Twenty-five years ago today, America watched television. Not Netflix. Not YouTube. Not TikTok. Not a livestream somebody sent you on your phone. There were no push notifications from X, no Facebook feed filling with eyewitness video, no Reddit megathread updating faster than the news networks could verify what was happening.

We watched television.

And almost all of us watched the same thing.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, millions of Americans turned on their televisions expecting whatever normally occupied a Tuesday morning. News. Weather. Cartoons. Talk shows. Local programming. Maybe nothing at all; perhaps the television wasn't even on yet.

Then the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

Television became something else.

It became a window.

For hours, America looked through it.

We watched smoke pouring from the North Tower. We watched the second plane hit the South Tower, and in that instant whatever possibility remained that we were watching some incomprehensible accident disappeared. We watched the Pentagon burn. We watched people running through streets beneath clouds of dust. We watched the towers fall.

And then we watched it again.

And again.

And again.

Some of those images became so familiar that it is difficult now to remember what it felt like to see them when we didn't yet know what happened next. Twenty-five years later, television is once again showing us September 11.

There are anniversary specials, documentaries, survivor interviews, archival footage and retrospectives. Streaming services have assembled collections for viewers who want to understand the attacks and everything that followed them. And there is something profoundly different about watching those programs in 2026. Because a growing portion of their audience isn't remembering September 11.

They're learning about it.

PART TWO: WHEN TELEVISION WAS THE INTERNET

It is easy to remember September 11 as something everybody watched on television because that is how many of us experienced it. But the numbers suggest something even more remarkable.

In the days immediately following the attacks, the Pew Research Center found that 90 percent of Americans said they were getting most of their news about the attacks from television.

Ninety percent.

Only 5 percent said they were getting most of that information online. The Internet certainly existed in 2001. CNN had a website. So did the major newspapers and television networks. People had email, instant messaging and message boards. There were already millions of Americans who began their mornings by sitting down in front of a computer.

But when something happened that seemed impossible, we didn't reach for an internet-connected news device in our pockets. The smartphone era had not arrived.

We turned on the television.

And then many of us couldn't turn it off.

In that same Pew survey, 63 percent of Americans said they couldn't stop watching the television coverage of the attacks.

That number matters.

September 11 didn't merely become something Americans knew about at roughly the same time. It became something Americans experienced through largely the same collection of images.

There were different networks and different anchors, certainly. You might have been watching Peter Jennings on ABC, Tom Brokaw on NBC or Dan Rather on CBS. Cable news had already arrived, and CNN, Fox News and MSNBC were all carrying the story. But the pictures were largely the pictures. The burning towers. The second impact. The collapse. The Pentagon. The smoke. The missing-person photographs. The exhausted firefighters. The families waiting for telephone calls that weren't coming. We didn't encounter those images because an algorithm determined that we were likely to engage with them. Nobody swiped past the collapse of the South Tower because the next video looked more interesting.

There was no personalized September 11.

There was simply September 11.

That doesn't mean America agreed about everything that followed. It certainly didn't. The political arguments came. The wars came. The investigations came. The conspiracy theories came. Eventually even our memories of that day became part of arguments about what it meant.

But before all of that, there was a strange and terrible period when tens of millions of people were simply looking at the same screen and trying to understand the same thing. Television had spent half a century bringing America together for entertainment. Lucy had a baby. The Beatles played Ed Sullivan. Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Who shot J.R.? M*A*S*H said goodbye. Those were shared television experiences because millions of people wanted to watch them.

September 11 was different.

It was a shared television experience because millions of people felt they had to. And looking back from 2026, I wonder whether it was the last time American television would ever possess that kind of power.

PART THREE: "THEY DID IT ON PURPOSE"

I remember the moment television stopped showing us an accident.

I was watching live when the second plane hit.

Until that moment, however horrifying the pictures from New York were, there was still an explanation available that made some kind of sense. A plane had struck the World Trade Center. A terrible accident. A catastrophic navigation error. Something had gone unimaginably wrong.

Then another plane entered the picture.

It hit the South Tower.

And somewhere near one of the television cameras, a woman cried out.

"Oh my God. They did it on purpose."

I have remembered those words for 25 years.

I've never heard them repeated in an anniversary special. I've never seen them quoted in a retrospective. I couldn't tell you who the woman was. She may have been a reporter, a crew member or simply somebody standing close enough for a microphone to catch her. But I remember her voice because, for me, those six words mark the precise instant September 11 changed.

