Best coverage… illustrates the feeling that every city was eventually going to be attacked, everything was closing, shutting down, the country was falling apart. Looking back we know what happened. Back then, we thought the entire country was falling apart.
On Tuesday, January 28, 1986, the two-minute TV clip dominated the airwaves of North America. Although the only network covering the Challenger launch live was Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based Cable News Network (CNN), within six minutes of the disaster, CBS, ABC and NBC, followed by CTC and CBC, broke into their regular programming and stayed with live coverage for five hours straight: playing and replaying again and again and again this eerie two-minute video clip. Time Magazine called it ‘a nightmarish image destined to linger in the nation’s shared consciousness’. Senior writer Lance Morrow stated: ‘Over and over the bright extinction played on the television screen almost ghoulishly repeated until it had sunk into collective memory. And there it will abide, abetted by the weird metaphysics of videotape, which permits the endless repetition of a brute finality.’