REWIND
NASA and the Spellbound Press: CJR July/August 1986
Dazzled by the glamour of man-in-space, the press kept ignoring hints of the disaster to come
It is January 28, 1986 – a bitterly cold morning at Cape Canaveral. The countdown clock is ticking as seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger prepare for launch. Among them is Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire high school teacher who is set to become the first ordinary American in space.
Several hundred miles north, in Atlanta, a Federal Express messenger delivers an envelope to the headquarters of the Cable News Network, the only TV network set to cover the "routine" launch live. The countdown continues as shuttle commander Dick Scobee and pilot Michael Smith run through their preflight checklist.
T minus 25 minutes and counting. CNN is broadcasting a live progress report from the Cape when the anchorwoman in Atlanta suddenly breaks in: "We have an important announcement about the space shuttle. A panel of engineers from Morton Thiokol, which designed the craft's solid-fuel rocket booster, has unanimously urged NASA to scrub this morning's launch. According to a company memo provided to CNN, the rocket experts are afraid cold weather might cause problem-plagued rocket-booster parts call O-rings to malfunction, allowing hot gases to burn a hole through the booster. This, the experts say, could cause a catastrophic explosion. Incredibly, NASA is still going ahead with the launch."
The wire services, monitoring CNN, filed urgent bulletins quoting the network report. NASA is besieged with calls, including one from the White House. A T minus 15 minues, NASA announces a "hold" in the countdown and shortly thereafter reports that the mission has been scrubbed…
Fantasies along these lines have gone through the minds of more than a few journalists in the months since Challenger's fatal explosion: If only someone had alerted them to the rocket-booster problems; if only history had a rewrite man. As William Broad, a New York Times reporting veteran of many shuttle launches, told me: "Clearly, knowing what we know now, if [journalists had] really dug into it they might have been able to save seven lives. Standing back, it looks like the whole edifice was rotten to the core."
The edifice, NASA, was until January 28 generally seen by the press as an exemplary federal agency – the one the put men on the moon without major cost overruns while the Pentagon was squandering billions. But in a scramble to scrutinize the space agency after the shuttle disaster, news organizations have shattered NASA's pristine image, uncovering evidence that the agency was long aware of problems with the O-rings; that it rejected Thiokol engineers' launch-eve scrub recommendation; that it downplayed O-ring problems for the sake of maintaining an unrealistically brisk launch schedule; and that it cut corners on safety in a number of other ways to lower costs while at the same time wasting billions of dollars through mismanagement.
Was the press remiss in not scenting the rot sooner and uncovering it in time to avert disaster? Space reporters tend to bridle at the question ("People are very quick to criticize in hindsight," Thomas O'Toole, who covered the space program for The Washington Post, says acidly) and to answer with a sharp "No!" It was not their fault, the reporters say, that no whistle-blowers came forward with dirt about the O-rings; without a whistle-blower to help, uncovering the O-ring danger would have been about as fortuitous as finding a needle in a haystack – without even knowing that they should have been searching for one.
Jim Asker, who covers NASA for The Houston Post, draws an analogy between space correspondents and police officers. "There are a lot more policemen than reporters across the country, and we don't expect them to catch all the criminals," he says. By the same token, we should not have expected the undermanned NASA press corps to come up with the O-ring story.
In a narrow sense, these defenses may be justified. Space reporters are indeed a small cadre. Few of them cover the shuttle full-time. And NASA, a close-knit bureaucracy, was not exactly rife with whistle-blowers before the accident. (Richard Cook, who recently spent seven months as a space-agency budget analyst, calls NASA an agency of yes men" fearful of jeopardizing post-retirement aerospace jobs.)
But to dwell on such excuses diverts attention from major flaws in the shuttle coverage up until January 28 – shortcomings that have some bearing on the Challenger disaster. News organizations, which tended to assume that the spacecraft was relatively safe, nagged NASA about launch delays while paying little heed to a growing list of danger signs, from fuel leaks to failing brakes to engine accidents. They tended to assume that NASA was reasonably well run, despite much evidence to the contrary. Dazzled by the space agency's image of technological brilliance, space reporters spared NASA the thorough scrutiny that might have improved chances of averting tragedy – through hard-hitting investigations drawing Congress's wandering attention to the issue of shuttle safety.
