On Sept. 11, 2001, Americans experienced the worst attack on U.S. soil in the country’s history. Millions witnessed the event in-person or on television, with wall-to-wall news coverage.
What happened, why it happened and who was responsible flooded the media, creating a chaotic and often confusing timeline of events detailing what unfolded before our eyes.
And just as quickly arose new narratives: conspiracy theories claiming the attack was secretly performed by the U.S. government, sacrificing nearly 3,000 American lives for its own causes. Twenty-five years later, those false narratives persist, now more mainstream than ever before.
So how do we combat these dangerous, deplorable misinformation campaigns in order to preserve the true story of Sept. 11?
Guests
- Garrett Graff, an American journalist, historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of 10 books, including the bestseller, “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11,” host of the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning and Peabody-nominated podcast “Long Shadow: The Lingering Questions of 9/11,” director at the Aspen Institute’s technology program
- Ayse Lokmanoglu, assistant professor of emerging media studies at Boston University’s College of Communication, computational social scientist whose research is focused on how supremacist and fringe ideologies and conspiracy theories are propagated online, member of the 2026 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows.
