More shuttle debris, America held hostage

I'm not going to say that I've been following the launching of the space shuttle today, but I have been following the ever changing headline. I hit Yahoo.com a lot during the day. It's been my homepage for a long time. On Yahoo! when the site loads up it has the top stories of the second, minute, hour listed on the right side.

Every now and again they add a separate space for a big developing story. London bombings and stuff like that. Well today it was following the shuttle launch.

I saw probably at least a half dozen different headlines, but they all had one thing in common. I can't remember the headlines exactly, but here are some examples and see if you can find a pattern.

"Space shuttle hours from lift off for first time since Columbia disaster"

"All clear for shuttle launch, 2 years after Columbia disaster"

"2 years after Columbia disaster shuttle launches toward space"

"Space shuttle reaches space 2 years following Columbia tragedy"

Now of course some debris fell off of the shuttle and the news media couldn't be happier. They've gotten a follow up the same day that the darn thing lifted off. They figured that it would be until about 48 hours until they were ready to come back home that they could get a follow up.

Now they have the headline to catch you and a chilling lead for the beginning of the story that urges you to read on. Then you find out that junk falling from the shuttle has happened before. Most likely during every single launch. It happens at least enough that NASA refers to most all of it as "expected."

I'm not trying to say that this isn't something that doesn't warrant a story, but this is something that will be talked about every single day until those astronauts are safely on the ground.

This type of thing is happening far too often.

It's kind of like when baseball went nuts about steroids before the season started and we started to hear about dozens and dozens of minor league players testing positive. What they didn't bother to bring forward in the stories is that minor league players have been getting caught for years and years and they just decided to pump up the story to make it look even worse than it was. But in all actuality it was normal.

This kind of thing reminds me of an editorial one of my colleagues wrote in our newspaper about the missing girl in Aruba. We caught some flack over it, but the point he made was that sometimes the media will just pick and choose a story to blow up. Sure the missing girl in Aruba is a terrible tragedy, but the fact of the matter is that there are children who go missing each and everyday and those stories aren't on CNN and MSNBC for hours at a time.

I guess I'm being a bit of a hypocrit about it all too. I do it all the time with the pages I layout. Today I picked and chose which stories were making it this week and those that were waiting until next week. How I layout the page tells the reader what they should be paying attention to.

However, instead of beating the proverbial dead horse by rehashing the same story every hour or everyday, they should concentrate of trying to find a different angle and dig deeper than the obvious.