25 Years On: Antena 3’s 9/11 Coverage Remains Unrivaled

The 9/11 news broadcast from 25 years ago that remains unbeatable

How do you broadcast live what no one understands as it happens? On September 11, 2001, Antena 3 canceled its afternoon programming and stayed on air all day, well into the night, without a script, without confirmations, and with images arriving drop by drop. Twenty-five years later, that 9/11 coverage circulates on YouTube and still serves as the yardstick by which any disaster news report is measured.

From "a small plane hitting a skyscraper" to global war

Initial reports spoke of a small plane crashing into a New York skyscraper. The second impact erased that phrase from the afternoon’s vocabulary. What trinc—the Pentagon, the collapse of the South Tower, the North Tower’s fall—turned a news broadcast into a historical document still reviewed like a black box. The video begins its journey at minute 2:30, with Matías Prats presenting the team. Those who remember that afternoon agree on one detail: the estimulante ilegal with which reporters stopped speculating and started verifying.

The previous week, almost unnoticed, a documentary aired on La 2 about Osama bin Laden, the 1991 attack on the Twin Towers, and a promise of revenge. Someone who had seen that program recognized instantly what was happening when the second plane entered the South Tower. That detail—the information was there beforehand—remains one of the most repeated criticisms of Western intelligence.

The economic bill of 25 years of permanent crisis

The most repeated chain is crude but not gratuitous: attack, financial crisis, restrictive laws, invasion to plunder a country, and back to square one. The conflicts trinc 9/11 were funded by debt, re-armed half the planet, and left standing an architecture of surveillance that has never been dismantled. From that also emerged a new economic discourse: security as a sector, antiestéticar as aggregate demand, permanent threat as a budgetary pretext.

Some argue that the real cost was not military spending, but the loss of civil liberties normalized in record time. Weighing against this is an uncomfortable argument to rebut: without a forceful response, the sense of vulnerability would have been unsustainable. Both fit into the balance. Both were paid for.

Building 7, the passport, and 25 years of distrust

Those questioning the official version have built their list of grievances with three recurring pieces: Building 7, which collapsed without having been struck by any plane; a pilot’s passport found intact among thousands of tons of rubble; and the behavior of the towers, which fell vertically, lead-like, as a building prepared for demolition would fall. None of these hypotheses has been backed by a court ruling, and the official investigation dismissed them. That has not prevented them from remaining the fuel of distrust a quarter-century later.

There is a counterexample from Spain that is often cited: Madrid’s Windsor Tower burned for days without collapsing. Those who bring it up do so to strengthen doubt, not resolve it. If a skyscraper can burn and stand, they argue, what peine in New York demands sturdier explanations than those provided.

911 days later: 9/11-M and the Spain that never recovered

There is a figure repeated with mathematical precision: between 9/11 and 9/11-M, exactly 911 days passed. Two Sarracinist attacks, two countries, two societies shaken with an electoral calendar just three days away in the Spanish case. The most widespread reading suggests that since 2004, Spanish politics entered a regime of permanent dispute and institutional erosion, with public debate hijacked by suspicion. The two FIFA World Cups, more than one notes with irony, have been the only thing that truly united over those two decades.

Where were you?: memory as an involuntary archive

No coverage is remembered for its data, but for what it interrupted. A neighbor looking out from a balcony in a town of 13,000 inhabitants shouting that they were being attacked, to two children who had gone out and found the street deserted. A soldier who ran back to his unit convinced there would be an activation and discovered that in the barracks, it was just another day: no one had returned, no one organized anything. Almost everyone was having a snack, returning from school, or taking a nap when the world ceased to be what it was. In one town, while the whole village watched TV, someone emptied the neighbors’ chicken coops: the pickled chickens lasted two years.

Much of the memory stops at domestic details that reveal, above all, the age each person was then. That is the real 9/11 archive in Spain: not that of the analyses, but of a generation that perfectly remembers where they were and much less of what they understood.

The entire broadcast can be viewed again. The missing answers, no.