people, then don't watch him.
I had a friend who used to watch television and he hated it.
So he could get angry at it.
I said, life's too short.
I said, why, you know, don't do that.
Life's too short.
Watch stuff that actually makes you feel smarter.
Or better informed, or challenges you, or something.
But in a general way, unless maybe it's because I'm older, I'm way less cynical about modern media than you.
I wonder how people We'd look at, for example, the Post and the Times in this period, where I've seen a ton of fabulous journalism, and almost none of it has been questioned.
A lot of it, people go, because it's a phrase of the moment, well, it's fake news, but what they actually mean is, I didn't like it.
Not that it's wrong.
I mean, does anybody, any serious person believe that the Times writes stuff, it just makes it up?
Did you happen to see about two months ago the cover of the Sunday Times?
It was the cover, the front page of the Sunday Times was a picture about how YouTubers are radicalizing people to the far right and the alt-right, and one of the pictures that they had in there was my picture.
I actually don't think that New York Times has a public editor anymore, but I did invite the author on the show many times and he declined, the author of the article.
Listen, you walked America through a time that was crazy, and I think a little bit of that decency that resonated with me is what I've tried to bring to what I do here.