David Muir Reveals Personal Details About Covering 9/11

Like many veteran journalists and television personalities, David Muir was one of the many reporters who went out on assignment to cover the events and aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and the ABC World News Tonight coanchor commemorated the 25th anniversary of 9/11 by sharing some of his sharpest memories of the day.

In a social media video, Muir explained, “I can’t believe that 25 years ago, on 9/11, I was a 27-year-old reporter at the ABC station in Boston, and I’ll never forget that morning getting the call that my assignment was to get to Logan Airport right away.”

He then shared some of the most poignant moments that resonated with him. “I will never forget some of those early images of, certainly, the witnesses on the ground in New York City watching people jump from the North Tower, and there are images of firefighters looking on, and then they can’t believe what they’ve just witnessed,” Muir said in the video. “I’ll never forget a local reporter here in New York interviewing someone who was describing what she had just seen, thinking that it was debris in the middle of this horrific attack, and realizing that these were people who had chosen to jump from the North Tower.”

Muir then explained his most personally memorable moment from his coverage of the catastrophe, saying, “One of the images that I carry, sort of seared in my mind, 25 years later, is what Florence Jones told me many, many years ago. She was in the South Tower, and she worked on the 77th floor, and she will never forget the moment that first plane hit the North Tower. She could hear it, she could feel it, and she could see the flames. And she could also see the people in the North Tower who, in that moment, that intense heat, they were above the point of impact. She believes that in that moment they realized that they had no other choice but to jump, and one of the things Florence told me that I will never forget is that she made a choice to watch them, and she said she watched them because she thought that they were owed that respect in that moment, that Florence believed it was her duty to bear witness to the pain and this excruciating decision that they were making to actually jump.”

He also decided to share his hopes for what potential impact this major anniversary of the events will have on Americans. “My hope on this 25th anniversary, I think, is the hope of so many who I have talked to through the years and have followed since 9/11 — the survivors, the families who lost loved ones on that day —and I think it’s their hope that we all remember how this country came together after 9/11. That even now, with deep political divisions in this country and a deep divide, that we all somehow find a way to remember what it was like to come together as a country for one another.”