The Media Does Not Want To Talk About This Historic NASA Launch. Here’s Why.

On Christmas Eve of 1968, as American soldiers became increasingly involved in a protracted war in a faraway country, and as political assassinations were becoming a regular feature of domestic politics — stop me if any of that sounds familiar — a single broadcast was watched by more than a quarter of the world’s population. I’ll say that again. One in four people on the planet, across dozens of countries, stopped what they were doing and watched a single broadcast. That had never happened before. And it’s never happened since.

This massive audience was not tuning into a deranged, depressing political podcast. They weren’t watching a hysterical panel on CNN, or the latest true crime documentary to roll off the assembly line at Netflix, or the season finale of a network television drama that was produced to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They weren’t watching an endless stream of dreck on the internet, either, courtesy of social media algorithms designed to confuse and demoralize them.