There is also the small matter of press gullibility in the early days, when the shuttle grew from a gleam in NASA's eye into a costly test vehicle. The shuttle seems, in retrospect, to have been one of the biggest con jobs in recent memory – a craft without a clear purpose sold by NASA on the basis of wildly optimistic cost and performance projections. The press, infatuated by man-in-space adventure, was an easy mark.
Taking safety for granted
How safe did journalists assume the shuttle to be in the months before the Challenger blew up? Some space reporters insist that they realized all along that it was highly dangerous; that, as John Noble Wilford of The New York Times puts it, "Everybody knew sooner or later there'd be an accident." The Post's O'Toole says a series of shuttle-engine glitches had given him an uneasy feeling ("Something was amiss but we couldn't put our finger on it"), and Broad says he had taken to studying shuttle "abort modes."
Despite their worries, these reporters, like most of their colleagues, failed to make an issue out of shuttle safety. Wilford, in fact, wrote in May 1985: "The shuttle's safety… [is] not an issue." ABC national correspondent Lynn Scherr told me she could not convince her editors that shuttle launches were more dangerous than 747 takeoffs. The prevailing complacency was epitomized by Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, who wrote during Sally Ride's 1983 flight as the first American woman in space: "Although she's all that way out there, we feel we can talk casually about her because there's no doubt that she's coming back safely."
This sort of comment was, no doubt, music to the ears of NASA, which was busy selling the idea that the shuttle had made space flight routine – just as agency officials had promised it would; that the shuttle was not an experimental craft but a "truck" to lug satellites to and from orbit; that the risks of a trip aboard were so slight that even non-astronauts could fly – a Saudi prince, Senator Jake Garn, Representative Bill Nelson, and a schoolteacher. Their selection as passengers got considerable news play, reinforcing the image of a routine program.
The general press assumption that the shuttle was safe had a direct bearing on coverage of a significant trend – NASA's increasing difficulty in meeting its own tight launch schedule, thereby weakening America's ability to compete with overseas companies that are prepared to launch satellites with unmanned rockets. If the shuttle was safe, then the delays amounted to costly bumbling, which is how they were generally depicted. In fact, as we now know, the picture was more complicated: NASA faced pressures to meet its schedule and conflicting pressures to meet its safety standards – a dilemma which, if fully appreciated at the time, might have prompted reporters to question the entire program and to press for caution rather than to badger NASA about delays.
But badger they did. On the eve of the Challenger accident, for instance, Dan Rather opened his report with these words: "Yet another costly, red-faces-all-around space-shuttle launch delay. This time a bad bolt on a hatch and a bad-weather bolt from the blue are being blamed." The New York Times termed the episode a "comedy of errors" and ABC reported: "Once again a flawless lift-off proved to by too much of a challenge for the Challenger."
Such comments typified increased carping about NASA launch delays in the months prior to the accident, according to a survey of newspaper and television coverage conducted after the accident by David Ignatius, and associate editor of The Washington Post. Kennedy Space Center director Richard Smith went so far as to blame the press for "ninety-eight percent of the pressure" to launch on the fateful morning. That contention may be extreme, but Ignatius argued in a Post op-ed piece that the press probably did put some pressure to launch on the publicity-conscious NASA. While the agency should not have been so concerned about its public image, Ignatius wrote, the news media, rather than hectoring NASA, "should have questioned whether the shuttle should have been launched at all."
Of dangers spotted – and warnings unheeded
Indeed, the media should have been asking that question – given that, over the years, there had been a series of conspicuous red flags pointing to shuttle unreliability.
Before the shuttle ever flew, two comprehensive and alarming critiques of its safety had appeared in reputable magazines – Science (November 23, 1979) and The Washington Monthly (April 1980). The articles argue that NASA, bowing to budget constraints, had taken safety shortcuts that called the whole program into question. Among those shortcuts was a decision by Rockwell International, the contractor developing the shuttle's main engine, not to test each engine component separately but instead to simply bolt the parts together and turn on the power. This approach resulted in at lease five major engine fires during tests. Science's R. Jeffrey Smith concluded that safety shortcuts had resulted in "a shuttle that many feel will be the most risky spacecraft ever launched."
The Washington Monthly's Gregg Easterbrook highlighted the dangers of shuttle flight, from the absence of crew-ejection seats to the extreme uncertainty of a successful emergency landing after an engine failure, to the dubious wisdom of reusing rocket components up to 100 times given "the fiendish forces of space flight."
