Brown now finds himself in the odd role of tragedy's touchstone -- like Walter Cronkite announcing JFK's death, or radio announcer Herbert Morrison's "Oh, the humanity!" at the Hindenburg crash. The experience is both flattering and unnerving: "In the biggest professional moment of your life, you want to think that you did it okay," he told us from his suburban New York home. "I know I did my job okay that day." And yet: "You'd trade it in a heartbeat for it not happening."
Not that he's seen the movies yet. "It's like looking at Sept. 11 coverage itself -- I have the tapes, but I've never looked at them," he said. "I'm not ready to go back."
UPDATE/CORRECTION 6:29PM: Earlier today, Washington Post's "Reliable Source" columnist Amy Argetsinger was nice enough to email The Cable Game and provide some background on and insight into TRS' Aaron Brown item. Ms. Argetsinger wrote, in part, that The Reliable Source was definitively NOT "personally singling out Brown's reporting or giving it any award for its level of quality," but rather "merely taking note of the fact that Brown's archived clips from that day are being used in all the movies to evoke 9/11 -- and that, as a result, they're becoming a bit of pop-culture shorthand."
While TCG remains not a fan of Aaron Brown, she is a definite fan of The Reliable Source, and is happy to correct the statement that TRS was somehow singling out Brown for praise. TCG still, however, stands by her statement that every reporter who worked that day--including Amy Argetsinger--deserves credit just for bearing witness under such overwhelming duress of all kinds.
