As a former longtime Floridian, I know about America’s steps into space. On scores of occasions, I walked out of my office building to get a clear view of one shot or another going downrange across the south Florida sky and heading into orbit.
Several times I trekked up the coast to stand across from Cape Canaveral and feel the ground rumble and shake as an American rocket roared into the unknown.
In 1986, I sat in my office with my former business partner watching TV coverage when the Challenger blew up in front of our eyes. It hung in the air less than 150 miles from my chair.
Since last Saturday morning, I have watched the news media scramble to cover the Columbia tragedy — from the first few moments when the space shuttle missed its landing time in Florida to the awful seconds when TV network and cable news played the video from a Texas field that showed several fiery dots where only one should have been.
For the most part, news people did what they always do in the face of a big story. They worked to get every aspect of the event in the greatest detail possible. While TV flashed the immediate aspects of the story, newspapers across the country — including The Salt Lake Tribune — put together editions that offered context and local angles while providing a chronology of the event and compiling the theories NASA was exploring for the loss.
Then, on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, TV aired memorial services from Texas and Washington, D.C. This is when things got interesting. If there is anything more uncomfortable than a journalist covering a funeral, I don’t know what it is. People trained to find all sides of the story are hard-pressed to cover farewell services for people — good, bad or indifferent. The only things being said are praise. If the dead had any quirks or flaws, they are not mentioned.
On Thursday morning, during the service from the Washington National Cathedral, veteran journalist Judy Woodruff of CNN had the kind of disturbed look on her face usually seen on a nervous puppy trying to get along in a new family of humans. There were no talking heads to help her; on camera she faced the words of former astronauts, Vice President Dick Cheney and others all by herself. Why? There is no other side in a funeral — especially a memorial service that is part of a national period of shock and mourning.
Whether covering the graveside service for a slain police officer or a state funeral for a national leader, journalists know that in one way or another they are intruding on the personal grief of families and friends. That is a difficult position to navigate.
While you cannot legally libel the dead, you can tick off the public. The time for full disclosure about the character of the deceased is not the funeral.
The Associated Press moved a story on the Thursday memorial service that began:
“Vice President Dick Cheney mourned the Columbia astronauts on Thursday as seven lost explorers of different faiths and backgrounds who were ‘bound together in the great cause of discovery.’
” ‘They were soldiers and scientists and doctors and pilots, but above all they were explorers,’ Cheney told a memorial service at Washington National Cathedral, where one of the stained glass windows holds a piece of moon rock.”
Inspirational words meant to comfort a nation and the families of the astronauts.
But not the most gut-wrenching coverage on TV. The toughest thing to watch was the first news conference offered by NASA officials on Saturday afternoon.
Viewed live on TV, the question-and-answer session was something no print journalist can fully capture: Within hours of the loss of the shuttle, those closest to the mission and most responsible for decisions chewed on the hard questions of the press corps while emotions that seemed to run from responsibility to horror to guilt bubbled under the surfaces of their faces.
It was NASA at its best and its worst. It was journalism at its high and its low. It was as close to reality TV as an audience inured to the genre by squabbling roommates and fake millionaires can get.
