INTERVIEW
"Every September 11 gives me a special feeling". He is the one by whom millions of French people have learned about the World Trade Center bombing. September 11, 2001, David Pujadas, freshly arrived at France 2, is at the controls of the special edition that follows this extraordinary event. Eighteen years later, the presenter recalls at the microphone of Matthieu Belliard, in the morning of Europe 1, these particularly intense live hours.
"It's a totally crazy thing, when you decide to take the antenna, you know that an airliner has entered a tower, and just before taking the antenna, when you sit on the set, a second plane goes into the other tower, so we start thinking that it's an attack, it's dizzying, and then there's a third plane, on the Pentagon, and a fourth one. is crushed in Pennsylvania, after the passengers tried to regain control of the plane, "recalls David Pujadas.
"We thought it was going to be a fifth, a sixth ... and then the towers collapse.It is an event that exceeds us completely," says the journalist. "It's something very oppressive and very unreal, it's on the air that I live, that I learn, that I discover all that, along with the viewers."
"I stayed on the air until midnight, I had to do eight hours of air, and when I got home at one or two in the morning, I turned on the television and "Looked at those pictures I had seen all day, trying to realize what was really going on," he says again.
"It was a big job for me and I got my stripes"
"It was a moment of fusion with the editorial staff and for me, professionally, a highlight," he explains. "I had just arrived in this drafting where I did not know anyone, it was a big job for me and I acquired my stripes, a form of legitimacy, when I came back to the newsroom [after having the antenna, editor's note ], I was applauded, "recalls David Pujadas. "People understood why I was doing this, why I chose it because I had a know-how," he concludes.