Friday, August 11, 2017

Darkness Falls Across the Land

From the time machine, Uncle Walter talking about something that's going to happen just a few days from now,  a full eight years after his death:


1979 Total Solar Eclipse TV News Report from Michael Kentrianakis on Vimeo.

The interesting thing will be seeing if the nightly newscast report of the eclipse coming August 21 will be anywhere near four and a half minutes long. Broadcast news attention spans are a whole lot shorter these days.

2 comments:

fillyjonk said...

1. I suspect it will probably depend on what kind of "saber rattling" is going on and whether the news outlets expect that will freak more people out. Or whatever atrocity is happening somewhere on Earth.

2. I was a kid but I vaguely remember the news about it (where my family lived, we were well outside of totality but I vaguely remember making one of those shoebox things) and all the excitement about how they were going to learn more about the corona.

3. Cronkite was considerably more polished/poetic in his delivery than most news broadcasters today. I forgot how the news used to be...

Friar said...

He used to keep a typewriter on a pull-out shelf at the desk in case something broke and he needed to bang out a few lines of copy to read and keep straight. I can't imagine a modern newsmuppet being able to write something on the fly like that.

I was in 9th grade and the guys in the shop class had glazed a few sheets of glass like their welder's masks so people could view it.