Planning to Cover an Unpredictable Event: The Apollo 11 Moon Landing on Norwegian Television

In all the Nordic countries national TV covered the moon landing in 1969, but this is the only study of how one of them actually did it. Norway’s public service broadcaster, the NRK, made their longest television broadcast to date, with their live coverage of Apollo 11’s landing on the surface of the moon. Even though the NRK based their coverage on the big, international satellite transmissions from NASA, there was plenty of time for their home made program coverage between them. Thus, Norwegian viewers experienced the moon landing through a mix where the NASA transmissions was combined with material that NRK thought would be important. The result was that the US triumph on the moon was followed by four TV debates as well as interviews with famous Norwegian artists at the time as well as reports from foreign correspondents contradicting what Dayan and Katz sees as the most important characteristic of the live TV coverage of a media event: its loyalty to the ongoing event. The amount of critical comments on the live Norwegian TV coverage of the moon land is in fact surprisingly high. The study is based on a detailed work with all remaining sources from the broadcast, because the original broadcast has been lost to posterity in the NRK television archive. This is the first time that results from this study is presented for international readers in English.