Like other Americans, I found the loss of the space shuttle Columbia tragic for the individual astronauts and their families, poignant as an exploratory setback and compelling as a news story. But something was off about the relentless, repetitive, almost obsessive media coverage. What does it say about us as a people?
The network and cable channels covered the tragedy nonstop. Most of the dailies went on page after page after page -- the puzzle of what caused the disaster, the human-interest aspect, the anguish of a failed mission, the bizarre debris falling from the sky, the reaction of the great and the humble. This was all newsworthy, even riveting, but only up to a point.
What was so troubling about the excess? Partly, it's a question of proportion and misplaced complicity. NASA presents the manned space program as something of unique grandeur and scientific importance. By giving the story so much excessive coverage, the press plays handmaiden to the hype. One looked in vain for reporting on the easily established fact that serious scientists tend to be dubious about the utility of most experiments conducted on manned space missions. Few of the results are significant enough to make into first-rank scientific journals.
On Monday, the Globe weighed in with a fine piece by Hiawatha Bray on the scientific use of manned missions. Monday's Wall Street Journal had an excellent similar account by Sharon Begley. Most of the scientific value, though not the drama, comes from unmanned missions. The shuttle program did contribute to the justly acclaimed Hubble Space Telescope when it put the Hubble in orbit and later carried astronauts to conduct repairs. Otherwise, the experiments on weightlessness and such are not considered terribly useful. One distinguished historian of science told the Journal, ''There's a lot of make-work going on up there.''
Wouldn't it have been unseemly to focus on these blemishes amidst tragedy and mourning? In fact, journalistic skepticism was much in evidence, but it was mainly skepticism about who fell down on the job. Wasn't NASA warned about the tiles? Weren't these craft getting old? Did Congress stint on the money? This is fine as far as it goes, but it still leaves the media in the overall role of cheerleader for the underlying premise that there is something uniquely heroic, ennobling and scientifically essential about the entire enterprise.
Here is the broader concern: We live in an era when democracy is eroding, when dialogue between leaders and citizens is closer to one-way spectacle than the deliberation of a free people. The extreme valorization of the space shuttle and the choreographed pageantry of, say, the recent State of the Union speech seem disconcertingly of a piece.
Meanwhile, fewer people vote, fewer have time for school board meetings, yet we seem to have plenty of time to watch spectacle on TV. You can sense a drift to something not quite totalitarian but far from Jeffersonian.
NASA pulls our heartstrings when its missions succeed, and the media pull them in a different direction when missions tragically fail. Seventeen years ago, when the Challenger exploded, Christa McAuliffe gave her life not for any educational purpose but because the Reagan administration had decided to put a schoolteacher in space for its symbolic value -- to camouflage its deep cuts in school funding on earth. McAuliffe's mission was criticized as cynical by both national teachers associations. This ugly fact takes nothing away from the bravery of McAuliffe and the tragic loss to her family, just as those who suffer loss in the Columbia disaster deserve our full compassion.
Still, we owe it to ourselves not to get so caught up in myth and pageantry that we lose perspective. The sleeper hit movie The Hours, faithfully adapated from Michael Cunningham's novel, offers several variations on Virginia Woolf's earlier classic Mrs. Dalloway, whose basic premise was the heroism and valor of everyday life. James Joyce had the same thought, presenting a single day in the life of an ordinary Dublin man as an odyssey worthy of Homer's Ulysses. All of us -- making time for our children, taking care of aging parents, studying for exams, mending marriages, soldiering on after misfortune -- are daily heroes. And every death is a personal tragedy no less excruciating than the Columbia disaster.
The shuttle crash was surely worth plenty of notice, but the obsessive, passive attention to the spectacle takes something away from the rest of us as active citizens of a democracy and as everyday heroes.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the Prospect.
This column appeared in this morning's Boston Globe.
