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Challenger Anniversary
Rand Simberg reminds that today is the anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. I don’t have quite the tale to tell as his, but I was at WMGT-TV, the NBC television affiliate in Macon, Georgia at the time (talk about small market). We stood in the control room and used the one-inch tape machine to view the explosion frame by frame. We could see the crew cabin blow away from the main body of the shuttle – NASA was reporting otherwise. I was horrified to think that the crew members were conscious – in their seats – as the cabin fell to earth. We in the newsroom had a debate over whether to comment on what we could plainly see – and we decided not to report our suspicions (after all, we were only idiots at a TV station.) Later, the crew cabin was found on the bottom of the Atlantic – and recovered. NASA reported that the crew members had put on their emergency oxygen masks. Clearly some of them were conscious.
I’ve heard many conservative talk-show hosts say that “the media” always reports everything whether it can confirm the story or not. The talk-show hosts are wrong.
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