Media

...The arrangement has enabled journalists to edify and divert their audiences with thrilling tales of courage, intelligence, and moral purpose...

...NASA, moreover, has reserved to itself the final choice of the astrojournalist, and the skeptical may be pardoned for wondering if those who have applied (Tom Brokaw, John Chancellor, Sam Donaldson, Tom Wolfe, among others) may not be treading lightly in hopes of giving no offense...

...Laurence's byline was already a familiar one in the relatively small and insular world of prewar science...

...John Glenn was America's answer to Yuri Gagarin, for example: He orbited the Earth to reassure the American people, warn the Soviets, and impress everyone else...

...Although Groves had already put a staff to work writing the news releases that would be issued when the first bomb was dropped, he "wanted to bring in an outside newspaperman," as he later put it, to give "a more objective touch" to Manhattan Project public relations...

...He shared a Pul-iter Prize for his science reporting in the 1930s and was known to Groves as the author of two articles on atomic energy published before wartime censorship had rung down the curtain on nuclear physics...

...And once you're hooked, you're hooked...

...At The Times, editors had fewer scruples...

...By the time of the Challenger flight, as we were immediately and repeatedly reminded, shuttle launches had become "routine...

...Not the least shocked were the journalists...

...In the process, he became an enthusiast...

...What was worse, many of those on the story were committed to following in William Laurence's footsteps as Government-designated reporters...

...His work earned him two War Department citations from the Government and the Pulitzer Prize from his colleagues...

...As the only reporter privy to the Project's secrets, Laurence was given access to its labs and factories, was present at Trinity when the bomb was first tested, and went along for the ride when Nagasaki was wiped off the map...

...He warned us, journalists and readers alike, to be alert to "the aura of suggestion," as he called it, "as to how we ought to feel about the news...

...with television once again serving as the national hearth" (The Boston Globe...

...They had already submitted their applications to become the first of their trade to go into orbit under NASA's Jour-nalist-in-Space Project...

...But the problems with the journalism that brought this event into America's homes began forty-one years ago when General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project, walked into The New York Times and borrowed the paper's science reporter for a top-secret assignment...

...ABC's Lynn Sherr is one of those who has done so, and on the day of the disaster she noted, with reference to space, that "the press needs to be where news is happening...

...Laurence's ten-part series, published a couple of months after Hiroshima, was loaded with superlatives...

...Big science and big journalism have Robert Karl Manoff writes regularly about the news media for The Progressive...

...NASA was the consummate player at this game, "long the most exotic and glamorous of Federal bureaucracies," as one report in The Washington Post put it...

...So had reflexive journalistic enthusiasm...

...Its mission, of course, had not a little to do with this: It sent men where only dreams had gone before...

...Perhaps so, but journalists have paid a high price for this kind of access...

...For big science, the partnership has meant an opportunity to build the constituencies it has needed to get its agendas adopted, its bills passed, its budgets approved...

...They were up there, of course, for other reasons...

...Caught up, as most of us were, with the majesty of space flight, the questions and criticism that emerged in the wake of the Challenger disaster came as a shock to the nation...

...One need only remember Walter Cronkite's fetching, little-boy enthusiasm over the years to realize how much the press, when it came to space ships, has slipped its moorings...

...In the words of some of the worshipful media post mortems, through coverage of the disaster "television...

...President Johnson sent men to the moon for similar reasons, and one of the principal dividends of NASA's manned missions has continued to be their inherent value as pseudoevents meant to serve a complex of political and military ends, both domestic and foreign...

...One of the press releases he helped prepare was so emotional that the Project's oversight committee requested that it be redrafted...

...Reporting the Trinity test, he likened the bomb's beauty to "the grand finale of a mighty symphony," and the mushroom cloud, boiling up from the New Mexico desert, to the Statue of Liberty...

...One of my New Year's resolutions for 1986 was not to quote Walter Lippmann for the next twelve months, but, I'm sorry, the man understood exactly what was going on here...

...helped unify the country" (New York Daily News), and "America became a family in common grief...

...But the more important point is that despite all we hear about adversarial journalism, reporters have not yet learned how to keep their distance from the state...

...For days after Challenger exploded, the aura was the news...

...On the day Challenger fell out of the sky, UPI's Al Webb recalled without irony his many years spent covering NASA: "You see," he said, "you never really leave the space program, no matter how long you've been gone...

...Of the atomic plant he visited, he wrote, "One stands before it as though beholding the realization of a vision such as Michelangelo might have had of a world yet to be, as indescribable as the Grand Canyon of Arizona, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony...

...See the Editor's Memo, Page 4. been hand-in-hand ever since...

...Like William Laurence, overwhelmed by the mysteries Twentieth Century science had revealed to him, relay upon relay of reporters have been entranced by the vision NASA put before their eyes...

...William L. Laurence had been chosen to write the story of the atomic bomb...

...Journalists accustomed to covering space launchings as sacraments of national achievement knew no other way to handle it...