Aaron Brown, the longtime television anchor whose coverage during CNN’s live broadcast of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks became one of the most well-known accounts of the day, died on Sunday in Washington, D.C. He was 76.
His family confirmed the death in a statement, which did not cite a cause.
Mr. Brown joined CNN in June 2001 and was still training for his role on the morning of Sept. 11. He was not supposed to appear on the air for several more weeks, but when the attacks on the World Trade Center began, he was rushed up to the roof of CNN’s Manhattan headquarters to cover the events live.
His broadcasts have endured as one of the most memorable reports during the attacks, with Mr. Brown veering between cleareyed reporting and horrified human emoting.
“Good lord,” he said at one point, turning from the camera to watch the South Tower collapse. “There are no words.”
For his work that day, Mr. Brown would win an Edward R. Murrow Award, one of broadcast news’s most prestigious honors. Still, it would be years before he spoke openly about his coverage of the attacks, and he remained conflicted about his place in it.
“Sometimes I’m a little embarrassed, I suppose, at this notion that anything I did mattered,” he told NPR’s All Things Considered in 2011. “I think I just told a story.”
Aaron Brown was born in Minneapolis on Nov. 10, 1948, to Mort and Rose Brown. He briefly attended the University of Minnesota in 1966 before dropping out to join the U.S. Coast Guard Reserves.
He began his broadcasting career in radio, transitioning to television in Seattle, where he became a well-known news anchor in the city across 15 years. He moved to New York in 1991 to join ABC News, where he was a founding anchor of its overnight program, “World News Now,” before joining CNN.
From 2001 to 2005, Mr. Brown was the host of “NewsNight,” CNN’s flagship 10 p.m. prime-time news show, which showcased his droll style, and “The Whip,” a review of global news with CNN correspondents around the world.
Mr. Brown’s approach, mixing news with wry commentary, led some to compare his show to one that NPR might air. Walter Isaacson, who was chairman of CNN at the time, called the show a “little gem” brightened by Mr. Brown’s “quirky sensibility.”
But Mr. Brown could rub some viewers the wrong way, a fact he acknowledged.
“I’ve always divided viewers,” he told Adweek in 2002. Research, he said, had found that his viewers fell into three general categories. “They found me interesting; they thought I was a jerk; or, they loved to hate me,” he said. “But no one is ever neutral about me. I can live with that.”
Mr. Brown was often considered to be an anchor in the Peter Jennings mold, delivering fact-based reports in a medium that was increasingly being overtaken by debate and analysis. In addition to the Murrow award, he collected three Emmy Awards.
“He was a tough guy to work for, but he could also be quite mentoring,” John Vause, a CNN anchor and correspondent who worked with Mr. Brown on Sept. 11, told the network on Tuesday. “It was almost like doing your midterm finals, every time you were doing a live shot with Aaron.”
Eventually, “NewsNight” began to slip in the ratings as Mr. Brown lost ground to Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. In 2005, CNN ousted him from the show and gave his 10 p.m. slot to Anderson Cooper, then a rising star who had gained widespread attention for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
Mr. Brown left CNN — by mutual agreement, the network said — two years before his contract was to expire, as it was shifting from fact-based news programming to talk shows and analysis. He later spoke with bitterness about being forced to anchor four hours of running coverage of the high-profile murder trial of the actor Robert Blake.
“It was totally ridiculous,” Mr. Brown told Variety after he was unmuzzled from his CNN contract in 2007. “It’s what people watch; I didn’t like doing it, and I don’t think people bought it from me.”
In 2008, Mr. Brown returned to television as host of “Wide Angle,” a public affairs series on PBS with a global focus. After leaving CNN, he was appointed the inaugural Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, a post he held until 2014.
“Aaron got to do the work that he loved — and he felt lucky to do that work as part of a community of people who were dedicated to good journalism and who became good friends,” Mr. Brown’s wife, Charlotte Raynor, said in a statement on Tuesday.
In addition to his wife, his survivors include a daughter, Gabby Kientzle, and two grandchildren.
Michael Levenson contributed reporting.
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