Covering the Awful Unexpected

By Richard Zoglin

The videotape opens with a long shot of the spacecraft climbing steadily into the sky, cuts to a telephoto closeup just seconds before the sudden fireball, then switches to a wider view of the billowing smoke and steam. It was played and replayed countless times, run in slow motion and stop-action, narrated by anchormen and pored over by technical experts. For all the resources and manpower deployed by the news media after Tuesday's shuttle explosion, everything seemed mere annotation to that single two-minute clip.

The deluge of TV and press coverage that follows a disaster has become an unavoidable feature of the media age. But the shuttle story was unique. Unlike an assassination or airplane hijacking--events that continue to unfold and reveal new elements--the shuttle catastrophe essentially began and ended in seconds. NASA officials and the victims' relatives cut themselves off from reporters, and there were no further pictures of the accident to be seen. Apart from chronicling the nation's grief (including a moving memorial service in Houston three days later), the networks could add little but speculation to the story on Tuesday.

Yet the magnitude of the tragedy commanded the nation's attention. Even the White House staff and some NASA controllers in Houston admitted later that they watched television throughout the day for whatever news could be gleaned. "We all shared in this experience in an instantaneous way because of television," said ABC Anchorman Peter Jennings. "I can't recall any time or crisis in history when television has had such an impact."

Like most Americans, television news editors had begun to treat space shuttle flights as routine. Cable News Network, the Atlanta-based all-news channel, was the only network to carry live coverage of the shuttle launch. Correspondent Tom Mintier, narrating the spacecraft's ascent, retreated into shocked silence for several seconds following the blast. Then, after the explosion was confirmed by Mission Control, he announced "what appears to be a major catastrophe in America's space program."

The three broadcast networks broke into regular programming within six minutes and stayed on the air for more than five hours; each returned later for an hour-long prime-time special. (The commercial-free coverage cost the networks an estimated $9 million in lost advertising revenue. ABC switchboards also fielded more than 1,200 complaints about pre-empted soap operas.)

Dan Rather of CBS first heard the news in his New York office and raced into a "flash" studio set up for such crises, going on the air without makeup or his customary contact lenses. His counterparts, NBC's Tom Brokaw and ABC's Jennings, were at a White House briefing, in preparation for Tuesday's scheduled State of the Union address, when Presidential Chief of Staff Donald Regan announced the news. The two anchormen raced out of the room together, heading for their Washington studios. Brokaw got a taxi first, but Jennings beat him onto the air, sliding into a seat next to Morning Newsman Steve Bell shortly after noon. Brokaw joined NBC's John Palmer, anchoring in New York, a few minutes later.

Once on the air, the anchormen's chief problem was how to fill the time. They played prerecorded videotapes of the ill-fated astronauts, interviewed their own correspondents in Cape Canaveral and elsewhere, trotted out scale models of the shuttle to describe how it func tioned and scrambled to round up "experts" who might be able to explain what had happened. ABC got former Astro naut Gene Cernan to its Houston studios. CBS brought on Leo Krupp, a former test pilot for Rockwell International, and NBC recruited former Astronaut Donald ("Deke") Slayton.

NBC's Brokaw was the coolest and most lucid of the three; Mission Control's first reference to the accident as a "major malfunction" was, he said, "the understatement of the year." CBS's Rather appeared shakiest in the early going, and his network was the slowest to marshal its resources. "What you have here," said Rather at one point, "is a reporter vamping for time." (CBS's most famous space enthusiast, Walter Cronkite, was vacationing abroad when the accident occurred.)

Still, all three networks performed with admirable sensitivity and restraint. Some viewers were offended at the oft-repeated shots that had been taped by WNEV-TV in Boston of Schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe's parents viewing the launch at the Kennedy Space Center. But interviews with grieving relatives were refreshingly absent. Though NASA had immediately sequestered the crew's families following the accident, network executives insist they would have avoided such interviews in any case. "We had our chance at the time of the accident," says Jeff Gralnick, vice president and executive producer of special programming for ABC. "The first rule is not to badger the bereaved."

The networks also drew some criticism for constant replays of the shuttle explosion and premature speculation about the long-range consequences of the accident. But most of it seemed necessary. "What else could we do?" said Brokaw. "We couldn't go back to soap operas or game shows. People wanted answers, as many as they could get." Added CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter: "People didn't sit in front of their sets simultaneously. We had to keep showing it (the explosion scene) because there were new people constantly joining the audience."

Though unable to match TV for immediacy, newspapers across the country also responded with extraordinary efforts. The New York Times devoted its entire front page and nine more advertising-free pages to the disaster, virtually unprecedented coverage. More than 80 staff people contributed to the package, including a Times technical manager who witnessed the launch while on vacation in Cape Canaveral. The paper departed from its traditional discursive headline style for a stark opening line: THE SHUTTLE EXPLODES. Said Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal: "I didn't want just another headline. Using 'the' was the most important decision. It gave almost a biblical quality."

Elsewhere, the Miami Herald turned out an eight-page special section, wrapped around the previously printed front page, for its Tuesday-evening editions. Both Los Angeles papers, the Times and the Herald Examiner, moved up the publication of their Tuesday-afternoon editions and doubled the usual size of their pressruns. Denver's Rocky Mountain News published its first extra since V-J day; all 67,000 copies sold out.

Because the Challenger flight was to send the first schoolteacher into space, some 800 journalists were on hand for the launch, about five times as many as for the previous shuttle flight, and the number grew to nearly 1,200 in the hours following the explosion. But most reporters were hard pressed to uncover ; scraps of news, as NASA officials at both Cape Canaveral and the Johnson Space Center in Houston refused all comment. "By midafternoon there was a circling of the wagons," said a NASA employee in Houston. "There was a feeling of overwhelming revulsion toward the media vultures."

That reaction was shared by many in Concord, N.H., McAuliffe's hometown. TV crews had been allowed to film inside Concord High School as students gathered to watch the launch; when the tragedy became apparent, the principal asked the press to leave. But more than 250 journalists soon invaded the town looking for stories. At a memorial service Tuesday night at St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, cameramen swarmed into the front pews, obscuring the view for many parishioners. When a group of Concord students stepped off a bus on their return from Cape Canaveral, they were greeted by photographers' flashing lights. "It was disgusting," said one angry parent. "Those kids should not have been put through that scene."

News organizations had their own complaints. In what NASA said was an effort to gather evidence for its investi gation, authorities impounded all press film from remote-controlled still cameras that had been stationed around the launch site. Several news organizations have protested the action. In ad dition, some veteran reporters of the space program were rankled at the virtual news blackout imposed by NASA after the accident.

The shuttle tragedy left its mark in some unexpected places. The New Yorker magazine, for example, had to stop its presses to change a cartoon in last week's issue in which a man seated on a barstool tells his companion, "I wish they'd shoot my congressman into space!" For all but the earliest copies of the magazine, the caption was rewritten to say, "I used to be a warm human being, but now, I'm sorry to say, I'm a bit of a swine."

With reporting by Marcia Gauger/Cape Canaveral and Thomas McCarroll/New York