The Challenger Speech: A Case Study - Part I

As a communicator, one of your key tasks would be to align your message with the interests of your audience. But although it may be easy to determine the interests of 10 people, it would be a bit difficult to determine the interests of a hundred of them, and it would be a daunting task to do the same for 1,000 people. 

So, how do you address many people effectively, i.e., how can you find common ground for your speech for a variety of audience constituencies? 

Consider a situation wherein you need to address millions of people who have different objectives. In the next video, David will talk about a difficult situation that former US President Ronald Reagan faced in the wake of the Challenger Disaster.

You can see how the US space program was not just aimed at discovering space; it was, in fact, a matter of motivating the country's children, filling the citizens with national pride and proving a point to adversaries. 

However, after a series of successful space programs and rocket launches, no one expected the Challenger space shuttle project to end the way it did. The next video is a live replay of the event; it was what everyone watching their TV had endured.

The Challenger disaster was an unexpected failure and tragedy for the country. Given the immense scale, months of planning and preparation that went into the project, the US president had to accommodate an emergency address to the nation on the same day as the event.

You will now learn from David how the news was circulated in the US media in the 1980s, and how such a mode of communication of live events impacted the president's address.

So, while newspapers and magazines would pitch in with information and insights later, the live news channels had already telecast the event across the nation. The audience knew what had happened, as they had watched it on TV. They were now looking for more details on how the President was planning to act in the wake of the event.

To address the nation in the wake of the Challenger Disaster, former US President Ronald Reagan delivered a brief speech. This speech ranks 8th in the list of the top 100 American speeches of the 20th century, which is compiled by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A&M University.

Listen to the speech in the next video and try to understand why it ranks so high on the aforementioned list.

As you saw in this video, the speech delivered by Ronald Reagen was addressed to not just a single type of audience but to the multiple stakeholders of the Challenger event. This speech projected him as an empathetic, compassionate and strong leader to the varied audience. 

In the next segment, David will analyse President Reagan's speech and recommend ways to build a speech targeted towards multiple audience constituencies.