Easterbrook wrote, with remarkable prescience: "Here's the plan. Suppose one of the solid-fueled boosters fails. The plan is, you die…. What if a billion-dollar spaceship wipes out on a ‘routine' mission ‘commuting' to space…? Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day?" Conventional rockets, he argued, were a cheaper and more effective way to launch satellites.
A survey of the Nexis computer library indicates that neither Smith's nor Easterbrook's piece inspired spin-off articles in three major newspapers or in twelve magazines that cover space on a regular basis. In fact, their work was not so much as cited.
More red flags appeared after the shuttle began flying in April 1981 – alarming episodes which, according to a survey I conducted of six publications (Time, Newsweek, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and The Washington Post) were reported only in a piecemeal fashion. Here are the episodes:
- December 1982. Fuel leaks in the shuttle engine were discovered, causing a Challenger flight to be scrubbed. NASA later disclosed that the leak could have created a "blowtorch" in the engine. Science magazine reported: "The leak could have resulted in a devastating explosion between one and two minutes after the Challenger had lifted off." The incident got little news play, according to my survey.
- October 1983. NASA found a defect in the insulation of the shuttle's solid-rocket booster nozzles. The flaw could have caused flames to burn through the rocket's metal casing, causing a lethal explosion. There are only fifteen Nexis magazine and newspaper references to the episode (compared with 264 for Sally Ride's first flight).
- May 1984. The Air Force, backing out of a pact with NASA, announced that it would be using conventional expendable rockets rather than the shuttle to launch some sensitive military satellites. Air Force officers said they were concerned about the shuttle's reliability and the possibility of an accident. Coverage of this development was rather perfunctory, given its significance. A Nexis search revealed only eleven articles devoted to the subject, seven of them in specialized publications such as Aviation Week.
- April 1985. As Discovery swooped to a landing after its fourth flight, its brakes malfunctioned, wheels locked, one tire blew out, and another was shredded. Science magazine reported: "Had the lockups occurred earlier, when the shuttle was rolling more quickly, all four main tires might have hailed, and disaster would have ensued." Nexis total for the incident: sixteen references.
There were three additional, startling episodes involving the shuttle's main engines:
- June 1984. Four seconds after engine ignition for what was to have been shuttle Discovery's first flight, a computer automatically aborted the takeoff while the spacecraft was still on the launch pad. A fuel valve had failed to open. Fire broke out and an explosion may have been narrowly averted.
- July 12, 1985. Challenger's main engines ignited but were shut down automatically three seconds before lift-off when computers detected a malfunction. Tension was high as hoses sprayed the engines to prevent fire and a possible devastating explosion.
- July 29, 1985. Six minutes after Challenger lifted off, an overheating engine shut down and the spacecraft barely made it into orbit. Had the engine shut down sooner or had a second engine gone out, Challenger would have been forced to try a highly dangerous emergency landing.
Each of these engine shutdowns got prominent play at the time, according to my survey, but they prompted little follow-through. A Nexis search in May unearthed eleven articles in which the words "shuttle" and "safety" appeared in the same headline – meaning that the article concentrated on accident risks. Of the eleven, only one had appeared before the Challenger explosion. It was an upbeat January 24, 1981, New York Times piece that ran under the headline ASTRONAUTS CERTAIN OF SHUTTLE"S SAFETY.
Most journalists were evidently just as certain that the space agency was being well managed. The pre-accident picture was of "an essentially smoothly running, trouble-free agency," as New York Times reporter Stuart Diamond wrote in a page-one expose of NASA published last April 23, three months after the Challenger blew up. Citing audit reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Diamond went on to disclose that NASA had in fact wasted billions of dollars over the years. The waste was directly related to safety because the space agency, at the same time it was squandering so many dollars, had been taking safety shortcuts in order to trim costs.
Many of the audits Diamond cited were several years old. They could have been acquired by reporters and publicized years earlier. Why weren't they? Diamond's explanation is that most reporters covering the shuttle were popularizers of science rather than investigators.
As with shuttle safety, the press virtually ignored a number of red flags which should have drawn their attention to the issue of mismanagement – major shuttle cost overruns, occasional General Accounting Office reports alleging NASA waste, and a stream of disclosures about the foibles of Pentagon aerospace contractors who also happened to have helped build the shuttle. Among these firms were Lockheed, of $640 toiled seat fame, and General Dynamics, several of whose present and former executives (including James Beggs, who became NASA director in 1981) were indicted last year for illegally billing the Pentagon for cost overruns.
