From Mining Disaster to Media Disaster

In Chapter 6 of Blur, “Evidence and the Journalism of Verification,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel tell the story of the January 2, 2006, Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia to illustrate the journalist’s need to verify information by knowing it as opposed to merely relying on observation.

The tragedy of the mine’s explosion was compounded by the tragedy of the media’s misreporting of the number of survivors.  Thirteen miners were trapped in the mine.  Initial media reports went out saying twelve miners had survived (meaning one hadn’t), but the reality was horribly, ironically the opposite: twelve miners had perished and only one had survived.

Ariail, Robert.  Robert Ariail.  "The Miners Are Alive!"  Editorial Cartoon.  The State.  6 Jan. 
2006.

I remember this story well and have used it in Journalism I before in a discussion of ethics.

Like many newspapers across the country, Columbia’s newspaper, The State, published the story on January 4, 2006.

Once the truth of the number of survivors came out, the media’s thought and decision-making processes were evaluated in detail.

On January 5, 2006, The State ran two explanatory pieces about what went wrong from the media’s perspective.  Unfortunately, a quick search of the internet didn’t produce any links to these pieces.

The first was headlined “Late-hour revelation hamstrings media” with the deck “A Chronology of Confusion.” This was a sort of standalone that included a timeline attributed to Cox News Service and graphics of other newspapers’ front pages showing how they had published the same error.

The other explanatory piece, a story headlined “Erroneous reports lead to media soul-searching,” was datelined New York and attributed to wire reports.  The story details how the news of the real death toll wasn’t widely known until after most newspapers, particularly on the East Coast, had already printed and begun distribution, whereas newspapers on the West Coast were a bit more reliable because of the time difference: The Sacramento Bee published the story headlined “Joy to Despair,” and the Los Angeles Times was able to recall trucks of papers with incorrect stories.

      

In a rather quaint fashion (compared to today’s lightning-fast social media reporting), the story pointed out that most internet and television news outlets were able to correct the mistake before many news consumers woke up that morning.

The State localized the story in a sidebar by explaining its own publication timing and showing graphics of two different versions of the paper’s front page.  The first edition, printed to be sent to the far reaches of the state (Charleston, Greenville, Myrtle Beach, Spartanburg) ran a story headlined “One body recovered; ‘we need a miracle.’”  The Capital Final edition, which is the version most Columbia-area residents would have received, was redesigned and sent the presses in about thirty minutes with the headline “12 miners rescued; 1 dead.”

I see now that combined with The State’s former staff cartoonist, Robert Ariail, and his perspective (the cartoon above is so old, it’s not even in his online archives), along with the discussion of the events in Blur, these explanatory pieces can be used to teach other concepts aside from ethics: building relationships with the audience, gathering and use of evidence, independent confirmation, skepticism, sourcing, transparency, verification.

If only this gold mine of a lesson hadn’t come from a coal mine of disaster.