Your comment caused my thoughts to go back to the Challenger tragedy. I told my family at the time it was a media-political calamity, and I still believe that.
Shuttle launches in those days were big news. As I recall there had been two previous launch delays for repairs. The delays were accompanied by a rising media howl suggesting that NASA, like everything else they despised in the Reagan Administration, was incompetent. Even before that fateful morning I had been concerned that NASA officials would let PR, not solid technical judgment, influence the launch.
When I turned on the TV and saw them knocking icicles off the equipment I began to get a very bad feeling. It increased as it became clear that NASA was going for launch in temperatures and conditions never before experienced. I knew nothing about 0-rings or other technical stuff -- I only had a certainty in the pit of my stomach this was not a good time to worry about media intimidation. I don't know if I'd have had the job-security and peer-pressure courage to call the launch off that morning even though Thiokol engineers themselves were recommending it -- there's something very powerful about knowing you're appearing on multi-millions of TV screens around the world. But it's terrible that someone didn't have the authority and political protection to tell the media to go push a rope.
Of course NASA was itself responsible for the particularly intense media attention with its decision to showboat by sending a teacher into space. This was a pure PR move to convince Congress more money was needed to broaden NASA's mission.
Didn't the Waco debacle start as a media-event staged by fund-hungry fed agencies?