I well remember PBS covering those early planetary probe missions
when no other network could be bothered (and CNN would not exist
until 1980 to boot).
Pioneer 11's flyby of Saturn in 1979 was one standout: I kept wishing
it could have taken at least a few closeup images of some of Saturn's
moons besides Titan, which proved to be a bit on the cloudy side.
There might have been something after this, but the last space probe
mission I remember PBS covering all night long was the Voyager 2 mission
to Neptune in 1989.
To swing this back to Viking, we can "thank" the relatively poor mainstream
media coverage of those Mars missions with inspiring Carl Sagan to do
something about it: He started The Planetary Society as one response
to help the public become more aware and educated about the Cosmos.
Space/Science » in reply to re: ...1976
When all we had was PBS