To put to rest the questions and conspiracy theories about why Discovery chose to air the show so soon, let me clear up that mystery.
The air date for the show was set weeks before we left Honolulu. Like all networks, the bottom line for Discovery is ratings - delivering viewers for sponsors. August 19th comes at the end of Shark Week - Discovery's biggest audience grabber. Airing our show at the end of Shark Week is nothing more than Discovery's attempt to hold onto that big audience for one more day.
Discovery didn't know if we'd find anything but based on previous experience they knew that TIGHAR expeditions make great television. The public loves Earhart, we do good science, we deliver vicarious adventure, and we're absolutely authentic. Obviously, we all hoped for a big, dramatic, conclusive find but we also knew that rarely happens.
At the end of the expedition all we knew is that we had not seen anything interesting in the standard definition video. I hoped, but didn't honestly expect, that something would turn up in the HD video, but just getting it processed and ready to review turned out to be a time-consuming process. It was this past Monday before the first five and a half hour batch of video reached Jeff Glickman. Jeff spotted the debris field stuff late on Tuesday. He worked on it all day on Wednesday while I matched the time-code on the video to the ROV logs to pin down where the debris is. By 04:00 Thursday morning Jeff had his initial report ready. On Thursday we worked out with Discovery how to break the news and on Friday they were able to insert it in the show (way past the supposed deadline for changes).
So there was no "showmanship" beyond the desire to present the best, most accurate show to the biggest possible audience.