What were you watching when.....?

SAD BREAKING NEWS IN TELEVISION HISTORY!

I know that yesterday, April 16th, was one of the saddest days in history when 33 people were shot to death on the campus of Virginia Tech. This was the deadliest shooting massacre in United States history. I know there have been several shootings and major sad events caught on television. With 9/11, the JFK shooting, John Lennon, and the scenes of war, what important events you can remember that would be considered as breaking news. Not the breaking news of car chases that you would see on Fox News or CNN, but serious breaking news that you would see on all networks?

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The Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict. Riots occured all around the nation.

OJ Simpson car chase was carried by all networks.

Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle explosions. ( I believe Apollo 1 fire was also carried, but not old enough to remember.)

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The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the failed 1993 Branch Davidian assault in Waco come to mind.

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The Columbine High School shootings come to mind.

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( I believe Apollo 1 fire was also carried, but not old enough to remember.)

My recollection was that there was a special about the Apollo 1 fire, but no continuous coverage. Grissom, White and Chaffee died during a practice session inside the capsule atop the rocket. A spark ignited the blaze in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the capsule. The seals on the capsule were locked and the men perished. I remember a break-in news bulletin and an hour special at 10.

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Ten-four, I remember it well. The fire took about 17 seconds. The astronauts were found at the door, which was designed to take 90 seconds to open. NASA made the decision to go to the mixed air enviroment. The space program returned to launch a lot faster than by today's standards. In 2 years, NASA was on the moon.

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The Amish School Shooting just about 6 months ago..... BOY TIME PASSES YOU BY FAST!!!

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Talking about NASA...The 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters come to mind. I guess I was always just fascinated by space travel as a kid and I remember seeing the Challeneger explosion that morning on TV. Very sad.
Or even Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We had days of coverage on that.

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1) Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. Bobby Kennedy broke the news to an Indianapolis crowd at a Presidential campaign rally. The sound that crowd made is still the most heartbreaking I think that's ever been recorded. The following day, Kennedy gave a speech in Ohio, and I'm positive at least one of the networks carried it live; it was the one where he wondered aloud "who next will be the victim of bloodshed."

2) Robert F. Kennedy assassination. Shot on the 4th of June, 1968, died early on the 6th.

3) The 1968 Democratic National Convention. Soured so many Democrats that they didn't bother showing up at the polls in November, and we got Nixon as a result.

4) The October Crisis of 1970. A Canadian event, but a damned serious one, leading Prime Minister Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act. It involved the kidnapping of a British trade official and the Vice-Premier of Quebec, the latter of whom was eventually murdered, by Quebec separatist terrorists.

5) Iranian Hostage Crisis.

6) Tianamen Square Massacre.

7) The First Gulf War.

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Didn't "Niteline" start as a result of the Iranian Hostage crisis?

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Two major plane crashes outside of 9/11 come to my mind. The first one was the Air Florida flight that crashed on the 14th Street Bridge in DC during rush hour traffic in snowstorm, and the news crews helplessly watched survivors in below in the icy waters of the Potomac River below.

The other plance crash was that of the final descent of the United Airlines Flight 232 in 1989...

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Obviously, 9/11 (in recent memory, anyway) trumps anything else. I can't count John Lennon, because I didn't hear about it, for some reason, till the next morning. The saddest for me, anyway, is pretty recent; the Bluffton University baseball team bus crash in Atlanta (my daughter knows one of the players who didn't make the trip, and when my kids were little, they played with one of the young men who died...Also, the husband and wife bus drivers who died had driven for some bus trips sponsored by the radio station where I work.)

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tlyle said:

Didn't "Niteline" start as a result of the Iranian Hostage crisis?

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That is true. Originally during the early days of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, ABC had a nightly 15-20 minute update called "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage" every night at 11:30 PM (Eastern). Since the crisis was not going to go away soon, in December, 1979, ABC decided to expand the 11:30 PM program to 30 minutes and named it "Nightline". The also changed anchors from the late Frank Reynolds to Ted Koppel.

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Yes, as a nightly update on that ordeal.

