The chief of the Flight Director Office, Milt Heflin, sent out a memo to the people in Mission Operations who worked the recent spacewalk that was conducted on the International Space Station. The memo was rewritten as an editorial in the Houston Chronicle. As usual, the Associated Press had characterized the spacewalk as a cobbled together job, using phrases to get the attention of the reader and at the same time "setting a bit" in the readers' head about lack of competency in the agency and therefore the executive branch of the federal government. For example, the title of the article from July 1 was "Finally, spacewalk a success". The press LOVES to use the word 'finally' in headlines with NASA. It makes it seem like things are in really bad shape, and that the people at NASA are the equivalent of the Three Stooges, or the Keystone Cops who take forever to complete a task, spend lots of money doing it and are just plain lucky to get the task done, in spite of their buffoonery.
I've observed the press for a few years and seen things from the inside of the manned space program during the last three Presidential administrations. Little is accomplished through luck. On the contrary, there's an extreme amount of planning, practice and hard work by many dedicated people to bring off the successes we have seen. and it has nothing to do with which political party is running the executive branch of government.
But, I have seen that the press will adopt this belittling attitude when a Republican is in the White House. Had there been a Democrat there, the emphasis in these articles would have been on how NASA overcame problems and rose to the challenge. It would have been all praise and esteem instead of thinly veiled reflections on NASA's competence.
It's really sad to see NASA used by the press for political purposes when it's essentially the same organization that was in existance during the previous administration. If the press uses a non-partisan agency like NASA to push it's agenda, what is it doing on other more political stories? That, as they say, is an exercise left for the reader. For my part, I've already decided that the press is neither so honorable nor so honest as we were led to believe when we were kids in school.
The next time you read the newspaper, I'll pass you the salt.
Posted by Bob at July 9, 2004 07:05 AM