“That Was Just a Coincidence”: What a Children’s Radio Show from the 1980’s Can Teach Us About Stopping the Spread of Misinformation Today
In the 1980’s, Kids America, a Peabody Award-winning syndicated radio show for children, tackled thorny topics of all shapes and sizes, but I am drawn time and time again to the episode that aired on the day the Space Shuttle Challenger shuttle exploded. On that day, January 28, 1986, a listener called in and asked for a song, a “maybe everything is okay” sort of song, insisting that the astronauts had indeed survived the crash. So, Susan Dias, one of the musicians, who appeared frequently on Kids America, whipped up a tune.
Co-host Kathy O’Connell described Dias’ approach. “Susan’s process of improvisation was to go along with what the child was requesting. She created a pretty good fairly noncommittal song about holding out hope in the face of adversity.”
She added, “By the time Kids America came on live at 6:30, the news had been pretty clear that there was no chance that anyone had survived. I remember in our follow-up after the song, I made the point that a song or a story can be very comforting, but that we need to also be realistic in the face of bad times.” That was the day that O’Connell started playing “The Rainbow Connection,” a song from the 1979 film The Muppet Movie, on her show during times of crisis.
That evening, she also brought on board a frequent guest, Martha Dodge, to help compose a letter to the family of Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who had been selected to serve as one of the seven crew members on the Challenger. She would have been the first American civilian to enter space.
On first listen, the exercise seems designed to calm listeners, to give them an open forum, where they can express their condolences, their concerns, and their sympathies. And, it clearly serves this role in spades. But what sparked my interest in this episode was a single exchange between Jennifer, a young student from California, and Kathy O’Connell, the co-host of Kids America; and one of her guests, Martha Dodge:
Jennifer, a listener from California: Today we were at school, and my teacher told us that five minutes ago the space shuttle crashed, and everybody sat in silence, and we were all really shocked, because there had never been a space shuttle that…well…we had one that had something wrong, but…it never crashed.
Kathy O’Connell, Kids America’s co-host: It’s true. Andy called us from Minnesota, and he pointed out that there has been no tragic accident involved with the American Space Program since 1967 — the Apollo Mission in which three astronauts died, and that was on the ground.
Martha Dodge, a frequent guest: Yeah, on the ground before they took off.
Jennifer: And there was this girl, she was reading about a fiction story about a space shuttle that crashed, and she was telling us about it. And everybody said, ‘How could you predict the future?’ cause the next day the space shuttle crashed.
Kathy: Jennifer, now you and I both know that that’s something called coincidence, right?
Jennifer: Uh huh.
Kathy: Okay. No prediction of the future there, I’m happy to say. That was just coincidence. Jennifer, thanks a lot for being with us today on Kids America.
Here, in a matter of seconds, O’Connell and Dodge set the factual record straight and debunk misinformation related to the crash using what can only be described as the most soothing of voices I have ever heard. And, while I haven’t been able to track Jennifer down, the episode got me thinking about how other kid callers were impacted by the show.
I wrote to Leah Oppenzato, a former listener of Kids America, who is now a teacher in Brooklyn, New York; to learn to what extent she remembered the Challenger explosion and what role the show played in shaping her understanding of the crisis. In a series of messages on Facebook, she delved into the way the show and Kathy O’Connell, in particular, provided her with a community that helped her understand and make sense of the event.
“The tone did help me deal with a confusing day spent listening to grownups tell me how I should feel,” she explained. “I think the idea of the letter was incredibly empowering, giving kids a chance to express themselves on their own terms, and do something real. (I mean that is how I am dealing with the current presidential administration!!).”
She added, “Kids America was the community that was most helpful to me in terms of processing that incident (rather than public school or Hebrew school. and they both tried).”
It was fascinating to me that Oppenzato drew this linkage between the Challenger explosion and the arrival of a new presidential administration. As we spoke, I explained that I had begun to dig in the New York Public Radio archives to see how the hosts of Kids America had handled other crises and pivotal moments in U.S. history marked by tangible, strife, or ideological disagreement. Which events, I wondered, had been left unmentioned, and which had hosts intentionally put on their listeners’ radar?
I wasn’t alive in the eighties; I was a germ of an idea. So, I asked Oppenzato a question that has long been on my mind: what were the main pivotal political crises that she remembered from her childhood, and which of them — if any — did Kathy O’Connell and the rest of the Kids America choose to mention on the show?
Oppenzato responded, “My family was very, very political, and so were all of my other contexts, and while on Kids America they said stuff about how ‘grownups will never use those bombs’, I was surrounded by grown ups telling me they were going to drop those bombs ANY DAY NOW. So I knew the Kids America version wasn’t true (in my eyes at least) but I thought they were so sweet to try not to scare us.”
