BBC World Service Coverage of Egypt Situation

This is a short post to commend the BBC for putting radio to work doing what it does best in its coverage of the developing situation in Egypt: live reports from journalists on the scene, expert analysis from a range of qualified and articulate speakers, and live phone-ins from regular folks around the world.

Good old terrestrial BBC radio broadcasts to Egypt were even more critical a few days ago, when Internet service there was disrupted by the government, leaving Facebook and Twitter off limits and useless.

In many cities around the US, public radio stations carry the BBC on one of their HD subchannels. Via the web, you can get the live BBC World Service radio stream here.

Whatever audio appliance you use, get it now and leave it on to witness aural history as it unfolds once again.

Challenger, Columbia and The Media

With the double anniversaries of Space Shuttle tragedies in the past week, it was worth going back and looking at the media coverage of the failed launched of the Challenger and the pre-landing disintegration of the Columbia.

How Seattle radio station KIRO covered the Challenger (with help from CBS) is the subject of a piece published by Crosscut.com last Friday.

NPR host Scott Simon's recollections of covering the breaking story of the Columbia make up the bulk of a freelance radio piece I produced last week.

It seems like the Columbia was lost twice: once on the morning of February 1, 2003 in the skies over Texas, and again in the vortex of other news that week that has made this Shuttle tragedy an orphan of recent history. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met at Camp David to discuss Iraq the very same morning the Columbia was lost, and Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council regarding weapons of mass destruction a few days hence (and both of these events were key to the run-up to the Iraq War about six weeks later).

And, finally, a round-up of links to decent YouTube clips of Shuttle disaster coverage is included in this post for Aircheck (the blog I edit for the Western States Museum of Broadcasting).