In particular, the coverage lasted from Friday afternoon when he was shot nonstop to Monday and the funeral. It was the first long term breaking story I remember, though there were plenty of all-network announcements.
BTW, though it was before my time, I believe the radio networks had similar coverage when FDR died. I’ve heard the coverage of the funeral itself, and my mother had a paperback book with a transcript of the coverage. Instabooks are not a recent invention.
The Loma Prieta earthquake had the dubious distinction of occurring live on camera during the '89 World Series…at least until the cameras cut off (fast forward to about 4:30 in the video).
All the major national/world news events I can think of have been listed already, but I can recall a couple of occasions when severe weather has hit my area (North Carolina) during either the ACC or NCAA basketball tournaments, and sports coverage was pre-empted by tornado warnings and such. People always used to get super-pissed when that happened :rolleyes:
A recent story I read about the anniversary mentioned that CNN was the only network carrying it live.
Let’s not forget the most bizarre mesh ever. Howard Cosell announcing John Lennon’s death on Monday Night Football.
OJ’s jury verdict was so big, that not only were all the networks presumably carrying it, but my high school actually held an assembly in the gym to watch it. I kept thinking “what does this have to do with learning?” but the other half of me thought “woo, I get to miss geometry!”
The only other time I can remember there being a school assembly to watch something on live TV was when the space shuttle full of teachers and students took off, in 1st grade. I remember there being lots of cool explosions and stuff, and then we had to spend the rest of week learning all about death.
I was just remembering this for some reason last week, and went hunting for a clip of it online (unsuccessfully). I was watching CNN Headline News over breakfast that morning and they had reported that the president had gotten sick earlier. Then if my memory is correct, they came back to the anchor mid-commercial and he had a somber look and he started to make that report and got cut off by the offscreen voice. I remember staying glued to the TV for about an hour after thinking that they were just waiting for a confirmation, and flipping through various channels to see if anybody else was reporting anything. And having a mild panic attack at the thought of “President Quayle”…
No clip, but here’s the story.
The verdict was announced about lunchtime in the Central Time Zone, and at our school we had the TVs turned out in the cafeteria. You could hear a pin drop in there and when they finally said “not-guilty” the place just erupted.