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| Volume 46, Number 2, Fall 1998 |
Bob Edwards [Host]: This is NPR’s MORNING EDITION. I’m Bob Edwards. Technicians are making final preparations for Thursday’s planned launch of the space shuttle Discovery. The return to space flight of Senator John Glenn has focused tremendous world attention on the mission. The trip was Glenn’s idea, but NASA is enjoying a public relations windfall. Officials say media coverage for this flight rivals that of the space shuttle’s first mission. NASA’s public relations department is working hard to make the most of it. NPR’s Richard Harris reports.
Richard Harris [NPR Reporter]: John Glenn’s return to space is a story straight out of NASA’s glory days, so it’s no surprise there’s tremendous interest in it. Some 3000 journalists, including 700 camera crews, have requested credentials for the liftoff. NASA has geared up by adding trailers, wiring, cell phone receivers and food service for the throngs of reporters that will be pouring into the Kennedy Space Center this week. Most important, NASA will also be serving up convenient doses of news. Brian Welsh is the director of media services for the space agency.
Brian Welsh, Director of Media Services, NASA: I think one of our secrets will also be we’re going to be [holding] a lot of briefings during the days leading up to it and try to give reporters as much of a sense of what the mission is all about as we can. And so you have events like that, and it gives folks the quotes they need, the actualities they need to get, the ability to go file stories. And so we’ll work as hard as we can to try to give everybody what they need to do their work.
Harris: NASA is a master at handling the media. It’s the envy of other federal science agencies. NASA, of course, has great raw material to start with. And it also has plenty of resources at its disposal. For example, permanent satellite channels. When the shuttle is flying, these channels are relaying 24-hour coverage of the mission. At other times, NASA uses the link to beam raw material to television stations all over the Western Hemisphere.
…Four or five times a day, NASA puts together a package of video tape clips tailor made for TV—new pictures of planets, glitzy animations, and interviews conducted by NASA staffers. Of late, there have been a lot of clips of John Glenn—gearing up with his orange space suit, climbing in and out of simulators, and being interviewed.
Welsh: If we’ve got a news release on some new invention that is going to be used on Mars, then we’ll go take a picture of it, and we’ll talk to the person who designed it, and we’ll put that tape up on the satellite and television stations can pull it down and do what they will with it. We try to give them the pieces that they might need to cut a story together themselves.
Harris: It’s easy for local TV stations to put together stories with this NASA material, and they don’t even have to do any reporting. And NASA’s reach extends far beyond its visible public affairs operations. It seems everybody who touches NASA money is expected to participate. Grant applicants are asked to prepare a public outreach plan, and sometimes the pitch isn’t subtle at all. Tom McKinnon at the Colorado School of Mines wanted to get his students into a program that would let them fly on a NASA airplane that provides brief periods of weightlessness. He says the agency’s interest in press attention from the mission was verging on the heavy-handed.
Tom McKinnon, Colorado School of Mines: On the first page of the guideline, bottom of the first paragraph, it says, “Each team is strongly encouraged to identify a team journalist.”
Harris: McKinnon says he’s used to satisfying more technical requirements in grant proposals. But, in order to give his students a good shot, McKinnon called in a public relations expert to get journalists signed up. And it paid off big in terms of publicity. The mission was all over Denver’s evening news.
Local Denver Newscast Announcer: From Colorado’s news leader, this is Nine News at Four.
Anchorman: Coming up next, some Colorado college kids get the ride of a lifetime as NASA gives them the next best thing to a flight in space. [BEGIN AUDIO CLIP]
Anchorman: Still ahead tonight on Denver’s Two News, School of Mine students take the ride of their lives in the interest of science. [BEGIN AUDIO CLIP]
Anchorman: Some Colorado college students have their feet back on the ground.
Anchorwoman: After having their heads in the clouds riding the famous vomit comet. Did it live up to its name?
Colorado School of Mines Student: It was awesome. Probably the best experience I’ve ever had in my life.
Anchorwoman: Did you vomit?
Student: Yes, I sure did.
Anchorman: With pride. [LAUGHTER]
Harris: NASA does all this in the name of public information, getting the word out, and in this case also teaching young scientists how to deal with the media. After all, NASA is spending taxpayer dollars, so the agency reasons that taxpayers have a right to see what they’re getting. But it’s a fine line between public education and self-promotion, and James Kaufman at Indiana University says NASA has definitely crossed that line.
James Kaufman, Indiana University: This, I think, goes back to the notion of (unintelligible) no bucks. They understand that they need to create a certain image, one that American people are going to buy and Congress will support.
Harris: Astronauts are the star promoters for NASA because it’s so easy to tell the story of human adventure out there on the high frontier. Duke University historian Alex Roland says, if NASA really wants to educate the public, it’s going about it all wrong.
Alex Roland, Historian, Duke University: NASA has invested far more time and energy and resources in parading the astronauts and highlighting the manned space flight program than it has in educating the public, and especially schoolchildren, about the many other achievements, especially in its space science program.
Harris: The unmanned science missions make up only one-third of the NASA budget, but Roland says they produce most of the scientific benefits: studies of the Earth, the other planets and the cosmos.
Roland: It seems to me that NASA’s public relations machine focuses more on the part of the program that is popular than the part of the program that’s really paying off and should be the source of education.
Harris: But Roland saves his harshest criticism for the news media. He says reporters covering space tend to get lazy and not look beyond the glitzy material distributed by NASA’s ever-efficient press office.
Roland: I’ve seen a surprising and dismaying amount of it with respect to the Glenn flight. And this flight is being represented by Senator Glenn and by NASA in a certain way that is—I mean it’s just transparently not true. And any reporter could find it out if they did anything more than paraphrase the NASA press releases.
Harris: In particular, Roland says few reporters have challenged the storyline that the Glenn mission is all for the sake of studying old age in space. Roland says it’s clear to him this is an excuse Glenn cooked up to get one last heroic ride. Bruce Lewenstein at Cornell University says the chummy relationship between reporters and the space agency goes back to NASA’s beginnings.
Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University: It’s important to know that NASA was created in the late 1950s partially in response to the Cold War. The United States had won World War II with science and technology, and NASA was an expression of the very best science and technology that could evolve. And so it was very much an expression of the power of democracy to be a force for good in the world. So for a reporter who was covering NASA to talk about all the wonderful things that NASA was doing was to be talking about how democracy is a good thing.
Harris: The reality is NASA has never simply been a science agency. And the key to the rest of NASA’s mission is using PR to project the value of democracy around the world and to make Americans feel good about their country. NASA media chief Brian Welsh says it’s no accident, then, that the law that established NASA explicitly commands the space agency to spread the word about what it’s doing.
Welsh: The Cold War impetus has lessened a lot over the last few years obviously, but the flag-waving part of what NASA is and what it’s about is very strong.
Harris: And Welsh says the public seeks out information about space exploration. NASA has the most visited website for the whole federal government, and when the agency set up a special web page for the Mars Pathfinder mission last year, it got one billion hits.
Welsh: A billion hits on the Internet is a massive amount of interest.
Harris: But despite that public interest, NASA’s considerable public relations work has not paid off in dollars and cents. In fact, NASA’s budget is in steady decline, while federal support for other, less publicized scientific enterprises is on the rise. So, if NASA’s public relations is, as some suggest, self-serving, it’s not doing that job very well. Richard Harris, NPR News, Washington.
Broadcast on NPR Morning Edition, October 26, 1998. © 1998 National Public Radio, Inc. All rights reserved.