Shuttle economics and the gullible press
Going back to the late seventies and early eighties, when the shuttle moved from the drawing board to experimental flight, one finds a similar reluctance to question the economic soundness of the shuttle program. NASA was contending that the shuttle, manned and reusable, would be more cost-effective in launching satellites that existing, expendable unmanned rockets. NASA's cost estimates, based on projections that each shuttle would fly at least 100 times, were obviously a key selling point for the shuttle. Not all reporters were convinced, but in the euphoria following the first shuttle flight, news organizations including The New York Times, Time, and the AP cited the 100-flight figure as a given.
As time went by, NASA admitted that its projections had been optimistic and dramatically cut its projected launches per year. Stuart Diamond ultimately reported in his 1986 expose that NASA chief James Fletcher, in a bid to ensure shuttle funding in the 1970s, had misled Congress and the public about the program's essential costs.
Again we come to the familiar red flags. There were many indications, long before the first shuttle flew, that NASA's launch goals were unrealistic and the projected program costs misleading. For instance, Gregg Easterbrook (along with Wayne Biddle in a 1980 New York Times Magazine piece and R. Jeffrey smith in 1979 Science articles) used the space agency's own data and guesstimates by skeptical engineers to cast doubt on NASA projections. Easterbrook, in his unheeded 1980 Washington Monthly piece, estimated that the total cost of a shuttle launch would be $105 million (compared with the original NASA projection of only $28 million) – almost twice as much as the cost of launching satellites with existing, unmanned Delta rockets. It turned out that Easterbrook was being conservative. The actual cost per shuttle launch as of January 1986 was (in 1980 dollars) more than $200 million.
Space reporters did not, on the whole, take these cost criticisms to heart. Indeed, after the first launch in April 1981, news organizations asserted – illogically – that the shuttle's successful return to earth had in itself refuted the critics' claims. Time (January 4, 1982) declared: "Throughout its long development, Columbia was plagued with troubles… In the end, all that was irrelevant. Columbia had flown." AP deemed the shuttle's maiden flight "a remarkable recovery for a craft that only a few months ago critics were calling such unflattering things as ‘space turkey' and ‘aluminum dumbo.'" In fact, critics had not been questioning the shuttle's ability to fly so much as its efficiency.
Another criticism of the shuttle, given short shrift by most journalists, was that its astronauts could do little, if anything, of importance in space that machines could not do better. Expendable rockets, for example, could put satellites directly into distant, geosynchronous orbits. The shuttle could not, because its maximum orbit was too low. So it had to resort to a cumbersome two-phase operation, releasing satellites which then blasted further aloft using their own boosters.
NASA, however, insisted that people were essential to such tasks as plucking satellites from orbit and returning them to Earth for repairs. That contention prompted critics such as James Van Allen, the noted astronomer, to point out that few satellites had low enough orbits for the shuttle to reach them. The shuttle could only climb to 500 miles, while many of the most important satellites were in geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles up.
Despite this marked limitation, the press went wild when a shuttle crew retrieved two satellites in 1984, comparing the space-walking astronauts to knights of old and generally accepting NASA's claim that a huge milestone had been passed. In a cover story pegged to the operation, Time gushed: "The mission was among the most spectacular in the 26-year history of the American space program…. [It] was ‘the greatest event in space since Armstrong and Aldrin landed [on the moon],' declared a Houston flight director." (In a buried qualification more than two pages into the piece, Time noted that the shuttle's limited altitude range was a "major hitch.")
No contest: the press vs. the technocrats
Journalists, of course, have a vested interest in a manned space program. Man-in-space makes for a much more readable – or viewable – story than machines. The danger which many reporters long overlooked was that a manned system for launching satellites (including ones crucial to nuclear-attack warning and arms-control verification) was much more vulnerable than an unmanned system. If an unmanned rocket exploded, you could have a quick investigation and get on with launching. If a manned rocket exploded, the system could be grounded for years – as witness the shuttle.
Given that possibility, why didn't the press pay more attention to shuttle safety? O'Toole of The Washington Post relies that "until the explosion we had no accident to cover" – a blunt acknowledgment that news organizations are highly reactive by nature. They are not inclined to delve deeply into technical issues unless a catastrophe pushes them into it, making normally arcane data of compelling interest to the public. (Who would have believed, prior to the accident, that taxi drivers would be chatting about something called an O-ring?)
