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The dog days of summer are here. It was such a newsfree day that a 40-year-old TV event qualified as Story of the Day. The televised images were those sent back from the surface of the moon from the Apollo 11 spacecraft. The anniversary of the start of that mission in 1969 had the flimsiest of contemporary news hooks, the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour. Appropriately, none of the newscasts led with a new digitally enhanced version of NASA's moonwalk videotape--it was the closer on both NBC and ABC. ABC's lead was an update on the healthcare reform debate; NBC and CBS chose the latest dismal statistics from the housing market. Yet not a single development was deemed newsworthy enough to warrant coverage by a correspondent on all three newscasts.

Only ABC assigned a reporter to update us on the Space Shuttle Mission. Ryan Owens filed from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, telling us that yet again a "series of nicks and scratches" has appeared in the spacecraft's heat-shield tiles caused by falling foam at liftoff. "Endeavour astronauts spent their first full day in space tediously examining the underbelly of the Shuttle."

As for that Apollo 11 videotape, ABC's David Wright reminded us how poor the pictures were when they were first broadcast--"grainy, black and white images of an otherworldly scene." Astonishingly the globe's 600m viewers did not see the video that Apollo beamed back to Earth. Instead the images were filmed off a TV monitor in Australia and then retransmitted. NASA's newly released images are clearer--but not because we can now see the original video. Wright outlined the snafu: "A lot of folks saved the front page of the newspaper that day as a keepsake--which makes it all the more extraordinary that NASA seems to have erased the original tape." A Hollywood firm has been hired to clean up the broadcast images, which makes the entire enterprise very Capricorn One

NBC's Tom Costello added that NASA's Apollo anniversary hoopla also includes an online posting of private conversations between astronauts as they orbited the moon's mountains and craters. Buzz Aldrin: "There is a big mother over here too." Michael Collins: "Come on now Buzz. Do not refer to them as big mothers. Give them some scientific name."

Andrew Tyndall 7/18/09 3:43:47 pm

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