This is one the many things that irritates me about the news media. The headline is “Eagle-Eyed Surfer Who Spied Shuttle Cracks Earns Kudos”. Sounds pretty amazing, right? It’s about a NASA systems inspector who noticed a crack in a space shuttle Atlantis fuel line. David Strait, who happens to enjoy surfing occasionally, noticed flaw, possibly preventing an eventual launch disaster.
What in hell does his hobby have to do with this story? It’s simple sensationalism. Sure worked on me. I wanted to know how a guy riding the waves got close enough to a space shuttle to see a crack in it in the first place. I clicked on the story because the headline gave me an image completely different from that of the real story. Maybe it’s more newsworthy simply because he’s smart and he surfs? Gosh, what are the chances? For that matter, why wasn’t there a news story upon his getting the job, too? “NASA Hires Surfer Dude”. Was there a headline at the beginning of the Persian Gulf conflict to the effect of “Broccoli Hater Calls For War With Iraq?” Do entertainment section bits about the Tonight Show read “Harley Rider To Interview Tobey McGuire”? How about “Man Formerly Accused Of Sex With Minors Leaves ‘West Wing’”?
I know this not that big a deal, and news stations need ratings, but, CNN, focus on the story, would ya?
The Onion had an article once (I’m not sure if it’s on the website or not), titled “Local gay man saves children from burning building.”
Basically, being gay had absolutely nothing to do with the story whatsoever, but his sexuality was brought up in nearly every single sentence.
It had sentences like, “Mr. Smith, who wasn’t sucking any cock at the time, managed to pull the children to safety through a window.”
As an ex-NASA contractor, the article reads pretty straight. It’s a little bow to government contractors, who aren’t always as respected as they would like to by the government. It’s also a (truthful) advertisement to younger people that their skills and enthusiasiasm sometimes make a real difference. And if you’re that kind of detail-minded, conscientious worker, you could do very much worse than joining the space folks. It’s a good place to be. There are plenty of surfers in NASA.
My least-favorite habit of news organizations is their tendency to refer to any event in the past in terms of the largest applicable unit of time. An event that happened three hours ago happened “yesterday” if it happens to be 1:00 a.m. now. If it happens to be Monday now, it happened “over the weekend.” If today is the first of the month, it happened “last month.” January 1st? “Last year.”
I fully expected to turn on the radio on January 1, 2000, and hear about all the worrying we did “back in the last millenium” about the Y2K bug.
OpalCat: Treating the article as an advertisement, the “surfing” is a blatant ploy to demonstrate to competent teens and 20s that NASA has a (respected) place for them, regardless of interests.
I must say also, as an ex-NASA contractor, that the details of the story fondly reminded me of people I used to know. Surfing warts and all.
So it had some audience. How do you make sure newpaper articles don’t attract people other than the target audience. No idea, really.
In my opinion, news articles aren’t supposed to be advertisements. It should be a news report, not a ploy. What, is CNN an arm of NASA’s HR department? Did NASA in any way decide that the word ‘surfer’ should have gone into the headline? I hope not. I’m not naive enough to the media are completely objective, but I still think they should be.
I don’t believe surfing is a ‘wart’. It’s an athletic pastime that unfortunately bears a stigma from some people’s viewpoint. Most importantly, it has nothing to do with the story. Mention it as an aside, fine, but the headline should get across the point of the story. Throwing in unnecessary words skews it.
As a side note, I see that, after being bumped out of the main headline section, the link now reads ‘Eagle-eyed shuttle crack spotter earns kudos’, though the title on the actual story page is still the same.
Hold on, hold on. Other than the solitary human interest mention of the fact that the guy is a “…sometime surfer…” and the headline, the story is about a guy doing his job well and receiving praise for his sharp-eyed observation from his co-workers. How does the story relate to his being a surfer??
Now, I could understand everyone’s ire if the story went on to make comments about how his “reading of the waves contributed to his ability to find…” or “since he has an extraordinary sense of balance from surfing, we was able to …” or something similar.
Headlines are meant to grab people, folks. That’s how you sell newspapers and get people to watch and listen to news programs. News presentation is also, belive it or not, somewhat about entertainment too. If the headline had been “NASA Engineer Finds Shuttle Cracks” it may as well have been in a tech journal. The circumstances of the find were unusual in the fact that normally, this kind of thing isn’t seen easily with the naked eye - therefore, you have a story - this guy saw the cracks that are normally only detected by machines.
So, how, again, does this make the story “about” his being a surfer???
It’s a good, solid, human interest story - headline and all.
Well, if I had to guess, I’d say, yes, NASA probably fed the CNN reporter what they wanted them to say.
NASA, never too adept with their PR, was trying to say in their own polite way that they welcome people of all cultures into their organization.
On a quite more cynical note, and certainly not reflecting any of NASA’s attitudes, news articles are written to sell copy. The number of “breakthough investigative journalism stories” that appear on TV and in the newspapers is vanishingly small. Those reporters who are trying to cover a story often end up making paper-thin generalities about things they apparently understand nothing about.
I had the experience twice of being at a “hot” event reported by the press. Reading the story, I honestly couldn’t figure out how they’d got the facts so completely wrong.
At least with the NASA article you know it isn’t an outright lie.
If it’s any consolation Space.com doesn’t mention the fact that he surfs in either their headline or the first two paragraphs. And in the 3rd call him only a “sometime surfer.” Although the first 3 paragraphs are all about 1 entance long. But I still like that site for my space news.
Rereading my post, I realize I made it sound like NASA was not giving the reporter any choice about how to write the story, which isn’t so.
The reporters I met for small NASA stories were more than happy to take any prepared text from us because the technical issues were often so complicated they’d have no way to write an article, otherwise. I remember explaining to an NPR reporter that common radios like those in a car only receive one frequency at once, and that it was possible to build radios that receive more than one frequency at once. That really threw her. I think we gave her some PR project material to write her story from.
I’ve never heard this. If there’s any doubt as to whether the time reference could be confusing, CBC always uses the day of the week. If it’s 3 AM Tuesday, an event that happened at 11 PM happened “late Monday”. If today is Monday, it happened on Sunday. If it’s the first of this month, it happened on Wednesday. That makes things much easier for everyone concerned.
That would be a much improved system, matt_mcl. In all fairness, NPR used to be the worst about this (used to be you couldn’t listen to Weekend Edition Sunday without hearing them refer to something that happened on Friday as having happened “last week”), and they have gotten better.