Oppenzato’s words resonated with me. What I respect so tremendously about Kids America — based on the footage I’ve listened to and the small number of interviews I’ve conducted with past listeners — is its dual emphasis on the safekeeping of facts and the cultivation of community. The beauty in the show’s set-up is that its producers and co-hosts did not want young listeners to be a passive presence; O’Connell and her team took thousands of calls from them each week. Many phoned to chat on air with O’Connell and with her many guests, some of whom were kids themselves. Others wanted to weigh in on the show’s nightly song challenge.
The dynamic helped dissolve traditional hierarchies between adults and children, putting co-hosts and listeners alike on equal footing. Oppenzato echoed this sentiment, when I asked about what she took away from her own listening experiences.
“Ultimately probably Kids America did make me feel comfortable challenging adults,” she said, “simply because it made me feel comfortable with adults.”
Kathy O’Connell has been doing children’s radio since the 1980's — first at Kids America and now at WPXN’s Kids Corner. In an email to me, O’Connell told me that no matter the presidential candidate, each cycle she employs a standard approach as an audio storyteller:
“On Kids Corner, I’ve pretty much dealt with Presidential elections and Inaugurations the same way over the years: Talking about the history of the process and the laws & customs behind it. I am VERY opinionated about my politics, but I think the most important thing I can do to nurture that in new generations is sticking to the facts. It’s bad enough I inflict my opinions on my friends & family. My listeners shouldn’t be subjected to that. So I focus on the facts around the rights and responsibilities of being an American, which are beautifully laid out in the Constitution.”
She added, “During Inauguration week, my daily Instant Question focuses on Presidential Inaugurations of the past. In Election Years, I devote time to major players in history from both parties more than any given current event.”
When I asked her if her strategy differed, much in the 1980s, O’Connell wrote me, “Kids America was on for the election of 1984, and I ran for President. At least, I kept saying I was running for President, so it became a running gag that I kept insisting I was running for President.”
“I think we did a segment talking about whether kids should be able to vote, since my only campaign issue seemed to be lowering the voting age so I could get elected. One of my listeners even made me a campaign poster using my picture from the cover of the WNYC program guide and a Kids America sticker. I still have the poster hanging on my wall.”
That evening, she texts me this drawing, sent in by a young listener, Jennie Schneier.
While exploring Kids America and its Challenger disaster coverage, I saw the great potential of children’s radio as a tool in the fight against the spread of misinformation among youth.
I’m trying retrospectively to see how a single show in the 1980's empowered listeners to become fact-checkers, question askers, and active contributors to an industry dominated by adults. One could easily argue that what I am doing is ridden with error — that this historical quest for tools and tactics to combat misinformation cannot possibly yield any findings that might assist youth in the Age of Trump. The times have changed, but must the tools?
I can’t sit here and share any conclusions — apart from the continued hypothesis that Kids America empowered its listeners to combat misinformation by creating a community that valued facts over fiction. When I began this research, I expected that every show that aired would be archived and available, but it turns out that that was not the case. When I went to Andy Lanset, an archivist and audio preservation specialist, who currently serves as the Director of Archives at the New York Public Radio, I initially requested shows from these dates: November 5, 1984 (the day before the U.S. presidential election); November 6, 1984 (the day of the U.S. presidential election); November 7, 1984 (the day after the U.S. presidential election); January 21, 1985 (the day after the second inauguration of Ronald Reagan); October 19, 1987 (Black Monday); and October 20, 1987 (Terrible Tuesday). Ultimately, only two dates had been successfully archived.
The reason for this gap in the repository is in part, because the New York Public Radio Archives were only established in the year 2000. “Up to that point,” he said, “whether material was saved was pretty much up to individual producers and where they could find space to stash our now outdated formats.” Lanset added, “So, there are gaps in the collection depending on what I found at the time and what we have been able to repatriate since then from former producers and other institutional collections. Overall our mandate is to save everything produced by and with WNYC and WQXR since they went on the air in 1924 and 1936 respectively.”
Discovering Kids America’s small but not so insignificant fact checking in the New York Public Radio Archives left me with a series of questions.
How can we get better at archiving misinformation and revisiting junctures in U.S. history, when people stopped it from spreading?
As we turn towards the future of misinformation, what are the merits of looking at its past?
Who, among us, is going to guide the next generation of fact-checkers in America?
It’s tempting to try to answer all of these serious questions in one fell swoop, but right now, all I really want to do is play Kids America on repeat and build a time capsule made out of sound.
