The Deadline Twilight Zone
Today is a day I am so glad I didn’t pursue a career in newspapers. The West Virginian coal mine tragedy was compounded by a lapse in communication that led families and the public to think for three hours or so that most of the miners had survived, when in reality only one did. The timing of the events could not have been worse from a newspaper perspective. The initial word of survivors hit around midnight Eastern time, right as East Coast newspapers were hitting their deadlines. So many of them scrambled to get the news into their Thursday editions; unfortunately for them, they were rather successful. The corrected information didn’t start reaching anyone until around 2:30, 3:00 in the morning, by which point the editions had been printed. All most East Coast papers could do was update their web sites and know that they were sending out a horribly wrong front page.
The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a short piece on its site tonight trying to answer the question How did we get it wrong? It’s a fairly short piece, with less information than I’d like. It does include a link to a larger Editor & Publisher piece, and Inquirer blogger Daniel Rubin has a much more substantial post on the subject which includes a link to an even more critical piece on the Columbia Journalism Review‘s site.
Now, it sure does look like this is a sourcing nightmare, probably compounded by the deadline. But when the governor’s making announcements, there are problems all around. And I do hope that this doesn’t fuel the idea that the media have no business reporting on tragedies like this. I know there are problems of sensationalism and story selection, but those are problems of execution, not concept. Media coverage of these stories help remind us of our connections and show us a glimpse of how people outside our own circles deal with challenging circumstances. It has occurred to me a few times that the energy that lets me write and publish these words is produced in part by men like those miners; in a very real way, their sacrifice was on my behalf. And I’m not sure I, or my fellow citizens, have valued their contribution enough, in terms of the wages we’re willing to support or the safety measures we’re willing to demand – and pay for. The trick will be to keep that in mind once the shock to the system wears off.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.
Wednesday, January 4th 2006 at 10:04 pm |
I’ve been deeply troubled by the developments of the past 20 hours or so on this story. One thing that arouses my ire in a way that few other things do is a rush to place blame before doing anything about the problem, or worse yet in lieu of doing anything about the problem. Now, here, since we have 12 guys dead…not much can be done about it, and I understand that. But the rush to find someone whose head can be chopped off over an announcement that, at least according to what I’ve read and seen so far, doesn’t seem to have been officially made by…well…anyone, at least not until the governor got hold of it and gave it some semblence of credibility, seems premature. I think the real story from here on out will lie with the safety record of the mining company in question. To obsess over the miscommunication is a red herring at best. The men were already dead, and the miscommunication among rescuers on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning did not cause any loss of life that hadn’t already happened. I know there’s an unbelievable amount of anguish and grief that may have been caused by the premature announcement, but I’m also finding it unbelievable how much energy and anger is being directed at that facet of it, and not at what happened in the first place that caused this event. That just strikes me as surreal.
We too had a case here where one local newspaper reported that only one man died, and the other waited long enough to report that only one had survived. It’s stuff like this that has me piping up in the middle of everyday conversations and debates with “What’s your source on that?” (And I’m not even a reporter.)
Thursday, January 5th 2006 at 1:39 am |
I do think the safety issue will be explored a lot in the weeks ahead, but there’s something very visceral about the mixup that I think serves as kind of a distillation of the whole thing. From what I’ve seen today, it looks like folks in the command center had corrected information long before the families did. And I can definitely see how people would feel like withholding that information is a cruelty on top of the accident itself. The former you chalk up as something of an occupational hazard; the latter just seems like carelessness and cruelty. And it may well be that the latter tells us something about the former.
And all of that is on top of the question of how this story was and was not sourced by the media. Understanding that is crucial to any hope that the mistakes don’t get repeated.