Aaron Brown, an anchor who earned widespread praise for incisive reporting and calm demeanor during CNN‘s coverage of 9/11, has died. He was 76.
Brown died on Sunday, the network said, quoting a statement from his family. No cause of death was given.
Brown won the Edward R. Murrow Award for his coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, as he anchored from the top floor of the network’s Manhattan offices. That was his first appearance on the network, as he had previously been with ABC News, serving as anchor of World News Now and World News Tonight Sunday. He was not even supposed to start for several more weeks, but was enlisted for the national crisis.
In the backdrop of Brown’s coverage were the huge plumes of smoke from the Twin Towers, engulfing lower Manhattan.
A decade later, Brown told NPR, “In some ways, you were like too into it, too focused to be anything other than a reporter with the biggest story anyone had ever had.”
As NPR noted, when the north tower collapsed, Brown became quiet. “Good Lord. There are no words.”
Brown was born and raised in suburban Minneapolis and attended the University of Minnesota before joining the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve. He had started his broadcast career as a radio talk host in Minneapolis, but later moved to Los Angeles and then to Seattle, where he became a fixture of the local news broadcasts, first at KING-TV and later at KIRO-TV.
In 1991, he and Lisa McRae became the founding anchors of the overnight newscast ABC News Now, and he also served as a correspondent on other network news programs. He also anchored the Saturday evening newscast and the Sunday edition of Good Morning America.
Brown’s departure to CNN was to anchor a primetime news program, NewsNight, and he was lead anchor on breaking news coverage. Four years later, though, the network scrambled its lineup, and Brown’s show was replaced by Anderson Cooper, who drew widespread attention and praise for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina. At the time, Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN/US, told The New York Times that Brown was a “first-class news talent” but “there are only so many hours in the course of a day.”
Brown later went on to anchor Wide Angle, a documentary series that aired on PBS stations, and taught journalism at Arizona State University.
