Context· weakSEP-E037
A broadcaster's account of its own premature report
- what the source states
- "We're not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn't receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening." And: "We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy)." And: "If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that."
- what we infer
- Included as context for a widely circulated episode, and honestly limited: this is the interested party explaining itself, and the missing tapes are its own account of its own record-keeping. Note that the on-air time usually cited alongside this episode does not appear in this source and is asserted nowhere in this case.
- limitations
- A first-person institutional account of the institution's own error, with no independent verification of the explanation offered.
- Contains no timestamps for either the report or the collapse.