From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Spaced Out
Another maudlin, media-crazed moment. But hold the scorn.
Have we had enough yet?
By any dispassionate measure, the national attention devoted to seven lost lives this week was too much. People die in larger numbers, with greater suffering, every day. But dispassion has never been the standard when it comes to such things. A fire kills a family of five one night, and it merits 30 seconds on the local news. A little girl falls down a well, and the nation comes down with a bout of St. Vitus' dance.
In Canada, seven teenagers died in a terrible avalanche barely 12 hours after seven astronauts perished re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The juxtaposition was not lost on our neighbors to the north. One dyspeptic columnist for the Toronto Star wrote of the avalanche victims: "Sadly, they got buried not only in an avalanche of snow but an avalanche of claptrap from south of the border." Similar observations--sans the bile--could be found in the British press as well.
It's easy to understand why critics from abroad are so dismissive of the coverage. It was maudlin and overdramatic at times. With the exception of Rep. James Sensenbrenner and one or two others who had actual expertise, the politicians rushing to the remote studios to help America heal were about as welcome as an accountant who asks "Is there anything I can do?" at the scene of a 10-car pile-up. President Bush, on the other hand, breaking with recent presidential trends, managed to strike the right notes tastefully and succinctly--synonymous terms in such a situation. Journalists who had offered nary a word for or against the space program suddenly spoke with passion about seven astronauts they could not have named from memory if the Columbia had landed safely.
With the round-the-clock wake on cable TV and the near-complete takeover of our leading newspapers, the defining characteristic of the coverage was over-compensation. Like the cast of the "Big Chill," the press--which had benefited so much from the space program in the past--spent the weekend beating itself up for losing touch with an old friend. "We could have done more, if we'd only paid attention!" it seemed to be saying.
Was the excess, this time around, such a terrible thing? Well, no. It is a truism that you cannot know what is enough until you've had too much. When you are covering a huge open-ended story, it's to be expected that competitive pressures and plain old momentum will take over. And that is as it should be. Many stories are covered all-out, few of them (think Joey Buttafuoco) are deserving. But a multi-billion-dollar spacecraft disintegrating before our eyes with seven intrepid explorers onboard certainly is. We may grumble about the hours of split-screen bathos, but it's only in retrospect that we can sift through the coverage and find the good with the bad.
Hindsight, for instance, exposed faults lines in the TV business. On the Internet, news junkies and the politically obsessed complained, albeit in muted tones, that the coverage went too far and lasted too long. But round-the-clock breaking news coverage is what most Americans expect from 24-hour news: They don't watch "Inside Politics" or "Hardball" and do not miss these shows when they are pre-empted by major events. For the addicts, the mega-intrusion of breaking news is like having your local watering hole overrun by busloads of tourists. The barkeep is delighted, but the regulars can't wait for things to get back to normal.
But the "normal" atmosphere for cable TV news can be quite uninviting--full of inside jokes, nasty insults and shrieking cynicism. What's wrong with opening the doors to passers-by during moments such as this? In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination people famously gathered in barber shops and in front of TV-store windows. Cable news provides a virtual common space for such gatherings. And if it didn't, cable news networks would probably go broke--or more broke. Because no business can live solely off the news souses who show up on even the slowest days.
Another possibly portentous development was CNN's unexpected trouncing of its archrival, Fox News. CNN "arrived" with the first Gulf War. Fox's ratings victories over the past two years coincided with Washington-centric stories easily covered from within one or two studios in New York or the capital. That CNN (for whom I am a paid commentator) beat Fox both in reporting and ratings on a breaking story that required multiple reporters may point to trouble for Fox as we head into a second Gulf War. Or perhaps not. But one thing is for sure, the shout-show format does not lend itself to breaking stories like this. "The O'Reilly Factor" should have remained a no-Columbia zone at least until the bodies were in the ground.
The crew members of the Columbia were, obviously, seven heroic individuals. They were more aware of the risks they were taking than any of us. Still, it feels somewhat shabby to celebrate their heroism in death when so few of us made much of a fuss over them when they were alive. But in a sense the media frenzy caused by their deaths might add more meaning to their lives than all of the poetry about "discovery" and "exploration" combined. After all, the details of their mission--if it had been successful--would not have been particularly historic. But in death their mission forced millions of Americans and their leaders to ask fundamental questions about why they were up there in the first place. Pundits, normally obsessed with political questions, took a moment to dedicate themselves to the proposition that man should conquer the stars.
War, Ambrose Bierce once observed, is God's way of teaching Americans geography. (Who among us knew where Kandahar was two years ago?) The tragedy of the Columbia is God's way of teaching Americans about the geography beyond our own solar system and of urging us to consider profound questions about our role there. Just as the slogan "New York's Finest" wouldn't be so poignant without the horror of Sept. 11, it's doubtful whether we would have had a chance to rally behind--or question, for that matter--the space program were it not for the sacrifice of the Columbia Seven.
And it is this fact that makes this week's feeding frenzy so forgivable. This was not a pseudo-event, to use Daniel Boorstin's phrase. And it was not a true-crime drama gussied-up as news for the benefit of those who claim to be interested in "current events" but who really want soap operas. "The Columbia is Lost" story involved large themes, important policies and billions of dollars mixed in with drama, tragedy and heroism too. If not this, then what kind of story should the media go overboard about?
Mr. Goldberg is a syndicated columnist and editor-at-large of National Review Online.
