After the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated Feb. 1, reader Howard Gillins bemoaned the lack of coverage it received before the accident, noting he was sure that now “we will be deluged with more information than we can possibly believe regarding every aspect of the event.”
And reader Robert Fulton, who said the loss of the seven Columbia crew members “is indeed a tragedy,” questioned why the shuttle is getting “so much more attention than any other horrific accident. When a commuter plane goes down killing all 18 on board, it makes the news but not to this extent,” noted Fulton, a free-lancer, who occasionally covers sports for the Union-Tribune.
Why does the death of people doing something admittedly dangerous, he asked, overwhelmingly overshadow the death of say, 18, “doing something as supposedly safe as a commuter flight?”
Gillins’ and Fulton’s questions go to the definition of news.
Union-Tribune news editor Lora Cicalo said that until something went horribly awry as it did Feb. 1, space shuttle flights had become almost routine. The Columbia became one of the big stories of 2003 because something unexpected and deadly happened.
If everything had gone according to plan and there was nothing extraordinary, there probably would have been a short story on the Columbia’s safe landing and perhaps little or nothing more.
Whether space shuttles should get more coverage is debatable, even among ombudsmen. Manning Pynn, ombudsman at The Orlando Sentinel, noted that with the Kennedy Space Center “in our back yard, we pay quite a bit of attention to the space program both from a science perspective and as a point of interest for tourists.”
The Sentinel has a full-time reporter based at Kennedy and covers every launch and every mission. “We learned our lesson with the Challenger explosion in 1986. We, too, had begun to look at launches as routine events but vowed after that accident never to let that happen again. Today, space coverage is one of our major areas of concern.”
But to Don Wycliff, ombudsman for The Chicago Tribune, an uneventful space flight is similar to an airplane flight. Newspapers don’t do a story every time a plane takes off. “That’s why a crash is big news,” he said.
“While shuttle flights have not achieved that level of routine, they simply aren’t the big deal they once were, nor should they be. And the fact that they remain inherently dangerous doesn’t change that.
“When NASA starts doing something unusual and daring again say, Mars it will be big news, and ought to be,” Wycliff said.
Sanders LaMont, ombudsman for The Sacramento Bee, has another view. “Newspapers are supposed to follow the money government spends, but rarely do it well. NASA has spent billions in years past, and for the most part, no one has been watching.”
LaMont also sees manned space flight as “a great adventure story, and to not cover it well would be like ignoring Columbus or Cook or Byrd. People like adventure stories and brave people, but we tend to forget that absent a disaster.”
Fulton’s question about why the death of seven people deserves so much more coverage than the death of a greater number of people who die in other accidents is a good one and not so easy to answer. Had the story been about people who died in the crash of a small plane or even in a military aircraft accident and there was no link to San Diego, coverage would have been sparse and muted possibly no photos with a single small story inside the A-section.
As Cicalo put it, what makes the space shuttle disaster bigger news has to do with the national psyche. Like those who serve in the military, the shuttle astronauts died in the line of duty.
Both military men and women and astronauts face danger in the name of the United States. We know the jobs of the military put service men and women in harm’s way but while combat deaths are sad, unfortunately, they are not unexpected. With astronauts, though, we expect success. They are not facing an enemy but are challenging the heavens with human ingenuity.
I earned a slice of humble pie last week for misstating the name of Community Health Improvement Partners as “Community Health Improvement Program.”
But I deserve an entire pie for my item on Roman numerals. If you want to feel like an idiot, write a column correcting an error and make one yourself.
In an effort at hyperbole, I showed my own ignorance of how the Roman system works when I wrote that I learned about them in grade school, about LLL (150) years ago. But as reader Jim Robinson gently pointed out, shouldn’t it be CL? He was right, of course. ‘C’ stands for 100 in the Roman system and L stands for 50.
And yes, it is something I should have learned in grade school.
