24 Comments

1. Gerard Van der Leun:

The moral is that, in general, all breaking news is bad news. When the rare moment of nationally shared good news happens it’s like a tonic to the soul.

Breaking news is always, as they say, “developing…”

I’d treasure the feelings that came with the good news, but just because it later turned out to be not so good doesn’t mean it wasn’t good for a bit.

Jan 4, 2006 - 8:14 am 2. byrd:

No, there are no lessons, no morals, just some reminders of things we already knew. Mining continues to be dangerous work. Bad things happen to good people. Be skeptical of initial reports.

Jan 4, 2006 - 8:27 am 3. Keith_Indy:

This just reinforces my image of the main stream media. That they are more concerned with making headlines then with pursuing the truth.

Breaking News Syndrome – being more concerned with making headlines, and scooping others, then with pursuing and publishing the truth.

And what happened with the news is adding insult to injury for those people who lost someone in this tragic incident.

Jan 4, 2006 - 8:45 am 4. David Thomson:

ìThis just reinforces my image of the main stream media. That they are more concerned with making headlines then with pursuing the truth.î

I also suspect sloppy journalism. We will know more as the story unfolds. The odds are, however, high that the MSM has once again humiliated itself.

Jan 4, 2006 - 9:16 am 5. Anthony (Los Angeles):

Byrd: there is one lesson here, and it’s about trusting the mainstream media. Once again, just as they did during Katrina’s aftermath, the MSM was falling all over itself to be part of the story, breathlessly reporting every rumor, instead of being skeptical and getting confirmation.

While I couldn’t decide who was worse last night, Fox’s Geraldo or CNN’s Anderson Cooper, I was most struck when I heard the bad news this morning by my memory of Fox’s Bill Hemmer wondering why there had been no press conference, why they hadn’t seen a company official for hours or the rescued miners. He was on the edge of being a real journalist, but instead chose to rely unquestioningly on what others told him. Just as with the Katrina horror stories.

That aside, however, this has got to be a nightmare for the families involved. Those poor people.

Jan 4, 2006 - 9:34 am 6. Lola:

This morning, I broke my boycott of Good Morning America for a bit an watched Matt Lauer’s interview with the governor and the son of one of the deceased miners. When the son referred to three deaths (or was it injuries?) in the past in the mine, Matt Lauer replied “that’s 3 people too many”.

Umm, well nothing is risk-free in life. Not to let the mining company off the hook, of course; they seem, just from the 200+ safety violations, to be negligent. But hazardous occupations will always have some sort of risks involved.

I guess my point is that in cases like this, the decent thing would be to simply let the bereaved relatives make their statements and not to injerect with their own point of view, lest they be seen as editorializing.

Jan 4, 2006 - 9:35 am 7. Esbiem:

Wretcherd at The Belmont Club, aka: fallbackbelmont dot blogspot dot com addresses the issue of rushing out headlines prior to getting all the facts. His comments are well reasoned as usual. The crux of his biscuit is that even if you hold back, double check your finding and release a more thorough report, you are just as likely to generate more errors in your reporting.

There was no intentional misdirection last night that brough brief joy to the families of the missing, and the media was “just doing its’ job. Even blogs got it wrong. My hissy fit with the establishment media last night was that all of the reporters asking the questions at the press conference at the mine were novices to mining issues and really didn’t know what to ask , other than “how do you feel about the missing and their “surviving” families and friends?” Give me a break, do we really need to hear the answer to such questions let alone to hear the questions themselves. Why couldn’t the networks get knowledgeable people to the site to ask pertenant questions, or to feed questions to the reporters? They got Anderson Cooper there in a timely fashion, why not the chairman of the department of mines at the Colorado Institute of mining?

Jan 4, 2006 - 10:18 am 8. Francois Baird:

This is really sad, particularly because I smell weak management. As a South African who grew up in a mining community and have over two decades of crisis management behind me (too many of them to mention being mining crises)I know that one of the most difficult jobs is to keep weak managements from talking about good news before it is fully verified. The cruelty of not following this rule has just been vividly exposed.

The other clues about weak management are the lack of professional crisis communication management expertise on site and 200 mine safety violations in a year.