They did it on purpose.

Before the second impact, we were watching a disaster.

After it, we were watching an attack.

And television allowed millions of people to make that realization almost simultaneously. There was no notification explaining what had happened. No headline had been written yet. No official had stepped to a podium. Nobody had issued a statement identifying terrorists or declaring that the United States was under attack.

There hadn't been time.

We saw the plane.

We saw the explosion.

And a woman standing somewhere near a television camera said what millions of people watching at home had just realized.

They did it on purpose.

That is something television could do in 2001 that is increasingly difficult even to imagine now. It didn't merely tell us what had happened. Sometimes it showed us something before anybody knew what it meant.

And we figured it out together.

PART FOUR: WHEN MEMORY BECOMES HISTORY

Twenty-five years is a strange anniversary. It is long enough that September 11 remains vivid for millions of Americans, but also long enough that millions of other Americans have no memory of it at all. Someone born on September 11, 2001, turns 25 today. Someone who was five years old when the towers fell is now 30.

There are adults with careers, marriages and children of their own who know September 11 the way my generation knew Pearl Harbor: as an event that happened before they were capable of remembering it. That changes the purpose of showing the footage. For those of us who watched September 11 happen, nobody needed to make a documentary. We had already seen it.

Live.

The documentaries being made 25 years later aren't really being made for us anymore. They are increasingly being made for people who need September 11 explained.

That creates a peculiar responsibility for television, because eventually the television record becomes the memory.

A person born after the attacks can watch the second plane strike the South Tower. They can watch the towers collapse. They can hear the anchors struggling to describe something for which nobody had prepared language. They can see firefighters walking toward buildings from which everyone else was running.

But they know something we didn't.

They know what happens next.

That may seem like a small distinction. It isn't.

Historical footage has a beginning, middle and end. The viewer approaches it knowing that September 11 is an event called "September 11." They know there were hijackers. They know there were four airplanes. They know the towers will fall. They know America will go to war. They know Osama bin Laden's name before anybody on the screen does.

We knew none of those things.

When I heard that woman say, "They did it on purpose," she wasn't explaining history.

She was discovering the present.

That uncertainty is almost impossible to preserve in a retrospective. Editors necessarily organize chaos into a story. They identify people. They provide timelines. They explain causes. They tell us what officials knew and when they knew it. They take thousands of disconnected moments and assemble them into something comprehensible. That's what documentaries are supposed to do. But something is inevitably lost in the process.

The confusion.

The waiting.

The contradictory reports.

The rumors.

The terrible stretches when nobody knew whether another plane was coming. The experience of watching a familiar skyline burn without knowing whether the worst thing that was going to happen that day had already happened. For those who remember September 11, the footage can reopen memory. For those who don't, the footage creates it. And every year, the balance shifts a little further from one group to the other. Eventually there will be nobody left who remembers September 11 firsthand. The pictures will remain. The voices will remain. The television broadcasts will remain.

And at that point, what America remembers about September 11 will depend enormously upon what we chose to preserve while there were still people alive who remembered what it felt like not to know what happened next.

PART FIVE: THE RESPONSIBILITY OF REPLAYING IT

There is an uncomfortable question hanging over every September 11 anniversary.

How much should we show?

The question isn't new. Television faced it almost immediately. There were images from that morning that networks eventually stopped showing regularly, particularly footage of people falling from the towers. Even the endlessly replayed images of the impacts and collapses became difficult to separate from the trauma of the event itself. Twenty-five years later, the calculation is different. We are no longer deciding only what people who experienced September 11 can bear to see again. We are deciding what people who did not experience it need to see at all. There is a temptation, especially as an event recedes into history, to make the pictures safer.

Show the skyline. Show the smoke. Show the firefighters raising the flag. Show the memorial. Show the names.

Perhaps show the second plane approaching, but cut away before impact. Perhaps show the towers standing and then show the rubble afterward. There are perfectly humane reasons for doing that.

But there is also a danger.

Sanitize history enough and eventually people understand the facts without understanding the event.

September 11 was horrifying.

It should be possible to say that without believing every graphic image needs to be broadcast every anniversary. Respect for the dead does not require turning their deaths into an annual television spectacle. But neither does respect require pretending the horror wasn't there. Those two responsibilities have to coexist.

