That day will always be a blur to me because, in addition to absorbing what had happened to my hometown and to the thousands who lost their lives, I had a responsibility to help manage a broadcast network which had to deal with this tragedy as it was evolving.
Here is what I remember
The day started in typical fashion. While getting ready for work at FOX I would listen to the local newsradio station as much to get the traffic news (this is LA) as the news of the day. Suddenly reports started coming out of my radio of a plane flying into the World Trade Center. Things started escalating and I realized something big, really big was happening. Then the Pentagon. Then Pennsylvania. As numb as I was I realized I needed to head into the office.
I woke up the Masked Wife and told her what was going on and to decide whether the kids should go to school (pretty sure they did, as I said, blur)
I headed to work and took Pacific Coast Highway because it was important for me to see the ocean rather than the mess of the 405. As I started my drive down PCH Sandy Grushow (who ran the network) called. It was one of the most bizarre calls of my life.
Sandy just started telling me what needed to be done and I kept reassuring him that I was heading down to the office and will handle everything including reaching out to FOX News. At some point in the conversation Sandy said something which made me realize he was not in LA. I asked him where he was and he said New York. I was sort of speechless for a moment. "Sandy how are you?" He told me he was fine and just started barking more orders. To this day I think he was in shock.
Turned out both Sandy and Peter Chernin (head of NewsCorp) were in New York for some meeting and had to road trip across country together to get back to LA. Would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that.
When I arrived people started congregating in my office. We all embraced shared our feelings and got to work. I immediately called Bill Shine who was my contact at FOX News. Now I have to say this was 20 years ago and FOX News was right of center but yet to go over the edge into insanity and fascism.Having worked at two networks I found FOX News to be far more cooperative than NBC News. I knew FNC would take our (the affiliates) air and we discussed logistics so we could inform the affiliates. We had no idea how long they would hold the air so we arranged hourly calls to make sure we had enough time to take back the airways.
I had two outstanding people working with me in scheduling, MJ LaVaccare and Anne Schwarz, and we immediately started culling the schedule for anything that may be offensive. Fortunately Family Guy had not returned to FOX at that time. That would have been a headache. The one thing I clearly remember was Independence Day (the White House is destroyed by the aliens) was to air that Sunday night and we replaced it with Mrs. Doubtfire. We addressed anything that seemed offensive and alerted the current executives on the show to replace the episodes and that none of this was a negotiation.
We worked with our comms people to make sure we had the answers to the inevitable questions and our marketing people reviewed all promotion scheduled to air.
We were in the middle of baseball playoffs and football so we kept in touch with our Sports group to make sure we knew whether we needed to replace Baseball Playoffs with entertainment programming.
By the afternoon we had everything under control or as under control as things could be and we made sure we had processes in place to communicate with each other.
I left the office a bit earlier than usual so that my wife and I could discuss what had happened with the kids. The one thing I remember from that was telling them that they needed to continue to live their lives and not allow what happened to change how they live and think. That's the real goal of a terrorist attack. It was a tough conversation but essential.
I'm sure other things happened that day but it was a blur. What I will say is that scheduling and keeping a network running takes a lot of effort and you need to have the confidence and trust of your co-workers. I was fortunate to have that at FOX and we survived that day and other crises that were heading our way.