News organizations are, on the whole, quite reluctant to draw critical conclusions about technological systems, especially when those systems are championed by technocrats who presumably know what they are doing. In the case of shuttle malfunctions, Wilford of The New York Times says, "NASA always had the defense that it works' and out editors would also say, ‘Yeah, they do have some problems with the equipment, but it works.'"
Journalists who did try to assess dangers associated with shuttle equipment prior to the accident speak of a layman's frustration in matching wits with experts. For instance, Houston Chronicle reporter Carlos Byars says he once tried to check out a claim of some astronauts that the danger of shuttle-tire blowouts (potentially fatal, you recall) was heightened because the Kennedy Space Center runway was too rough. He quizzed NASA engineers who had designed the runway. These experts insisted that it was not too rough. Byars was not entirely convinced, but felt he had to drop the matter. "I'm not equipped to debate the engineering of such a system," he told me.
Given this sort of reluctance, one is left with a sinking suspicion that, even had Thiokol's unease about the rocket-booster seals been disclosed to space reporters last year, the story might never have surfaced. NASA's experts would presumably have told inquiring reporters that the O-ring had repeatedly met safety standards. Who was a mere reporter to dispute this?
One answer, of course, is that the reporter would not be drawing technical conclusions – his expert sources would be. When "experts" disagree, a journalist is entitle, if not obligated, to bring the dispute to light.
Byars, in any event, says that his experience with the shuttle runway helped to sour him on technical investigations: "You can take any complicated system and ‘what-if' it to death. … It's not real glamorous to write about tire problems."
Jim Asker of The Houston Post also admits that the glamour of space travel helped to divert reporters' attention from the safety issue. What most space journalists wanted to write about, and what their readers presumably wanted to read about, was the derring-do of dauntless astronauts ("looking like a modern knight-errant in a shining space suit, [he] sallies forth into the darkness, powered by a Buck Rogers backpack," Time, November 26, 1984) and the sheer, untechnical marvelousness of the shuttle itself ("magnificent on the pad, a space age Taj Mahal that leapt into the sky on twin pillars of impossible bright yellow and blue flame," Newsweek, April 27, 1981). In pre-accident days, investigations of shuttle technology, even if they focused on potential dangers to the shuttle's crew, could not compete with this sort of lush sensationalism.
NASA and the power of the positive image
Beyond space reporters' technical insecurity and preference for glamour lay another impediment to criticism of NASA: the agency's powerfully positive image. It had been polished by the triumphs of Project Mercury and the moon landings and by the accolades of reporters themselves. U.S. News & World Report, for instance, once described NASA as a "concentration of mechanical and human genius."
"There is no question that the press was somewhat lulled by the many successes of NASA," John Noble Wilford of The New York Times admits. "The press somehow came to believe NASA was pretty-nigh infallible and [took] the shuttle program too much for granted. I plead guilty to that."
Stereotypes, of course, have a great bearing on how reporters weight events and draw, or fail to draw, connections between them. In 1972, for instance, a prevailing (and largely justified) press stereotype was that George McGovern's presidential campaign (of Eagleton shock-treatment notoriety) was incompetent. Incompetence became the running theme. One day McGovern's plane was tardy by a mere fifteen minutes for a campaign stop in Portland, Oregon. The now-defunct Oregon Journal ran a headline in its next edition which read, as I recall it, MCGOVERN ARRIVES A LITTLE LATE. Fifteen minutes! Hardly headline fare, one would have thought, but the example shows how a prevailing stereotype can affect the patterns which journalists perceive. McGovern picked Eagleton as his running mate, he arrived late in Portland – all part of the mosaic of ineptitude.
By the same token, as shuttle reporting showed, an overpowering stereotype can cause reporters to downplay important facts of fail to make connections between them: NASA was highly successful, so shuttle engine shutdowns, brake failures, tire blowouts, fuel leaks, cost overruns, must be of relatively minor significance. They were reported as isolated events, not perceived jointly as a mosaic of danger demanding investigation.
After the shuttle explosion, of course, NASA's positive image lay in ruins, and many facts about the space agency that reporters had known for years took on a entirely different coloration. The record of near-accidents and engine "glitches" and soaring costs suddenly seemed more sinister – a jolt in the perception that brings to mind M. C. Escher's famous print of angels and devils. If the viewer concentrates on the white areas, he sees a pattern of angels. If he focuses on the black shapes, he sees a pattern of devils. News organizations, transfixed by NASA's angels before the Challenger explosion, are now seeing devils.