Don't exploit it.

Don't erase it.

That is a much harder editorial standard than simply deciding whether an image is disturbing. Because some images are disturbing precisely because they communicate something important. Watching people run as the towers collapse tells you what "the towers collapsed" cannot. Hearing an anchor's voice break tells you something a polished documentary narration cannot.

Seeing the second plane enter the frame tells you why a woman near a television camera could suddenly understand, before anyone had officially explained anything, that what she was witnessing had been done deliberately. The raw broadcasts preserve something documentaries can only reconstruct.

They preserve ignorance.

Nobody in those broadcasts knows the ending yet.

That may be one of the most historically valuable things television recorded that day. And now we live in a media environment that almost immediately converts events into arguments.

A video appears online and within minutes it has commentary attached to it. Someone clips it. Someone captions it. Someone tells you what it proves. Someone else tells you the first person is lying. Algorithms learn which interpretation keeps you watching and supply you with more of it. The event and the argument about the event arrive almost simultaneously. September 11 certainly produced arguments, propaganda, misinformation and conspiracy theories. But there was a brief period that morning before any of those things could fully form.

The pictures got there first.

America watched.

America didn't understand.

Then America began to understand.

That sequence is worth preserving. Not because television coverage was perfect. It wasn't. Not because Americans were somehow more enlightened before social media. We weren't.

But because the historical record contains something increasingly rare: millions of people encountering an enormous event before it had been sorted into individualized versions of reality.

Twenty-five years from now, the question won't simply be whether people know what happened on September 11, 2001.

The question will be how they know.

Television cannot give them our memories. But it can preserve the evidence from which those memories were made.

PART SIX: THE LAST THING AMERICA WATCHED TOGETHER

We talk a lot about the death of shared culture. There was a time when a television series could air an episode and the next morning seemingly everybody had seen it. You didn't have to ask which streaming service it was on. You didn't have to worry about spoilers because half the country had already watched it at the same time you did. That world was already beginning to disappear in 2001.

Cable had fragmented the audience. The Internet was growing rapidly. TiVo had arrived. The idea that television networks could dictate where millions of Americans would be at a particular hour was beginning to weaken. Then, for one terrible day, all of that fragmentation disappeared.

America watched television together again.

Not because a network had scheduled something irresistible. Not because there was a championship game. Not because a beloved television series was ending. Not because somebody had landed on the Moon.

We watched because something was happening to us, and television was the place where we could see it happening. That may be the part of September 11 that television itself can never adequately commemorate. The anniversary specials can replay the broadcasts. They can restore the footage. They can interview the people who were there. They can reconstruct timelines down to the minute.

But they cannot recreate the audience.

They cannot recreate a country in which 90 percent of Americans could say television was their primary source of information about the same event.

We don't live in that media world anymore.

If something of comparable magnitude happened today, we would certainly still watch it. But we would watch it in thousands of different ways. Some of us would turn on television. Some would watch livestreams. Some would see vertical cellphone video before any journalist arrived. Some would follow posts from people at the scene. Some would watch clips stripped of context. Some would encounter misinformation before verified information. Some would immediately retreat to the commentators they trusted to tell them what it meant.

And some would experience the event primarily through an algorithm deciding which pieces of it they should see. We might all be witnessing the same historical event.

We would not necessarily be watching the same thing.

That is why September 11 occupies such a strange place in television history.

It belongs to the modern world, but barely.

The Internet was there. Cellphones were there. Cable news was there. The media fragmentation that defines our lives today had already begun. But when the unimaginable happened, the old broadcast instinct was still intact.

Turn on the television.

See what's happening.

Twenty-five years ago, television showed us something none of us wanted to see. I can still remember watching the second plane hit. I can still remember the woman somewhere near that camera realizing what it meant.

"Oh my God. They did it on purpose."

I don't know her name. I don't know whether anyone ever interviewed her. I don't know whether she has any idea that someone sitting in front of a television 25 years ago heard her voice and never forgot it. But for one instant, she spoke for millions of us.

We didn't know who "they" were yet.

We didn't know what would happen next.

We only knew that the world had changed between one airplane and the next. Television didn't explain that moment to us. It let us experience it together. That is what the anniversary programs can preserve, but never reproduce. Twenty-five years ago, television showed us something none of us wanted to see.

We watched anyway.

We watched together.

And perhaps that, too, is something worth remembering.