Aaron Brown, the anchor who won widespread praise for his incisive reporting and calm demeanor during CNN's coverage of September 11, has died. He was 76 years old.
The network said, citing a statement from his family, that Brown died on Sunday. The cause of death was not mentioned.
Brown won the Edward R. Murrow Award for his coverage of the attacks of September 11, 2001, based out of the top floor of the network's offices in Manhattan. This was his first appearance on the network, as he had previously been with ABC News, where he served as the channel's anchor World News Now and World news tonight sunday. He wasn't even supposed to start for several more weeks, but he was drafted into the national crisis.
In the background of Brown's coverage were huge plumes of smoke emanating from the Twin Towers, sweeping across lower Manhattan.
A decade later, Brown told NPR: “In some ways, I was so immersed in it, so focused that you couldn't be anything other than a reporter reporting the biggest story ever.”
As NPR noted, when the North Tower collapsed, Brown became calm. “Oh God. There are no words.”
Brown was born and raised in the suburbs of Minneapolis and attended the University of Minnesota before joining the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve. He began his radio career as a radio talk show host in Minneapolis, but later moved to Los Angeles and then to Seattle, where he became a fixture on local newscasts, first at KING-TV and later at KIRO-TV.
In 1991, he and Lisa McCray became the founding anchors of the nightly newscast ABC News Now, and also served as correspondents for other news programs on the network. He also anchored the Saturday evening news and the Sunday edition of Good morning America.
Brown's departure to CNN to anchor a prime-time news program, News nightand was a major anchor covering breaking news. Four years later, the network shuffled its programming lineup, and Brown's show was replaced by Anderson Cooper, which attracted widespread attention and praise for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. At the time, Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/US, told the New York Times that Brown was a “first-class news talent” but that “there are only so many hours in the day.”
Brown later went to anchor Wide angleIt is a documentary series that aired on PBS stations, and he taught journalism at Arizona State University.
