The media got West Virginia right

Frankly, I was surprised to see so much made in the print media of the West Virginia mine tragedy. Though tugging, gripping and unquestionably profoundly sad, the story felt more like an expanded human interest tale suited for 24-hour cable television than the sort of hard news Americans expect in their morning newspapers. The missing teenagers whom CNN, Fox News and MSNBC make so much of are rarely – if ever – discussed in major newspapers and though this story was undoubtedly more relevant, I still struggled to see how it might compete for front page space with political fodder and international events.

What has surprised me even more, though, is that absolutely pathetic and irresponsible way with which the media has now started to shift blame for the coal mine communication mishap onto itself. Numerous outlets are questioning if the three hours of false reports (all but two miners found alive) were not indeed the fault of the media, making the truth (only one miner alive and marginally so at that) more painful for family members.

This is pure rubbish.

I can't account for every television, radio, Internet, print and wire report that went out between midnight and 3 AM eastern time Tuesday night. But as I lay awake in a Pennsylvania hotel room – actually not too far from the West Virginia border – watching the news unfold, what I saw was responsible journalism. Most reports, as I channel surfed, did not say that 11 miners were alive; they said that family members were reporting that 11 miners were alive.

The distinction may seem semantic, but it is tremendous. The media, stationed by a church where family members had gathered, witnessed rejoicing, screaming and hugging from family members and friends who had been informed – wrongly so, we would later learn – that all but two miners had survived. So the media reported on this drastic change in the environment surrounding the story. As long as reports of the miners being alive were attributed to family, friends or other people who made such claims, the reports were essentially true – again, the media wasn't saying that the miners were alive, it was saying that others were saying that the miners were alive.

Any news outlet that dropped this attribution was, however, in the wrong. Personally, I don't remember witnessing any such errant news reports, but if they existed, they were certainly irresponsible. To not confirm a story before dropping attribution is to turn rumors and gossip into hard news, and that is not what reporters are supposed to do.

Either way, though, I would argue that the point is somewhat moot from a blame angle. Again, people are coming down on the media for giving false hope to family members. It was the family members who shared this false hope with the media in the first place! There is no chicken or egg question to be found here – the family members' misinformation clearly came first.

Still, I struggle for the true meaning of the larger story. Other than being a particularly tragic work-related accident, I don't see what this story lends the national scene. It was surely local news and, to a degree, also newsworthy in those portions of the country where coal mining is a major industry. But to Joe American, it was a human interest tale blown massively out of proportion.

Do I take anything away from this media festival? At risk of sounding cynical and insensitive, I found one compelling aspect of the story's coverage – a quote aired on CNN from a friend of a coal miner, “One guy said, 'What in the hell has [the Lord] done for us,' but just a few minutes before that we were praising [the Lord], because they believed that they were alive..."

Why is it so compelling? If the quote offered is accurate and was truly muttered in a church, the human interest story blown out of proportion actually may have been a tragically tidy modern incarnation of the Book of Job in reverse. And the irony is astounding.