Life is change. It’s a fact of nature. One minute you’re strapped in, on your way home with pleasant thoughts of greeting family and friends, and the next, you’re a massive fireball streaking through the sky at 18 times the speed of sound. All the rest of us can do is stand around and wonder why it happened and where to go from here. But as natural as this response may be, sometimes we get a little caught up in our search for explanations—we try to escape the shock by retreating into idle speculation.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the media coverage of some of the more tragic events of the last couple of years. The explosion of the space shuttle Columbia is only the most recent example, but it could be argued that the 9/11 attack, the war in Afghanistan, and the impending conflict with Iraq have all suffered from this rash of maturbatory speculation.
Television coverage is particularly bad. Something terrible happens, and for the next 24 to 48 hours we get to watch the same footage over and over again while every idiot with camera time offers some ill-informed theory about what went wrong. None of this serves any purpose. There can’t be any understanding until the facts are in—and like it or not, facts take time. The Columbia explosion, like any other mid-air disaster, will take weeks or months to investigate fully. Even after the final report, there will be questions which can never be answered—there always is.
So why was the television last Saturday afternoon flooded with non-stop looped playback of amateur disaster video? Why is every paper in the country scrambling to find every photo of fallen shuttle debris they can dig up? What’s so interesting about this stuff? Unless you’re a crash investigator working for NASA, wreckage is wreckage, whether it fell from an exploding space-plane or off the back of flatbed truck. Wouldn’t it be more useful for the rest of us to honour the lives of those who died and get on with our own while the experts do their jobs?
Of course, we can’t forget the terrorist angle. Well after the ill-fated re-entry, various media outlets created their own superheated air by conjecturing that terrorists may have been responsible for the shuttle explosion. Realistically, it’s possible—but highly improbable. Accidents happen. This is especially true in a field so complex and risky as space exploration.
Sometimes there is no explanation—or if there is, all we can do is be patient and wait for it. It’s ridiculous and irresponsible to stretch out a story, no matter how breaking or shocking, when no new substance can be added beyond the same five facts we got from the initial sound-bite. There’s a reason it’s called the news.
Lost contact, shuttle exploded, don’t know why, bits of flaming wreckage raining out of the Texas sky. Seven people died doing a job they loved. It sucks, but that’s it. ‘Nuff said.
