25 years have passed since September 11, 2001, but for a handful of Fox News anchors, the memories remain as sharp as the morning itself.
Jon Scott, Brian Kilmeade, and Eric Shawn all sat in front of Fox News cameras that day, and all three still work for the network today. Their recollections offer a rare, unbroken thread between a newsroom’s most chaotic morning and the anchors who never stopped showing up for work.
Each man built a career at Fox News long before the towers fell, and each has stayed through a quarter-century of format changes, ratings battles, and industry upheaval. That kind of tenure is increasingly rare in cable news, where talent churns through networks every few years. Yet Scott, Kilmeade, and Shawn remain, carrying institutional memory that few of their colleagues can match.
Their accounts, gathered in new interviews marking the anniversary, trace a single morning from routine to catastrophe. They also reveal how that day reshaped Fox News’ identity and, in Shawn’s case, left a lasting physical toll that only became public last year.
Before the Attacks
The morning began without warning for any of the three. Scott had an ordinary shift ahead of him, set to anchor coverage right after Fox and Friends at 9 a.m. He was reaching for the studio door when everything changed.
“My senior producer got in my ear and yelled, ‘Scott, get to the studio now,'” said Scott. Producers pulled him in early, and he ended up anchoring continuous coverage for the next eight hours.
Shawn’s morning started on foot, walking up Fifth Avenue under what he now calls the “9/11 sky.” He noticed a low, loud jet overhead and assumed it was heading somewhere else entirely.
“I thought the plane was going to hit the office building above Penn Station,” Shawn said, before watching it bank toward the World Trade Center and vanish behind the skyline. Minutes later, a crew member on the street confirmed what Shawn already suspected — that the plane he’d just watched had struck the towers.
Kilmeade, meanwhile, was on set for a lighthearted morning show that hadn’t yet found its identity. Fox & Friends was airing when word came that a plane had hit a building downtown.
“We thought it was an accident; it looked small,” Kilmeade shared.
Within minutes, that assumption would collapse alongside everything else the anchors believed about the morning ahead.
As the Attacks Unfold
Confusion defined the earliest reports across the network. Scott had an aviation-accident expert on the phone, walking through reasons a small plane might have strayed off course, when a second aircraft entered the frame.
“I saw United 175 swoop into the very lower right-hand corner of the screen,” Scott said, describing the moment he realized the crash wasn’t accidental. He mentioned Osama bin Laden’s name on air almost immediately afterward.
Shawn reached that same conclusion even faster, drawing on years spent covering radical Islamic terrorism in New York. He’d covered the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, so the pattern felt familiar.
“I basically knew immediately. I thought of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden,” Shawn said, noting that he ran to the assignment desk to correct an early report calling it a small plane. He was quickly rushed upstairs and put on air alongside Scott.
Kilmeade’s role shifted from anchor to field reporter within hours. He talked his way into a camera crew and headed downtown, watching the towers burn from a moving vehicle before both buildings collapsed entirely.
“I remember going down 7th Avenue, and my cameraman, Scott Wilder, said, ‘I gotta get a shot of this,'” Kilmeade recalled. By the time they arrived at Ground Zero, there was nothing left standing to reach.
Throughout the broadcast, small errors slipped through as reporters scrambled to keep pace with events on the ground. Early Pentagon reports described an explosion rather than a hijacked airliner, and confusion briefly spread about how many planes remained unaccounted for. Still, Scott believes the network largely avoided major missteps that day.
“We tried to go with what we knew and not venture too far out onto a limb,” Scott said.
The Aftermath
Kilmeade spent the day gathering tape without a clear assignment, driven by a need to help however he could.
“I felt like I was the conduit, because I kept going back to work, and I also felt like I wanted to tell an extremely important story,” Kilmeade said.
One moment stood apart from the rest.
“Some guy comes running, screaming, ‘Does anybody want to talk to President Clinton?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ … Within 10 minutes, Clinton’s limo pulled up. He got out of the car … He must have watched the show, because he knew exactly who I was,” Kilmeade shared. “I had what I thought was about a 15-minute one-on-one with him. He answered everything honestly and substantively, offering to help.”
Shawn headed downtown that night and stayed for extended shifts in the weeks that followed.
“It was — you cannot, on television, give justice — the television, the pictures, don’t give justice to the overwhelming reality of this horrific site — the pile, the girders, the smoke — it was just overwhelming,” Shawn said. “What really stays with me is the smell. There was this acrid, bitter, metallic smell … and the dust, the overwhelming dust, a thick haze. Those are the two things that will always stay with me.”
