I’ve always heard that Howard Stern did a good job on 9-11-2001. On that day I was going to work in a van pool, and we listened to network news radio on the long drive in; I didn’t listen much to Stern, and didn’t hear him that day.
It turns out that Stern’s people finally put an edited version of the show on YouTube back in February. The video starts with a whole lot of Stern’s lowbrow NSFW humor about Pam Anderson… but once the news story begins to unfold, that came to an end. Stern maintains composure and was remarkably reasonable, but callers…. not so much. The Howard Stern Show was a comedy show, and they tried to keep humor going, but the seriousness of the situation swept in. It’s really interesting.
[youtube dhPz8LlDRIo]
One bit that got me: at 46 minutes into the video – after the first tower had collapsed – Howard tells his staff that if they want to leave to go to their families, they were free to go. But shortly after, the general manager of the radio station tells Howard that if *he* wants to go, they’ll “fill.” Howard’s response was a flippant yet somehow kinda powerful “I got nowhere to go.”