In what will definitely go down as a huge media blunder for the year, the coverage of last night’s “rescue” of 12 miners from a West Virginia coal mine is “tragically on display,” News.com’s Scott Ard informs - and will be forever, most likely. In case you haven’t heard about this, there were reports on Wednesday morning that 12 miners that were trapped in a mine were found alive - information that was passed on to the families of the miners, as well as the news media. Unfortunately, the timing of the information coincided somewhat with the printing times for many newspapers, and many front pages this morning heralded the rescue of these individuals in almost-but-not-quite war font. Unfortunately, the (mis)information about the rescue was rescinded just hours later, leaving the families in disarray when it turned out that only one man survived, and egg on the face of big media. While Ard is right to point out that sites like that of NYTimes.com should have removed the wrong story from its front page, it is important to note that these stories shouldn’t be deleted from sites as a whole. If not only for the many hyperlinks they surely attracted when the news was fresh, but to prove a point.
In my office cafeteria today, I saw the cover of USA Today carrying a similar headline, and it felt peculiar to look at. If anything, it’s a reminder about how delicate the news business is and how the 24-hour news cycle can create a situation like this. It’s easy for a broadcast or even online news site to “retract” its story and get the correct facts out there, but a newspaper takes 24 hours before someone sees the “fix” - that’s tough.
This leads me back to something that “Imus in the Morning” producer Bernard McGuirk said on this morning’s show about the situation - that the “silver lining” in this whole story is that the media looks bad for running with unconfirmed facts, and that it basically served them right. While I don’t necessarily agree with that statement, because “checking your facts” could have been any reporter getting two individuals to confirm the story here, I can see where people might think that way. But here, even the government believed that these people had been saved.
