Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, two of the Fox News correspondents who reported live that morning say the country has largely moved on — and that the distance is costing it something. Writing in American Thinker, Elise Cooper spoke with Jon Scott and Eric Shawn about what the anniversary means to them, and why they believe the day’s lessons have faded faster than its memories.
Both men describe the passage of a quarter-century as faintly unreal. Scott told Cooper that it sometimes feels like the attacks happened “a couple of years ago,” because the events are so thoroughly seared into his memory. He called it a catastrophic and horrific day, the kind that sticks with you.
Shawn has a more physical set of recollections. That morning, American Airlines Flight 11 — the first plane to strike the North Tower — passed directly over his head. He told Cooper the image and the sound will stay with him forever. So will the smell, a metallic odor he says lingered for months. And so will the hope: being down at the site, he recalled, everyone believed survivors would still be found.
Watching the towers, waiting for the fires to go out
Scott’s account captures how poorly the day matched what even experienced observers expected. He remembered that the Twin Towers had been engineered to absorb the impact of a 707, then the largest airliner flying in the mid-1990s. When two larger aircraft struck, he saw the flames and assumed the outcome would be grim but bounded — a terrible death toll, firefighters hauling hoses up the stairwells, an eventual extinguishing of the fires, and a World Trade Center uninhabitable for a long time.
What never crossed his mind, he said, was that the towers would come down.
That gap between expectation and reality runs through both men’s recollections. Scott described the images that remain with him: people forced to choose between burning to death or inhaling toxins until they could no longer breathe — or jumping, which so many chose because it was the less painful way to go. Those choices, he argued, were foisted on the country by its enemies, and Americans should remember that.
‘We don’t feel threatened’
Scott offered a blunt assessment of the national memory. Roughly twenty to twenty-five percent of the country, he noted, was not even alive in 2001 — a figure he called surprising. The larger problem, in his view, is not just that many people don’t remember the attacks, but that the country no longer feels menaced by the kind of threat they represented.
He described a brief period of unity after the attacks, when Americans broadly agreed on hunting down those responsible and preventing a repeat. Within a year or two, he said, that consensus came apart as political leaders turned on one another. The victims, he added, have largely been forgotten.
Shawn framed the stakes in similarly broad terms. He told Cooper that September 11 was an attack on the nation’s values — an attack by radical Islamic terrorists against the Western world — and that Americans are here to resist it and defend the democratic freedoms the country represents. Like Scott, he believes people have lost sight of the threat the country faced, and of the threat he says it still faces.
A pitch for remembering
Both correspondents are emphatic that Americans need to recall how terrible the day was, not simply mark its date. Cooper’s piece closes by noting that Fox News is airing extensive multiplatform special programming to honor the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks for viewers who want to learn more.
The larger argument in the American Thinker essay is less about any single broadcast than about the mechanics of memory. Anniversaries arrive on schedule; remembrance does not, and the piece suggests that a country that no longer feels threatened by a threat is a country that has stopped doing the work of reflecting on it. For Scott and Shawn, that work starts with the specific, uncomfortable details of that morning — the sound overhead, the metallic smell, the impossible choice at the windows — rather than with the comfortable abstractions that have accumulated in the years since.
The 25th anniversary also arrives in a country that has changed demographically as well as politically. Nearly a generation of adults has no firsthand memory of the attacks at all, a fact Scott treats as central to the problem rather than incidental to it. Whether that generational distance represents ordinary historical forgetting or something more consequential is, in effect, the question the essay leaves with its readers.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/remembering-that-devastating-day/