Management must personally shoulder their responsibility in this sad event, not because the event happened – mining is a tough territory – but because a weak management must be held to the flame, if they are to be trusted with managing a dangerous enterprise.

Jan 4, 2006 - 10:19 am 9. byrd:

You’re quite right Anthony. But I filed that under ‘reminder’ rather then ‘lesson.’ A lesson is generally something new. As far as media reliability, this is just one more thing to throw on the mountain-sized pile of other things.

And while Wretchard runs a great site, it seems fairly clear that the media could have gotten this one right if they cared enough to try. But they didn’t care enough.

Jan 4, 2006 - 10:31 am 10. rastajenk:

That’s a good point, Esbiem, I wondered about that last night, too. MSNBC now has Robert Hager there, who has shown in the past to be comfortable taking on complicated, science-based stories; but last night all they had was the pouty Rita Crosby, who seemed to know nothing but had plenty to say.

The USA Today’s front page this morning had a large picture of….drum roll, please….a screenshot of CNN with the breaking news that the miners were found alive. On page three, the actual story had NO attributable quotes to that effect. The only official mining company quotes were the earlier ones about a “glimmer” of hope and long odds. So essentially, there was no independent approach on the part of USA Today, for one, to accuracy and fact-checking.

I wonder if the people in the “command center” had any idea of the scope of the media frenzy going on outside. They were rescue specialists, regulators, company officials; not PR spin-controllers. That’s not their specialty. I’m not for letting them off the hook, somebody made an egregiously grievous mistake. But the media, in CYA mode, will surely look to demonize everybody but themselves for this terrible slice of live journalism.

Jan 4, 2006 - 10:33 am 11. Bruce Wechsler:

For me, the rise and fall was immediate. I went to sleep before the “good news” broke and didn’t listen to the news during my morning commute.

On line at the office cafeteria, I saw the positive headline on the “USA Today” pile at cash the register. I said out loud (to no one in particular) “Wow. They found ‘em alive!” Immediately, a colleague responded with a whince “No…they’re all dead, but one. The report was wrong”.

I can’t exactly put in words why this blunder makes the loss more tragic, but it does.

Jan 4, 2006 - 10:34 am 12. In Vino Veritas:

The Company knew within twenty minutes that the initial report of survivors was wrong. They chose to sit on that information for three hours while the families were given this false hope – celebrating in the Church, celebrating on the streets.

The Company’s explanation was that they wanted to be aboslutely sure about what the status of the miners was. Bullshit. They knew, at the very least, that no survivors had yet been found; they could have at least informed the families that the initial report was incorrect.

The families heard the initial reports from the Company, not the media. As much as I understand the desire of some to blame the media for everything, the Company is the culprit here.

Jan 4, 2006 - 10:56 am 13. PC14:

I was watching O’Reilly on FOX and one of those booming Alert screens came on and then the voice of Geraldo. He was over the top emotionally and just kept going on and on, way too long about the miners being alive. It was great news but even the FOX talking head in the studio looked uncomfortable as kept repeating himself.

I rewound the TIVO and called my wife in and played it. She actually thought it was satire from SNL until I told her it was real.

Might even go so far as to say Geraldo sounded like he had slamed a few too many. Just my observation, he may not be a drinking guy for all I know.

Jan 4, 2006 - 11:22 am 14. Ed Poinsett:

The media were on the grounds for 40 hours before the false story hit. In all that time no producers lined up an authority who could confirm or deny rumors which are bound to happen in an emotional drama such as this. It was Shepard Smith in New Orleans deja vu. Anderson Cooper chose to source the report from a guy who was a friend of somebody instead of a proper authority.

Why no caveats that the story was unconfirmed?

It is another example of shoddy workmanship by the fact checked, multi editored MSM.

Jan 4, 2006 - 11:52 am 15. Sandy P:

The MSM is blaming the families?????????????

Jan 4, 2006 - 11:55 am 16. Terrye:

IVV:

You do not have the slightest idea what you are talking about.

The media did the same thing here that they did with Katrina… they decided they would get the maximum mileage out of someone else’s pain and suffering.

I live in Indiana. I know coal miners. I know how these kinds of thing works. I know of people who have actually lost people in these kinds of accidents and the truth is nobody knew anything for sure within twenty minutes. That is the whole damn point.

