A nice video (via Les, with good commentary) put together by Slate, speculating on what media coverage of the first Moon Landing would have looked like if it were 2009, not 1969.
Yeah, I suspect so. While there may be some “Golden Age of News” blinders in our memory, the fancy-shmancy graphics, the man-on-the-street commentary, story arc titles, panels of talking heads, and Twitter feeds (fergoshsakes) all look like the sort of non-information dreck that’s taken over TV news. All that was missing was someone interactively drawing orbits around the Moon on a huge touch screen panel, and someone on Fox speculating that it was all a hoax to distract attention from Obama’s birth certificate …
The Google Maps bit, though, was clever. That’s information, folks, a way to show a map of what’s happening where on the Moon. There are things the news media can do to inform, rather than entertain. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much money in that.