_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [103]
Once out of earshot of everyone, Don phoned Executive Vice President of News John Lane and Vice President Joe Angotti. We filled them in, and Lane asked, “Who are your sources, Jay?”
Disbelieving that anyone in journalism would ask another journalist to reveal his or her sources, I took a couple of seconds, and answered: “With all due respect, Mr. Lane, I do not reveal my sources.”
“Well,” he said, “we have a policy, we have to know who the sources are before we put something of this magnitude on the air.”
I was stunned. Was I witnessing the death of journalism here? I stood firm. “Mr. Lane,” I began my answer, “I’ve been with this company for nearly twenty-eight years. I have broken my share of exclusives on NBC. I have never put any story on this network that wasn’t gathered under the guidelines of solid journalism. You have my reputation. If that’s not good enough, let me break it on radio’s 5:00 P.M. hourly newscast. I’m sure Jim Farley will be most happy to put the story on the air.”
“No,” he said, “we want the story on Brokaw’s show, but we have to be sure.”
“Dammit, John, I’m sure,” Don Browne spoke up. “Jay has the best sources here. He’s proved it time and again. Now let’s get Brokaw’s people on the phone, and let’s break it.”
I put the phone down. “You argue it out with them,” I told Don. “When you have their decision, call me.”
Don Browne argued and won. Tom Brokaw and I broke the story, the biggest of my life, and I did it with the New York Times’s reporter Bill Broad standing at my feet, taking notes.
The Challenger disaster would later be voted the number-one story of 1986, and I received a write-up in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, in Newsweek, in Time magazine, and on all the wire services. Larry King in his USA Today column wrote, “Jay Barbree of NBC News is arguably the best correspondent to ever cover the space program.”
I could not help but notice that the breaking of the Challenger story failed to bring me a single nomination for any journalism award—a nomination generally entered by one’s company, and, even though the great news producer Jim Kitchell had gotten our unit an Emmy for the Apollo landings in 1969, in 1986 no grunt in the field was to be nominated for anything. Our industry was obviously on a slippery slide into show business. Journalism was an afterthought. Our future was the star system, where the greed of the world’s multimillion-dollar news anchors would suck a network’s news budget dry.
Two months later I was selected as one of the semifinalists in the Journalist in Space Project. Our number was 1,769 at the beginning, and those of us who were left in the final stages had to go before a selection board made up of six journalism professors and five peers. We were questioned by a live TV interviewer, and when it was over, there were eight of us left in the Southeast—five in the Washington Press Corps, two in Florida, and one in Virginia. My boss Jim Farley was proud. He was the one member of NBC News’s senior management who had been helping me pull the Journalist-in-Space wagon down the road.
In March 1986, I settled in for what was ahead. There would be two-and-a-half years of covering NASA’s recovery from the Challenger accident and “return to flight,” and all the while I had to keep mind and body in shape for the Journalist in Space project.
It was a time of little sleep and many frustrations. Only minutes after Challenger’s remains tumbled into the sea, the largest naval search-and-salvage operation ever was launched. Six thousand people, fifty-two aircraft, thirty-one ships, three submarines, and five robot subs were used. The real pressure began the day civilian divers discovered the astronauts’ remains. They were in Challenger’s crew cabin in one hundred feet of water seventeen miles northeast of the Cape. Every news editor in the world wanted to know if and when Challenger’s crew had been recovered, and the American public wanted to know when each astronaut had been reclaimed from the sea for interment by their family.