People don’t know anything about the business, they do not know if the management was negligent or not, they do not understand the citations or what they mean, they don’t even know what it entailed in a rescue like this.

I got up last night and turned on the TV and I smelled a rat immediately. I knew there had been no confirmation from the mining people of what had happened. There had been no press conference called.

There was just a lot of idiot reporters making a bad situation worse than it had to be for the sheer nasty fun of it and now before the first miner has even been buried the media and their loyal fan club are all ready trying to find someone to blame.

Mining is a dangerous business. My father was a roughneck on the oil rigs and damn near died in a terrible accident many years ago. There are certain kinds of jobs that carry inherent risks. So before we turn that manager Hatfield into Micheal Brown maybe we should wait and see what is going on.

BTW, if anything comes of this it will be more paperwork, more regulations, and in the end people will still die in terrible accidents like this.

Jan 4, 2006 - 11:58 am 17. Rick Z:

In our postmodern media culture,where “feelings” trump “knowledge” and journalism is regarded by its practitioners as a profession that only those who inhabit the rarified bubble of liberal arts post-secondary education and the contemporary newsroom are fit to practice, this tragic miscommunication is hardly surprising. We certainly saw it with Katrina, where virtually every “fact” disseminated by the media during the first 72 hours turned out to be wrong, and we see it every day in the hopelessly wrongheaded coverage of science, the GWOT and the economy. These people know nothing.

Once upon a time Journalism was a craft practiced by adults with real-life experience in the military, in small business, on the farm, or public service where the wisdom gained by actual knowledge informed the best coverage of complex issues. Now we have method acting meat-puppets with good hair and soft academic degrees.

Jan 4, 2006 - 12:03 pm 18. Sandy P:

Let’s see, 6/10th of a mile to get to the track, 2 miles of track away from the opening to bring them up.

Performing CPR wearing full-face masks and carrying oxygen on 13 people.

I can understand garbled.

Jan 4, 2006 - 12:27 pm 19. Lola:

Oh, absolutely, you’re right. But people like Matt Lauer don’t understand that. And these are the folks who shape our opinions, one way or the other.

Jan 4, 2006 - 12:34 pm 20. Keith_Indy:

IVV – The families heard the initial reports from the Company, not the media. As much as I understand the desire of some to blame the media for everything, the Company is the culprit here.

************

Unfortunetly there isn’t a shread of evidence that I’ve seen as to who actually told the families the initial “good news”

A couple of rumors, but nothing concrete.

And it WAS the media that compounded any initial error.

And the Company was correct in wanting to get the facts straight before telling the family.

That they didn’t come out and say, wait that rumor you heard was wrong, and NOT have the truth, wouldn’t have been a decision I would want to make.

Jan 4, 2006 - 1:15 pm 21. Terrye:

I hate to sound like an old fart..but once upon a time the press would have been kept at arm’s length in a situation like this and they would have given out the information after the Authorities released a statement to them.

Imagine that, waiting for confirmation..how quaint.

Jan 4, 2006 - 1:16 pm 22. Keith_Indy:

For what it’s worth

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/01/04/D8EU32887.html

The head of the company that owns a West Virginia coal mine where 12 miners died says the owners “sincerely regret” that families erroneously believed for three hours that their loved ones were alive.

Ben Hatfield says about 45 minutes after an initial erroneous report that 12 miners had survived, word came that all but one of the miners were dead. He says the immediate reaction was that the report could be wrong. And he says company officials didn’t feel it was prudent to pass that along to families, without being sure.

He says, “In the process of being cautious, we allowed the jubilation to go on longer than it should have.”

Jan 4, 2006 - 1:18 pm 23. Terrye:

Keith:

I heard Hatfield talk about this and he said that they knew within the first hour that they would have to clarify, but he did not want to do it more than once. In other words he did not want to come out with statement after statement.

Someone just jumped the gun and the media ran with it. And you know, maybe they hoped it was true, and people were alive.

Very sad.

Jan 4, 2006 - 1:30 pm 24. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

I’m reminded of what George Orwell said about the coal miner:

“He is a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.”

Written in the 1930s, when coal was absolutely dominant in energy production…but even now, coal supports an awfully big part of our civilization.

Jan 4, 2006 - 2:33 pm

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