NBC’s Jeff Rossen on Covering 9/11 from Ground Zero: ‘I Wanted To Be A Part Of It’

NBC News correspondent Jeff Rossen is profiled this week on our sister site, FishbowlNY, as part of ongoing series “9/11: New York Remembers,” featuring interviews with New York radio and TV personalities reflecting on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. Rossen, just 25 at the time, was a reporter at WABC in New York who set himself apart at Ground Zero with his tenacious reporting skills:

“The then-news director of Channel 7, Dan Forman, called me up and said, ‘You know what, consider yourself full-time as of right now,’” Rossen recalls.

Despite his stellar reporting, management would have preferred that he relinquished his on-air duties —even for a few hours.

“They were trying to get different shifts in. They wanted fresh reporters on the ground,” Rossen remembers. “I kept saying, ‘I don’t want to go home yet.’”

He wasn’t able to put himself in a mindset of being anywhere else.

“I couldn’t think about walking away from there and sitting at home, because all I would do was sit at home and watch it on TV,” Rossen admits. “I wanted to be a part of it.”

Read the full interview here.

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