Media Musings: Expect little from government
Somehow, as the images float before you, it seems like they aren’t new, just endless reels of the same tragedy.
Major broadcast networks and cable news channels drown us in coverage of the seven gifted astronauts whose Columbia spacecraft cut tears into the sky on Saturday. Newspapers, great and small, ran special editions or as much as possible given space limitations.
The networks flew top staff to sites, did live updates until their trucks hummed into the night aimed at their own targets beyond the reach of Earth’s atmosphere, and often found themselves getting non-answers to the questions so many wanted immediate answers to.
The absence of the “new” in so many of the reports was stark proof that news saturation often reaches a point where it is that endless reel of the same, twisted at times to pull up the old pain of the death of the Challenger before our eyes.
Yet, the biggest story is now developing and its outlines were being drawn as this column is written. It’s the same old betrayal of a government agency by Congresses and presidents all too willing to do budget cuts regardless of the warnings given unto them.
It appears NASA itself was warned by top advisers – who were then dismissed – that safety was being compromised because the 40 percent budget cut had meant the loss of veterans who held the institutional memory of space shuttles.
If the drama plays out, as it normally does, there will be the great blue-ribbon committee, which will develop facts and opinions, followed by a series of recommendations that may or may not be followed. What will matter here are the political dynamics associated with the recommendations and the costs associated with restoring a confidence level.
NASA spent $133 million refurbishing Columbia and it was considered to be in top condition. Yet, it failed.
There’s been a long list of troubling decisions and mistakes, to be sure, by NASA. One University of Maryland professor said that NASA has not made any major contributions to science and that many discoveries were shared with NASA to allow the agency to make such claims.
There have been scientists, as well, who have argued that unmanned missions carrying robots could achieve most of the established goals without fear of the loss of human life.
And so it will go on. By the time the sorting out is completed, years will have passed us by and the pain and the horror and the loss of Columbia’s gallant crew will have lost its cruel power over media and the nation.
We’ll have moved on to wars and rumors of war, of perhaps spending billions of dollars we don’t have to rebuild Iraq, and seeing good men and women try and make homeland security better than it was when 9/11 showed us the power of terrorism.
It’s foolish and futile to predict Congress or any president on any issue. History’s a better guide. The cynic would say it best: “Expect little. You’ll never be disappointed.”
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)