Is it a case of mystery repeating? For the second time in recent weeks, a local television station airing the Fox documentary series, “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” bumped a segment covering the subject of evolution off the air, the
Times-Picayune of New Orleans reports.
WVUE in Louisiana was showing the broadcast in prime time on Sunday when host Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remarks on climate change and dinosaur extinction were “abruptly overrun,” according to the Times-Picayune. One minute and 24 seconds of program were displaced by a news promo and a PSA, followed by regularly scheduled commercials.
The station’s general manager blamed the glitch on an “automation error.” WVUE will re-air the program in its entirety on Thursday,
Mediabistro reports.
A
similar hiccup hit the series’ premiere in March on KOKH in Oklahoma City, when about 15 seconds of the program
disappeared behind a news promo, Mediabistro reports. The station’s management tweeted an apology and blamed the lapse on “operator error.”
In that missing section, the astronomer Tyson said, “Three and a half million years ago our ancestors, yours and mine, left these traces. We stood up, and parted ways from them. Once we stood on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated on the ground. Now we were free to look up, and wonder.”
Since the update of Carl Sagan’s famous “Cosmos” series began airing on Fox, some religious groups have criticized it as incompatible with, and insensitive to, biblical teachings on the origin of life.
But so far, conspiracy theories involving divine intervention or deliberate attempts to bleep evolution from the program have remained on the Internet’s fringes.
Sunday’s episode resumed on the Louisiana station with Tyson still discussing evolution.