On 9/11/01, Aaron Brown was the face of CNN. Last night on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, he reflected on the mood of the country five years later:

“Humans have to define for themselves a sense of normalcy. You can’t survive. We can’t as people survive without some sense of normal. And so people in the most horrible situations define normal and to some extent I think we have defined normal again. I actually worry about the reverse of that — that we too readily forget what actually happened there.

I was reading, this morning actually, little capsules in the New York Times about the survivors, widows, parents who lost children, and what have you. And you realize for them, five years is a blink of an eye. And we go on with our lives, and we should go on with our lives, it’s important to go on with our lives, but we ought to go on — not that I should be preaching to people — we ought to go on with our lives with at least some memory of what happened that day and where we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

NBC’s Brian Williams reflects on 9/11:

“During my first trip to the pit, under police escort, I found what appeared to be a human fingertip, dusty and trampled and misshapen, sitting there in plain sight at the edge of the smoldering pile. Heat still radiated and pockets were still smoking. I’ve thought back on my find, which was bagged and taken away. Was it identified? Was it all that was left of someone? One of my neighbors buried the jawbone of her son. That’s all they ever found.”

> CNN’s Gary Tuchman landed the “first and only interview” with Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last person pulled out from the towers. It airs tonight on 360…

> “Are we going to die in this truck?:” Johnny Dollar’s Place has video of Rick Leventhal recalling his experiences on 9/11…

> Eat the Press is watching CNN Pipeline: “It is, in many senses, like opening a time capsule and being brought back to a world you can’t imagine you once lived in…”

> Jon Scott on FNC this morning: “We are overlooking Ground Zero on a beautiful bright blue sky morning that looks a lot like the sky did on Sept. 11, 2001…”

> Quoting Jim Bell‘s memo to Today staffers this afternoon: “Everyone here should take a moment and feel great pride in this morning’s 6-hour telecast… Many things stood out today: from the beautiful show open, to our location at Ground Zero, the great guests & bookings, the personal & emotional stories, the graphics and on and on…it was really powerful…”

> Geraldo At Large correspondent Laura Ingle blogs about the voice mail on her answering machine five years ago: “You are going to New York. Don’t call me back, there’s no time. Get in your car and get to the airport… NOW…”

“Paula Zahn was newly hired to take over CNN’s morning show but wasn’t supposed to go on the air until May 2002.” But on Sept. 11, 2001, “she called her boss in Atlanta and volunteered. She was told to go to CNN’s New York offices; she didn’t know where they were,” The Hollywood Reporter notes. When she arrived, she started anchoring with Aaron Brown.

In a reporter’s notebook on tonight’s Paula Zahn Now, she reflects on her terrible first day of work:

“It was my first day on the job at CNN. We were on the roof of the CNN bureau in New York — just a few miles from where the World Trade Center once stood. I could see the smoke and smell the burning rubble…

There was nothing in my 23 years of reporting that could have prepared me for the enormity of what had happened. The country, the nation’s capital, and my hometown were completely paralyzed with shock and fear.”

Zahn will anchor from Ground Zero tonight…

MSNBC treated the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 as a living history event this morning, rebroadcasting The Today Show’s coverage of the terrorist attacks until noon.

“We’re going to be doing something that no one else is doing, showing you what it was like to live through 9/11,” Chris Matthews said on MSNBC at 8:53am.

The next three hours were commercial-free, just as they were on 9/11, as MSNBC aired the NBC coverage in real-time. An e-mailer calls it “amazing and dramatic…”

For the last five years, “television networks have been reluctant to show” the most disturbing images of Sept. 11, “but now, five years later, some of the restrictions are loosening,” the AP says. For example, here’s a CNBC memo about footage restrictions:

“Please note: For b-roll purposes in regards to 9-11 we have agreed we will not show the following:    -No planes flying into buildings    -No people jumping    -No collapse of the towers We can however show the towers burnings, smoke etc and all other aftermath.”

> CNN trumpeted Anderson Cooper‘s “exclusive” position at a U.S. forward base on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The base was attacked earlier today, and here’s the video…

> Check out mediabistro’s media recollections of 9/11. Becky Turco recalls helping Diane Sawyer videotape the scene at Ground Zero: “Later, while Diane was getting mic’d up outside, a producer in the news truck blurted out, ‘You mean she’s been walking around Ground Zero for over an hour and that’s all the soot she has on her?!?!…’”

> ABCNews.com has a twenty-minute video of Peter Jennings‘s special report on 9/11…

> Bob Schieffer‘s commentary on Sunday’s Face the Nation was titled “Our Finest Hour…”

> Fox News Channel showed fascinating “then and now” still photographs of NYC, the Pentagon, and Shanksville (via the AP)…

This morning, Matt Lauer, producer Elliott Walker, and other Today Show staffers shared their memories of broadcasting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to millions of viewers.

“The moment we saw the fireball come out of the South Tower from that second plane hitting, I remember looking at Katie, and Katie looked at me, and our eyes met in a lock. And we knew. This was terrorism,” Lauer said. Here’s the package:

This must-read THR story recalls television news coverage of 9/11/01. An excerpt:

“Fox News Channel’s Jon Scott was about to begin his 9 a.m. shift when he was told to run to the studio. He arrived to find out that a plane had hit the trade center.

‘I thought it was an accident, as incredible as that may seem now,’ says Scott, who is a pilot and aviation enthusiast. ‘It should have hit me right away that, OK, they didn’t bring the towers down in ’93 so they were going to try it again from the air.’ On the air, Scott was talking to an expert at 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower.”

CNN’s coverage, titled “9/11: The World Remembers,” was highlighted by a timeline that ran through American Morning and continued on CNN Newsroom.

“All morning long we are following the timeline of that day,” Soledad O’Brien said.

The anchors repeatedly described what was happening “at this moment” on that Tuesday morning five years ago. The voiceovers were supported by graphics on the right side of the screen…