This evening MSNBC went back before the chaotic chain of events that erupted from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, playing a late-night version of the coverage from that grim morning which became one of the most fateful breaking news stories in history.

Indeed, I remember the room in my freshman building common room was left on news channels for weeks, even when empty at 3 a.m., and much of the rest of country watched more news in September 2001 than they had in years. But the footage of that day and the need to know what was going on in the world is what gives the breaking NBC news footage from that day great hindsight to make sense of what has passed.

Today, columnists like former MSNBC General Manager Dan Abrams reflected on the debate they had when they first replayed the footage in 2006, worried that it might offend some people.

Other journalists like Pat Tiernan speculated on how the crisis might have been covered with the leaps and bounds of technological advances available to reporters today.

I believe social media would have caused widespread panic back then. Twitter choked on a fail whale when Michael Jackson died and the next day people used blog rolls to convince millions that Britney Spears had died. I look at what happened with the Coast Guard exercise on the Potomac this morning and shudder to think that panic or hatemongering would have been infectious if people were so wired eight years ago.

The footage from September 2001 has enough inaccuracies given the pace of breaking news in a cable news format. Katie Couric was on TV already that morning and showed admirable restraint stopping short of calling it a terrorist attack before hearing confirmation from the Pentagon. Like in all breaking news situations, you run with what you hear as long as you make clear that the details are unfolding. The reporters heard at first it was a small plane, then a airliner and then allegedly an United Airlines jet.

However, the greatest mistakes found in that archival footage are doctored reports about the Bush administration. Instead of mentioning the now-infamous “My Pet Goat” moment when former President Bush was told of the attack when reading to a school, NBC reporters were told that Bush’s aides had briefed him before he left his Florida hotel.

When Andrea Mitchell took over coverage and asked what contingency responses were in place for further attacks, her White House correspondent said “and shooting the planes down is obviously out of the question.” In fact, that is exactly what Dick Cheney gave the order to do- even though he was only vice-president.

And when Mitchell interviewed a national security expert and asked whether there was any indication of the attacks (such as a memo that had a month before been presented to Condoleeza Rice and the Bush cabinet expecting an upcoming attack by Al-Quaida, which in 1993 tried to bomb the World Trade Center) the security advisor responded:

“No, only in the movies do you get that kind of foreshadowing.”

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