CNN and various other news sources must create more news and turmoil.
Does/can anyone seriously doubt the intentions of anyone involved in the rescue effort by casting dispursions on them and the bad information that pre-emptively led people to believe the miners were alive when in fact most were not?
What the fuck is the point in stirring up the muck and mire of how and why early information was mis-reported? Who could possibly blame anyone on site for wanting to believe there were survivors? Who could possibly believe that anyone there didn’t have the miner’s and their families’ best interests in mind?
But no… the fucking reporters must pick and pick at the wound that isn’t even a scab yet. Sticking that knife further and further into a tragic and painful incident without the hope of uncovering anything more than exposing someone in the chain of command who was focused on rescue NOT reporting the news for the morbid interest of network and cable reporters.
How is this in anyone’s interest? To what end?
Stop you gleeful sensationalist messengers of death. For all that remains good and noble in the human condition. Just Fucking Stop.
I have no respect for news anymore. Vultures have more respect for the dead and serve a better purpose.
They are picking and probing at the wound because otherwise they would have to place the blame squarely where it belongs - on themselves for not doing proper reporting.
Go fuck yourself Frank. Late Tuesday night the fucking VP of the coal mining company came out and told reporters that 12 men were alive. The family members had already had been called at their vigil by people from the company and told that 12 men survived.
The families heard the incorrect news direct from the people conducting the rescue operation. Reporters were not involved in that fuck-up.
So why is that a story? Because if you can’t clearly communicate between people in the mine and people up top during a rescue mission, that’s pretty fucking awful. And if you can’t get good communications during a period of such urgency, that could be symptomatic of other communication problems that may have caused the accident.
Exactly. Families were told first of this news, then the reporters were informed. According to a timeline I read in the paper today, at midnight the families were informed that 12 were alive. At 12:30 am, the company became aware that perhaps they’d misheard the call from rescue workers. At 1:38 am, the company learned that 11 of the 12 were dead. At 3:00 am, they finally informed the families and media. I’m trying to figure out exactly where the media is to blame for getting these families’ hopes raised. More media outlets should have emphasized caveats like “we only have company reports on this right now,” sure, but anyone who’s been following this story can see that the families are blaming the company (and the governor, IIRC) for spreading this story before being totally sure, and for not backtracking sooner when they learned that their information might not be totally accurate.
In an emergecy situation such as this, speculation about the conditions of the survivors are always chaotic. The rescue crews are equiped to rescue people not to worry about filtering and crafting media updates. If someone mis-spoke - which they clearly did - then that is just human error. The mis-information didn’t cause the death of the miners. They were already dead. So what purpose does it serve to isolate and publicly flay this particular error in information. It’s pointless. Really pointless.
Plus, reporters are supposed to check facts not rush to report the first thing they hear the second they hear it. Trust but verify. What ever happend to fact checking. I’ll tell you what… the reporters are glory hounds. It’s not whether the news is accurate or even relevant… it’s who rushes it to air first. And when it’s wrong… well, just blame the sources.
How, pray tell, were they supposed to check the facts when even the company officials who were getting this information didn’t know that most of those miners were actually dead? Are the reporters supposed to storm the mine and check pulses? Break down the doors of the hospital, HIPAA privacy laws be damned, and look at charts?
I will say that they should have been much more cautious in their statements, more repetitions of “company officials tell us” and “we have not heard anything specific from the hospital” and all of that. Some reporters did revert to very cautious statements once nothing more was forthcoming from the company and suspicions were raised.
I’m not blaming the reporters for misleading the families. The fact that families are angry and will likely sue the company for any responsibility it might have in the death of the miners is an entirely separate issue.
My objection is the finger pointing by the media for what is communication error on the part of some rescuers who were more concerned with the rescue process and were understandibly speculating based on developing evidence as to the condition of the trapped miners. If someone was overly eager in delivering the wrong information, why does that person deserve exposure and villification? In service of what?
Ah. Well, the general public might not care, but in light of the wailing of various affected family members saying they might sue (IIRC), I suspect some of them care. As Barbarian noted, it might even be a symptom of the other significant, frequent safety problems this mining company has had in the past.
Hey, I’m just saying, some people do apparently care. Furthermore, I’d be much more suspicious if the media studiously ignored where the breakdown in communication was, but maybe that’s just me.
The media should have put more effort into verifying the story. It’s that simple. In the rush to get their 72 point headlines out, they forgot to make sure the story was accurate.
No, the media are not the only ones at fault here, but they didn’t do their job, and should not be exempt from criticism, and should not be trying to lay the fact that they didn’t do their job off on other people.
How the fuck were they supposed to verify? The company didn’t say, “We found where the miners are and there’s a chance they might be alive.” They said, “12 miners are alive.” Pretty fucking authoritative from a first hand source - the people actually conducting the rescue operation. On what basis should they assume that the rescue operators were so drastically wrong? If the people conducting the rescue opeations declare that they’ve found 12 miners alive, then it’s a pretty far cry from we found 12 miners dead.
Were you watching Paula Zahn last night, too? I hadn’t been following it too closely, but being from an area of the country with a mining history and its own share of mining accidents (granted, they were well before my time, early 1900’s and earlier), I slowly became interested.
I completely lost interest after 5 minutes, though, and began thinking almost word for word what you said in your OP.
This is all well and good but we have two seperate problems.
*The media are not responsible for the tragic miscommunication to the families. * This is a simple concept and only true morons (the ones that think Iraq still has wmd, 9/11 and SH connected, etc, etc) will struggle with it.
While I think 24 hour news networks are the bane of civilization, I don’t really think they mispreported anything. The info was coming from mine and state officials. Not as accurate as seeing them alive in person, but I’d consider the sources trustworthy.
Why all the Monday Morning Quarterbacking on the details of how this was managed by major media. The real offense is creating a spectacle out of the tragedy.
I wish fervently that people would say “no” to these missing high school girls, these cuban refugees, these brain-dead bulimics, these girls in the well, these celebrity trials, and compel the media to do what they should be doing: bashing the president.
Right. People haven’t spent nearly enough time trying to figure out how the President is responsible for this mining tragedy, as he most assuredly must be. The media should not rest until they have shown how President Bush’s policies led inevitably to the miners’ deaths.
what would happen if all the locals refused to participate in the spectacle? A quiet, diginfied “please leave us in peace in our sorrow” and no further comment? W/o the endless parade of folks willing to share their POV’s (“here’s the neighbor of the cousin of the grocer who had once dated the daughter of one of the people who used to work in the mine”), maybe, just maybe the reporters would go away, too.
