WHERE DID THE SUN GO?
A LOOK BACK AT A SPECIAL DAY AND THE MEDIA COVERAGE AROUND IT
Eclipses are always noteworthy events, but Monday’s eclipse was a bigger deal than normal.
It was just the second total solar eclipse visible from the United States during the 21st century.
The first was in 2017. The last one before that was 1918. And the next total eclipse visible in the U.S. won’t be until August 2044.
So, yeah, it was a big deal, and the news networks went all-in on coverage. Take NBC just as one example. The network had 13 reporters spread out across the country and that doesn’t include the whole “Today” show cast set up at the Museum of Natural History.
As media journalist Brian Stelter smartly pointed out on X: “Today’s eclipse coverage is a testament to the enduring POWER of TV news. The best views of totality won’t come from TikTok or Twitch – they’ll be supplied by old-school networks with the infrastructure and equipment and talent and $$$ to transport you there live.”
Most of the coverage was great fun, and hopefully you got a chance to see either a full or partial eclipse if you live in North America.
NBC “Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt said, “(We) cover a lot of difficult things to report sometimes, but this is magical. … We are in a sea of strangers right now, united by this moment.”
It did seem to be a uniting moment in a country that is so often divided these days.
Jim Diodati, mayor of Niagara Falls, Canada, appeared on NewsNation’s “Morning in America” and said, “I mean, it’s a combination Super Bowl, Woodstock and Christmas Eve. That’s how we feel right now. I got up early, you can feel the anticipation yesterday, I was at the supermarket and I see a lot of our American friends here with plates from all the states in the U.S. And everybody — the anticipation, the buildup and again, we know there won’t be another full total solar eclipse in Niagara Falls for 120 years. So, it’s once in a lifetime, one of the great natural wonders of the world, Niagara Falls, one of the great celestial events all happening at the same time.”
Aside from their reporters, CBS lined up some celebrities, including “Star Trek” actor William Shatner, who said, “It brings to mind the
whole world looking up into space and wishing over that ring of fire for goodness and success to our world — both individual people and the fact that we will care for our world even more assiduously than we have been in the past. … Everything, if you have the right bent of mind, everything is a wonder. Everything is awesome. Just living is
awesome.”
And Bill Nye The Science Guy said, “I just encourage everyone to be in the moment, just take the time to be present, to remember what it felt like, to really experience this remarkable moment when the sun goes completely away and we have nighttime in the middle of the day. And the other extraordinary aspect of this I remind everybody is the precision, where astronomers are able to predict this event within less than 100th of a second, and if you were a tarot card reader or a psychic and you could do that, you would really be something. But they can’t. Astronomers can and this is a wonderful thing.”
This was cool, too, as MSNBC’s
Katy Tur, who was hosting the network’s two-hour live special, walked into a virtual reality set created that showed the science behind the eclipse.
I also appreciated The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona pointing out the absurdity of some coverage with this piece: “Fox News Uses the Solar Eclipse to Fearmonger About Migrant ‘Invasion.’” As Baragona noted, “With millions of Americans eagerly anticipating Monday’s total solar eclipse, Fox News delivered an ominous warning to its viewers: The dramatic celestial event presents a ‘real opportunity’ for migrants to illegally cross the southern border.”
During Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom,” co-anchor Dana Perino said, “Fox News alert! A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground. The southern border will be directly in the path of totality today when the moon covers the sun for nearly four minutes.”
Co-anchor Bill Hemmer added border officials “are bracing for higher traffic than usual,” which means “a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in.”