• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 13, 2022

It was too much to ask that our local TV news actually slot a story into the lead position at 11 p.m. the other night that was uplifting and miraculous.

This was the story of what ranks as one of the most awe-inspiring of all of the techno-scientific efforts made and accomplished by mankind to date -- a pretty tall statement.

How could anybody fail to drop their jaw at the news that a manmade spacecraft had not only gone farther into the far reaches of the universe than any other in history, but that it was also capable of sending photos (such as the one above) back to us too? WTF, indeed.

A story like this one boggles the mind, and if not underplayed in our nation's TV news media, it may have emerged as a welcome counterpoint to the gloom and doom that overwhelmingly characterize TV news and entertainment today.

The way a story is played in the news media sends a signal to news consumers about the importance of that story.

Thus, when news viewers are fed a steady diet of graphic, violent stories night after night at the top of the newscasts they watch, they come to believe that our cities, our country and the world are mired in a hopeless morass of misery.

If this miraculous space exploration story had been the lead story on newscasts coast-to-coast, it may have given hope to the hopeless or at the very least provided something different to think about than the bleak, day-to-day misery that TV news shovels onto the rest of us every day.

Here in New York, the first glimmer of this story on one of our leading 11 p.m. newscasts was a brief teaser for it about 10 minutes into the show identifying it as an “upcoming” story that would be seen perhaps in the next segment, or maybe even later in the show.

Before that story, however, we saw the usual stories about shootings, a severe beating on a subway platform and a terrible, fatal car crash in one of New York's outer boroughs, to name just three of the stories.

These stories are not unimportant because taken as a whole (and combined with similar stories of street-level mayhem in New York that lead the news every night) they paint a picture of a city in the grip of terrible violence.

But it can also be argued that a story about a spacecraft sending unprecedented photos from outer-outer space all the way back to Earth is not a story that comes around that often.

When such a story does appear, can it not take precedence over the kinds of everyday violence that lead the news on all of the other 364 days of a typical year?

No one’s mind should be boggled by the decision to essentially bury this space story under the usual diet of violence that sustains local TV news.

In a way, the violence stories are easier to put together. Video is often provided by Citizen App and/or local security cameras. And police can fill in the rest.

Reporting substantially on a technological wonder such as the James Webb Space Telescope would require a reporter with some expertise in science and experience reporting on it.

Yes, the TV Blog is talking about an on-staff reporter assigned specifically to science stories. It might be hard for younger people to believe, but let me assure you, once upon a time, such reporters actually existed.

Photo courtesy of NASA.