Scott, anchoring from the studio, described the emotional discipline the broadcast demanded of him.
“We had a floor director who was looking at the images on our monitors, and she just broke down and started bawling. I can normally keep myself pretty well composed in most situations, but when I see other people crying, it’s hard for me not to get emotional,” Scott said. “I decided that if I got emotional, it wasn’t going to help get the story out, so I tried to buck it up, and I think I pretty well succeeded.”
Shawn’s Cancer Diagnosis
Last year, Shawn revealed he had developed cancer, a diagnosis he believes stems directly from his prolonged exposure to toxic dust at Ground Zero. He’s since become an outspoken advocate for the World Trade Center Health Program.
“I had just received, a couple of weeks earlier, my certification from the World Trade Center Health Program … I mention it only to shed light on the fact that I don’t think most people realize the widespread extent of the illnesses related to 9/11, from the dust and the chemicals,” Shawn said. “There are 350-something toxic chemicals in the dust, and the widespread impact has been enormous — 50,000 people have been diagnosed. I think it’s up to 63,000 now. There are 190,000 people in the World Trade Center Health Program.”
Shawn described the scope of illness as a legacy still unfolding decades later.
“9/11 was one day, but for many people it’s every day, because there are 70 types of cancers that have been diagnosed related to 9/11,” Shawn said. “I know reporters who have died — my colleague from Channel 5 died of 9/11-related prostate cancer. Steve Edwards of The National Post died of kidney cancer related to 9/11. I wanted to raise awareness of the illness and the deaths, which now have surpassed the number of people who were killed that day, and I don’t think many people realize that.”
He framed the ongoing toll in stark terms tied directly back to the original attack.
“In my view — and this may sound dramatic — people are being killed by Al Qaeda today. These are all the people who are in their homes sick with horrible cancers and illnesses, and those who have died,” Shawn said. “That’s what’s in my heart and in my thoughts.”
What Stands Out Now
Kilmeade returns often to a single image from Ground Zero — firefighters regrouping after losing their unit, then heading back in anyway.
“They’re going back and forth: ‘Who’s left? He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.’ ‘So what do we have?’ ‘We got each other.’ ‘I have a car.’ So the next thing, emerging from the parking garage, was this small pickup truck, and four other guys got on the back — firefighters, full gear — and they went back in,” Kilmeade said. “I thought, this is as close to a war zone as I could be without being in a war zone.”
Shawn holds onto a more recent memory tied to how the anniversary itself has evolved.
“I’m grateful that this year, for the first time, they’ve added a new moment of silence at 12 noon — the new moment of silence at the site is to pay tribute to those who have grown ill and died from 9/11-related illnesses,” Shawn said.
Scott still visits the memorial, and the weight of it hasn’t faded with time. “I still walk by the 9/11 memorial and read some of those names, and I can’t believe all those people were just snuffed out in an instant,” Scott said. “It’s hard to believe it was 25 years ago. I still remember it like it was yesterday. That really is all I can say. It was just an awful day, and it was a tragedy for the nation.”
Fox News’ Ascension After the Coverage Concluded
Scott believes the sustained coverage that followed 9/11 — including the network’s early reporting from Afghanistan — helped establish Fox News as a serious competitor.
“We were kind of a fledgling news operation in those days — we’d only launched in ’97, so we were four years in,” Scott said. “I remember we hired Steve Harrigan while he was in a bunker in Afghanistan. I think those events helped propel us to number one, and I’d like to think my coverage was part of that.”
Shawn frames the shift in broader, more ideological terms.
“I see 9/11 as an attack on our soul, the American soul. The radical Islamic terrorists … want to destroy our values, the Western values, what we represent: freedom, liberty, the freedom to choose, to live the way you want,” Shawn said. “I think the Fox News Channel understood that immediately, and I think that was the sense of the average American.”
Kilmeade credits the network’s underdog culture over any single editorial decision.
“They’d always tell us other networks pay more, they have more people, but you can do more,” Kilmeade said. “This company, this news station, was built on the thought that it’s not about you, it’s what you can do to make the team better, the show better … I think that played into the story.”
Looking back a quarter-century later, Kilmeade still marvels at how consistently the tradition of remembrance has held.
“I’m in awe that 25 years later, we can actually say that every year those names have been read,” Kilmeade said. “I think it’s something the country should truly be proud of.”
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