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Only one day earlier, it was the threat of an asteroid, hurtling past Planet Earth, that had attracted the worried attention of ABC's Neal Karlinsky and NBC's Kristen Dahlgren. Well, that rock missed Indonesia by some 17,000 miles. Instead, a smaller meteor entered the atmosphere over the Ural Mountains in central Russia. Smaller it may have been -- but was still big enough to leave a 300-mile contrail across the sky, before it split apart into a fireball, while breaking the sound barrier to cause a sonic boom, which left windows shattered throughout the city of Chelyabinsk. The Russian habit of mounting cameras on the dashboards of automobiles turned the meteor into a video news event and, therefore, the Story of the Day. All three newscasts kicked off with assembled pieces of footage and then followed up with an interview with an astronomer. Each newscast happened to be anchored by a substitute (the regular anchors having worked an extra shift this week for Tuesday's State of the Union): Lester Holt on NBC, David Muir on ABC, and Anthony Mason on CBS.

The meteor was covered from Moscow by ABC's Kirit Radia, yet his inside-Russia insight did not allow him even to mention Chelyabinsk's name. From London, CBS' Mark Phillips told us that the city's existence had once been a secret, a site for the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons program: Phillips report has not been posted online. NBC had Tom Costello cover the meteor from Washington DC.

NBC's Holt, introducing Costello, told us that the meteor weighed ten tons. CBS' Mason, introducing Phillips, told us 15m pounds. Radia said it weighed the same as the Eiffel Tower, namely 7,700 tons. Let's get some fact-checking here, shall we?

As for expertise, ABC's Muir consulted Amy Mainzer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (at the tail of the Radia videostream), but was as interested in manmade space debris as he was in extra-terrestrial space rocks; CBS' Mason tapped Derrick Pitts of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, who focused on the meteor itself; NBC's Holt sat down with Neal deGrasse Tyson of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. He was more interested in asteroids, which could be regionally catastrophic, than in the meteor, which he dismissed as a large boulder, a once every five-to-ten year event.
Andrew Tyndall 2/18/13 6:41:47 pm

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