Hindenburg begins era of shock disaster news
Visceral reaction to zeppelin's fall has become a winning media formula
BY LOUISA THOMAS
It was the disaster that changed the news forever — the world’s first shocking video footage, destined to be replayed over and over again.
When the airship Hindenburg floated over New York on the afternoon of Thursday, May 6, 1937, gliding in the sky like a skyscraper turned on its side, taxi drivers honked and pedestrians stopped to marvel. The Hindenburg had already made 10 round trips between Lakehurst, N.J., and Frankfurt, Germany, but it was still a sight to make people gasp. It was a symbol of the future and the envy of the world. Cities across the country were constructing docking stations. The spire on top of the Empire State Building was intended as a mooring mast (though it was never used as one — a famous picture of a dirigible moored over New York is a fake).
Journalists had gathered at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst to report on the zeppelin’s first arrival of the year, and onlookers came out to watch despite the rain. Around 4:15, a few hours late, the airship reached Lakehurst. The crowd had to wait as a storm forced the airship to pass over the field without landing. Finally, around 7:20, it came to hover in place over the rain-soaked field, ready to be winched down.
One of the journalists present was an announcer from WLS Chicago, a slight, handsome young man named Herbert Morrison. He was there to record a program marking the anniversary of the airship’s first trans-Atlantic flight. This was unusual. Radio stations did not generally prerecord programs — in fact, the big networks had never run a recorded program. But Morrison persuaded the local Chicago station to give it a shot and got American Airlines, which had booked the Hindenburg’s flight, on board.
Morrison’s dispatch was part experiment, part publicity program and part challenge. Describing the tethering of a big dirigible in a colorful way isn’t easy, at least under ordinary circumstances. “The vast motors are just holding it, just enough to keep it from —” he stopped short. “It’s broken into flames!” he yelled. “It’s flashing! Flashing! It’s flashing terrible!” Fire shot out of the top of the airship and the rear began to plummet. Within seconds, the airship was completely consumed by fire. Morrison was screaming, his words accelerating, his tears streaming through his voice. “This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world! … Oh, the humanity!”
The crash of the Hindenburg was not, actually, the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world. As disasters go, the numbers were small. Of the 97 men and women aboard, 35 died. Later that night, after hearing that two-thirds of the passengers had survived, Morrison sounded a little sheepish. Watching the ship go down, he had been convinced that all were killed. “I hope that it isn’t as bad as I made it sound in the beginning,” he said. Too late for that. NBC broke its rules to air Morrison’s radio broadcast to listeners across the country the next day, and pictures were wired around the world. Spectacular film footage of the “flaming inferno” electrified and terrified audiences. The age of the zeppelin was over — and a new age in the history of journalism had begun.
The coverage of the Hindenburg crash was not the first instance of disaster journalism; the genre has been around at least since 1704, when Daniel Defoe described the devastation of southern England in an eyewitness account in “The Storm.” Nor was it the first time a journalist had used new media, visceral descriptions and high-pitched subjectivity to move audiences to sobs and screams. Fifty years earlier, the muckraker Jacob Riis made audiences faint with his photographs of slums in the Lower East Side of New York City. And at the turn of the 20th century, the media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer had practically engineered a war — certainly they were eager to claim the credit — with their lurid accounts of rape and rampage in Cuba.
What made Hindenburg reports different was how immediate and unmediated they felt to audiences. Newsreel extras were whirring on Broadway by noon the next day, and later that afternoon, NBC interrupted regular programming to air 15 minutes of Morrison’s radio broadcast. Unaccustomed to prerecorded news, thousands believed they were hearing a live account. The quality of Morrison’s voice was trustworthy and transporting, so full was it of genuine emotion and horror. He brought people into the scene. His report was so powerful, in fact, that when Orson Welles prepared his actors for his radio stunt “The War of the Worlds,” he had them study Morrison’s recording.
The coverage of the Hindenburg ended the era of the airship. As safety records go, zeppelins actually had a good one. Over 30 years, they carried many thousands of passengers millions of miles with few fatal accidents.
It didn’t matter. Airplanes would soon revolutionize air travel anyway. But the real legacy of the coverage isn’t how it affected transportation; it’s how it affected the news. The coverage of the Hindenburg was news without a point — except to make people scream. Morrison, Pathé, Movietone, Universal and Paramount weren’t speculating about what brought the zeppelin down (historians and scientists still argue about the causes of the fire). They didn’t communicate the scale of what had actually happened. This wasn’t muckraking journalism; it was hardly journalism. It was gut experience shared across the country. And we still can’t get enough of it.
Louisa Thomas is the author of "Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family — A Test of Will and Faith in World War I," to be published in 2011.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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