I went to the Museum of Television and Radio today. It’s not a typical museum with exhibits; rather, its centerpiece is an enormous radio and television broadcast archive with tons of items for your viewing pleasure, from the birth of broadcasting to the present. After paying the $10 admission fee at the front desk, you go up to a room with lots of computer consoles from which you access the archive database. Once you find a few things you want to watch, you go to a desk where someone prints out your list of programs. The list includes an access code for each item you’ve selected. Then you go down one floor and someone sets you up at a TV console with some headphones. You punch in the number of your selected program and you watch it. You can rewind, fast-forward, et cetera. Unfortunately, there’s a two-hour time limit for viewing.

The whole process is convoluted and the employees are kind of high-strung.

I went there with the purpose, for some reason, of watching NBC’s live television coverage from the morning of 9/11. I know, that sounds morbid. But I’ve always been interested in news coverage, and I was interested to see how everything unfolded that morning in real time. There’s some archived morning news footage online from various programs, and there’s an article about how the morning news shows reacted, but I wanted to watch the coverage unfold in real time.

At 8:50 a.m., on Today, Matt Lauer is interviewing an author named Richard Hack, who’s just come out with a biography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. They’re discussing how crazy Hughes was. Lauer interrupts Hack mid-sentence to say that something has apparently happened at the World Trade Center but there’s no footage yet. After a commercial, we see live footage of the towers, one emanating smoke, and Katie Couric is narrating. We briefly see Lauer and Couric sitting on the couch, looking very concerned, before we return to footage of the towers. For at least the next two and a half hours, we will hear the anchors, correspondents and interviewees, but the screen will be filled with images of the events unfolding.

Lauer and Couric don’t know what kind of plane hit the tower. At 9:00 a.m., Lauer gives a recap of the “accident.” An eyewitness, Jennifer Oberstein, comes on the phone and Katie Couric interviews her. Then an NBC producer is interviewed by phone. As this is happening, out of nowhere we see the second plane hit and explode as the interviewed producer exclaims, “Oh my god!” We hear similar shouts coming from the studio crew. As things continue, everyone voices suspicion that this was terrorism.

Eventually we see President Bush giving a live speech from Florida about what has happened. Holy crap – this isn’t just a news event. The president is involved. This is serious.

NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewksi reports from inside the Pentagon that the building just shook and he sees people outside but doesn’t know what’s happening. Cameras are still focused on the World Trade Center while he speaks. A few minutes later, the anchors are interviewing a former State Department official about terrorism when we see, without warning, a sprawling suburban building with a huge cloud of smoke. The former official is still talking. A few seconds pass before someone tells us that we’re looking at the Pentagon.

After about ten minutes, we hear Matt Lauer telling us that Tom Brokaw is with him. It’s 9:47. Then we actually see the anchors for the first time in almost an hour. Lauer is no longer on the couch but sitting at the Today news desk, and Brokaw is sitting next to him with a very concerned look on his face. Presumably, in the last 45 minutes, Brokaw has been alerted, has put on a suit and has been whisked to the studio. It’s odd to see him appearing in the morning and to see him sitting silent as Lauer speaks.

It continues from there. Shock as the first tower collapses, more shock later as the second one falls.

I wasn’t watching TV that morning, so I don’t know if the New York’s local NBC station, WNBC, was showing national coverage or local coverage, or if WNBC was even still on the air here, given that its transmission tower had been destroyed.

Yup. Like I said, morbid.