Eric Shawn revealed in 2025 that the dust and smoke from Sept. 11, 2001 had left him with skin cancer, a diagnosis found earlier that year and disclosed during a live segment on Fox and Friends. The longtime correspondent said he will keep broadcasting from Ground Zero in 2026, when the terrorist attacks reach their 25th anniversary.
The disclosure lands because Shawn is not speaking about the attacks as a distant observer. He was commuting to work in New York City when he heard a plane moving far too loudly overhead, first thinking it might hit 2 Penn Plaza before learning it was American Airlines Flight 11. He was later on the air with Jon Scott when United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower, and he spent the days after the attacks reporting amid smoke, dust and rubble downtown.
Shawn has long carried the memory of that morning in sharp detail. He said he learned the first plane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center after speaking with TV crews outside the Women’s National Republican Club in midtown, then ran into the assignment desk and told colleagues it was not a small plane. In later recollections, he described downtown Manhattan as horror and said the towers were just reduced to rubble. The smell, he said, was an acrid, bitter metal taste like eating metal.
His health problems began soon after. In November 2001, Shawn started coughing uncontrollably, a symptom later described as World Trade Center cough. He was eventually diagnosed with acute, chronic bronchitis and with gastroesophageal acid reflux, which resolved on its own. Doctors also told him he had the markings of someone with asthma, though he was never formally diagnosed before. He said he knew at the time that the smoke and dust were not healthy, but he did not think about the consequences until years later.
The new diagnosis adds another layer to a story that has never really ended for him. Shawn is one of 190,000 people registered in the World Trade Center Health Program, the federal program under the CDC that monitors and treats conditions tied to the attacks in New York, the Pentagon and in Shanksville. He has continued to return each Sept. 11 to broadcast from Ground Zero, and his decision to do so again in 2026 suggests that, for him, the anniversary is no longer just a remembrance. It is also a measure of how long the health fallout has lasted.
