On the afternoon of 11 September, firefighters had pulled back from WTC 7 because they expected it to collapse. BBC staff were monitoring local and national media and talking to the emergency services, and, as Richard Porter, head of news at BBC World, later wrote, “there was a fairly consistent picture being painted of Building 7 in danger of collapse.” From about 4:15 p.m. CNN and other American networks were reporting it had collapsed or was collapsing. [1][2]
The BBC relied on an incorrect Reuters report, which Reuters later corrected. Porter wrote that the correspondent, Jane Standley, did not remember minute-by-minute what she said, and that “if we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error — no more than that.” [1][2]
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