Pamela Thomas Graham on September 11
“We cover the financial community as our beat,” says
CNBC president and CEO Pamela Thomas-Graham (MBA ’88/JD’89).
“So in many ways the terrorist attacks felt very personal
to us as a news organization.” After doing a headcount to
determine that all CNBC personnel were safe, Thomas-Graham —
less than three months into her tenure at the business news network
— turned her attention to determining what services and coverage
CNBC could provide at a time when the U.S. stock markets were
closed.
On the morning of September 11, Pamela Thomas-Graham, president and CEO of CNBC, happened to be in her second office at Manhattan’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza. She’d just finished a breakfast meeting with advertising clients and was preparing to return to CNBC’s Fort Lee, New Jersey, headquarters when the first plane struck the World Trade Center. “In retrospect, none of us knew what we were dealing with at the time,” she recalls. “We were watching the coverage unfold before the second plane hit, but we didn’t fully understand what was going on.”
CNBC anchor Mark Haines was on air at the time. “I heard Mark saying that from the size and shape of the hole in the building, it didn’t seem likely that it was a private plane that had gone off course,” Thomas-Graham says. “In a very calm but determined way, he kept repeating that it didn’t seem like an accident, especially given the clear skies that morning.” Since then, she says, people who worked in the World Trade Center and the surrounding area have told her that Haines’ quiet insistence made them take the warnings to evacuate more seriously. “Unfortunately, we all have this mindset that we’re on the phone or we’re writing an e-mail, and that we have to finish whatever it is we’re doing,” she says. “I don’t think any of us will do that now.”
With the U.S. financial markets closed, Thomas-Graham and the CNBC staff had to determine what sort of coverage they would provide viewers. “I felt our unique added value was to cover the story as a business network,” she says. “We’re a news organization, but we’re not NBC News.” A quick decision was made to run emergency numbers for companies affected by the attacks on CNBC’s familiar stock market crawler.
“Our mindset was to really focus on what the financial community needed,” she continues. “We talked with NYSE chairman and CEO Dick Grasso (96th AMP), SEC chairman Harvey Pitt, and some of the leaders of Wall Street firms to find out what their plans were for opening the markets again and getting workers into the area safely.” The Sunday night before the markets reopened, CNBC broadcast live from the floor of the NYSE. “We thought it was one way to say, ‘We’re here, it’s safe to come back. This is going to work. We’re going to make it happen.’”
—Julia Hanna (send e-mail to the author)