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tlyle said:

The Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict. Riots occured all around the nation.

OJ Simpson car chase was carried by all networks.

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The L.A. Riots hit home for me, because I lived a couple miles north of where Reginald Denny was beaten, at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues in South Los Angeles. I had just turned 12 a month and half before this, and I remember coming home from school (I was in 6th grade at the time) and watching the verdict as it came down (about 3:30 in the afternoon), and then three hours later was when the Denny incident took place. I'm watching all this stuff on television and looking out through my neighborhood, and I never saw anything like what took place those three days. Thinking about it now, we're coming up on the 15th anniversary of the riots (April 29th), and most of the neighborhoods in South Los Angeles have slowly and surely recovered, although there's still some more work to do. As a result, lots of new businesses (including developments by Magic Johnson and Carolina Panthers WR Keyshawn Johnson--who grew up not far where I lived) popped up that some people thought would never happen.

As for the O.J. car chase, I was watching the Rockets-Knicks NBA Finals matchup on NBC when it occured. They put the game in a small picture in the bottom right of the screen, and aired the car chase full screen. Fast forward to a couple years later, when the verdict was delievered, the high school I attended feared that it might be a riot if the O.J. verdict went the other way, and warned everybody (over the P.A. system) what would happen if they caused trouble. I always thought that O.J. may have not killed Nicole and Ron Goldman, but he knew who did it and isn't talking, but whatever...

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Didn't "Niteline" start as a result of the Iranian Hostage crisis?

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Yes...the program began during the 444 days of the hostage crisis and was originally designed to give nightly updates on the situation.

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genius said:

Two major plane crashes outside of 9/11 come to my mind. The first one was the Air Florida flight that crashed on the 14th Street Bridge in DC during rush hour traffic in snowstorm, and the news crews helplessly watched survivors in below in the icy waters of the Potomac River below.

Click to expand...

My parents have told me that story...I wasn't born then for some reason I always thought it was an myth or urban legend but that I found that story is how Howard Stern first became famous on his radio show by the calling the airliner to ask how much a one-way ticket cost from Reagan National to the 14th Street Bridge!

Also saw the story on the Weather Channel

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It's true that Nightline was born out of the nightly report on the Iranian hostage crisis. In the pre-cable news days, it was common for all the networks to do a 15 minute to half hour special report when there was major news that broke that day.

One thing not already mentioned: The Reagan assassination attempt.
The John Lennon murder was more of a radio event for me...I announced it then listened to WABC.


More regional..a plane crash on Halloween night in Roselawn, IN near Chicago on Halloween when there was a front that went through that resulted in icing. The flight originated in Indianapolis, and there was extensive coverage from the scene.

Also..the 1974 Xenia, OH tornado.

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I was in Los Angeles visiting from San Diego, only to find the San Diego stations being simulcast because of the "Heavens Gate" cult suicide. So that comes to mind...


Gee, I wonder if they found their "Mother Ship?"

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Appollo 1 Fire
Believe it was a Friday night. I was home from college. ABC interrupted programming and showed teletype sheet on a card while the V/O announcer read the copy. Later that night, probably 10:30 Jules Bergman came on with a fairly terse re-hash. NBC ran a "Gul Instant Special" on it, but at the time there were not many details available. There was no continuous coverage, was treated as spot news for a few days.

RFK
Live continuous coverage of his final journey home from California to New York City to Washington. I recall that since no network could provide live coverage from the funneral train, CBS ran stock footage of train rails/tracks while Uncle Walter read pool wire reports that were tossed off at each station on the route.

Appollo Around the Moon Christmas Eve 1968
The three major networks carried the "show" from the crew earlier that evening that ended with the reading of the passage from Genesis, but NBC stayed on all night to first report the burn that put them into lunar orbit (TLI - Translunar Inserion) and then their emergence from behind the moon after firing the rockets that would break them out of the orbit. That was the time they had electric trains running on the studio floor to show how the flight went. The overnight broadcast was anchored by Jim Hartz (not John Hart who was with CBS