If you love something, you are naturally inclined to see the angels, and U.S. journalists have long had a love affair with the space program. In the pre-explosion days, many space reporters appeared to regard themselves as participants, along with NASA, in a great cosmic quest. Transcripts of NASA press conferences reveal that it was not unusual for reporters to use the first person plural ("When are we going to launch?"). Howard Benedict, the AP's veteran Cape Canaveral bureau chief, said in a lecture on the shuttle in 1984: On has a feeling of… participating in the beginning of a truly great adventure" (WRITER LAUDS SPACE SHUTTLE FLIGHTS, Salt Lake Tribune, October 18, 1984).
And, of course, there was NASA's Journalist In Space competition, which, prior to the Challenger accident, had drawn 1,705 applicants (including me) eager, as the NASA form stipulated, to "share the experience of space travel." The contest elicited responses such as the following from former ABC correspondent Geraldo Rivera: "To beat through the aid and clouds and sail through the vast ocean of vacuum, what must that be like?" Not much like investigative reporting, I wouldn't think.
That contest notwithstanding, reporters' self-interest was perhaps only a drop in the bucket of pro-NASA bias. Journalists, after all, comprised a cheering section for the space program long before there was any home that one of the could bag the great cosmic assignment. In Project Mercury days, as Tom Wolfe observed, journalists lionized U.S. astronauts as single-combat cold warriors, airbrushed the physical imperfections from news photos of their wives, and refused to quote Chuck Yeager, the man who broke the sound barrier, when he derided pilot skills required of Mercury astronauts ("A monkey's gonna make the first flight").
One driving force in space reporting has long been a kind of techno-patriotism. As Wayne Biddle, a former New York Times technology reporter, puts it: "In our society, technological optimism is clearly a kind of religion, a matter of faith." So it was on the space beat when the shuttle made its first flight. For the news media, the craft became a symbol of U.S. technological redemption following an era of American malaise. Give a listen:
- "It was a beautiful, exhilarating, uplifting ride. … It gave the nation welcome reason to rejoice: Whatever setbacks have been suffered in Iran or at Three Mile Island or in Detroit's auto industry, the United States is still master of high-tech ventures," New York Times editorial, April 15, 1981.
- "In the astonishing complexity of the craft's design, in the peerless performance, certainly in the cool performance of its astronauts – possessors of what Tom Wolfe calls ‘the right stuff' – Columbia was a much-needed reaffirmation of U.S. technological prowess. … [Its] flaming power seemed to lift Americans out of their collective futility and gloom," Time, April 27, 1981.
- "The [astronauts'] heroism… lay… in their willingness to trust their lives to an untested craft, a faith in the technology and sheer scale that many Americans had the right stuff again," Newsweek, April 27,1981.
- "It was as if the space program had been reborn. … The military, scientific, and commercial possibilities of the space shuttle seem almost limitless," Washington Post news story, May 16, 1981.
It is difficult to knock a powerful symbol of what is "right" with America; most reporters were not predisposed to try, and those who were skeptical of the shuttle, such as Biddle, encountered editorial resistance. Biddle, who resigned from The New York Times in September 1985, out of frustration, he says, with his editors, recalls that "it was always an uphill battle to get articles critical of the shuttle into the paper. There was a great dial of resistance – a sort of corporate culture were you knew you were swimming upstream."
Until January 28, NASA was largely spared the sort of mainstream press scrutiny that Biddle (now with Discover magazine) wanted to give it. But on the grim morning, editors, in a catch-up frenzy, began throwing investigative reporters (many with little NASA experience) into the story – including Stuart Diamond and David Sanger of The New York Times and literally dozens of journalists at The Orlando Sentinel, The Miami Herald, The Houston Post, and other papers. The outsiders came up with a fair number of scoops, while many old-timers on the space beat found that their sources had dried up. ("I was really shut out," Wilford admits, and Thomas O'Toole of The Washington Post says ruefully: "People I'd known for fifteen or twenty years wouldn't talk.") It was a time for stocktaking in newsrooms around the country. O'Toole and Carlos Byars of the Houston Chronicle were ultimately moved off the space beat, and some new blood was injected.
The days of NASA as a journalist's sacred cow are presumably
gone forever. It is sad that it took the deaths of seven astronauts
to goad journalists into assuming the thoroughly skeptical role
they should have been playing all along.
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