TV SPIN DOCTORS CAN MAKE YOU DIZZY
at 12:38 am by William Dowd, Associate Editor
One reader who called Wednesday morning about our front-page story saying the West Virginia coal miners had been found alive — an erroneous piece of information not contradicted by officials at the scene for a full three hours — had a very specific question.
“I’ve been a Times Union reader for close to 40 years and always trusted it. How,” the Clifton Park resident asked, “could you have said those miners were alive when I heard on the radio and TV on Wednesday morning that they were dead?”
A fair question. To answer it, a little background is needed.
Flash back to around midnight Tuesday. My wife and I were watching“The Tonight Show” when a bulletin was flashed on-screen by WNYT Channel 13. It said the trapped miners had been found alive. That was the prevailing belief among news media until 3 o’clock Wednesday morning when the people on the disaster site realized communications had been bollixed up and the public given the wrong information. However, like most people in the Capital Region and elsewhere in the East and the South, my wife and I had already gone to sleep thinking the best had happened.
We were as surprised as anyone when we awakened to find the worst had actually taken place no matter what Channel 13 had told us without equivocation. The electronc media, you see, have the advantage of simply updating stories minute by minute rather than being locked into one moment in time — the final deadline by which publishing decisions must be made.
In this instance, TU editors had to make a final decision to go or not go with the story by 1:45 a.m. Wednesday. The story did not change until 3 a.m., by which time the vast majority of people were in bed and the final TU edition had beeen printed and was being delivered to homes, stores and vending boxes.
I mention this because, as I pointed out to the reader, in more than four decades in the news biz it has been my experience that radio and TV rarely offer corrections. They simply update stories, usually not bothering to mention they had earlier supplied erroneous information.
This was underscored when I checked the 11 p.m. news on Channel 13 Wednesday night. ReporterJohn Allen’s story on the mine mixup was decorated with a huge graphic montage showing various newspaper front pages — including those of the TU and Schenectady’s Daily Gazette — as if they were the only ones who disseminated the early, erroneous story. And, Allen’s report centered on how the print media had come out with the wrong version of the story.
The video footage Channel 13 used showed several TV reporters — one of whom looked suspiciously like CNN’sAnderson Cooper, although he was not identified on-screen — talking about the “miracle.” That, one presumes, was supposed to show some balance. However, Allen made no mention of the fact Channel 13 was among the first, if not the first, local media outlets to misinform people about the West Virginia situation.
As we said, there’s no particular reason to offer up a mea culpa if you can simply “update” a story. The public, so the conventional wisdom goes, has a very short memory.
Posted inAll entries, National news|5 Comments »
COAL MINERS STORY: A MEDIA DISASTER, TOO
January 4, 2006 at 1:54 pm by William Dowd, Associate Editor
Newspapers often are referred to as the first rough draft of history.
“Rough” turned out to be a horribly apt description for how the coal mine tragedy in Tallmansville, W.Va., was covered in Wednesday’s Times Union and most other newspapers in the South and East, as well as radio, television and Internet outlets.
Times Union, published Jan. 4, 2006For several days, the dramatic efforts of emergency personnel trying to locate and extricate more than a dozen miners trapped far below ground had played out in excruciating detail in the world news media. Then, a few minutes before midnight Tuesday, reports began being flashed onto TV screens and sent out to newspapers nationwide, saying that a dozen miners still were alive. The first Associated Press bulletin, moved at eight minutes before midnight, said “Family members say 12 miners trapped after an explosion in West Virginia are alive.”
Based on this information, supported by interviews with various officials and relatives of the trapped miners, newspapers about to go to press characterized the story as a rescue, with many unequivocally stating that the miners were alive. A few examples among thefront pages:
Hartford Courant: THEY’RE ALIVE
Ft. Myers News-Press: 12 found alive in mine
Boston Herald: MINER MIRACLE!
Newsday, Long Island: Miracle in the Mine
Daily Gazette, Schenectady: 12 miners discovered alive
As it later turned out, all but one were dead.
The Times Union received several calls early Wednesday morning from readers who had seen the headline in our late edition saying, “12 found alive inside mine.” How, they wanted to know, could we print such a thing when it later was proven false?
The short and simple answer is that newspapers have to be printed by a certain time so they can be delivered to doorsteps, stores and vending boxes. As the deadline for making final decisions was upon us, the widely-held belief was that the trapped miners were alive. That is why the Times Union went with that story.
The Times Union’s newsroom deadline for the final edition is 1:45 a.m. It was not until more than an hour after that — three minutes before 3 o’clock this morning, to be exact — that the Associated Press issued a bulletin reversing its earlier report. In its entirety it said:
BC-APNewsAlert,0041
TALLMANSVILLE, W.Va. (AP) — Family members report that 11 of the 12 coal miners who were initially thought to have survived an explosion in a coal mine have died. The sole survivor is hospitalized.
AP-ES-01-04-06 0257EST
Why did we and most other news media outlets choose to believe the initial story?
Not being on the scene with our own people we could quiz on the details and confirmations, we had to do what any publication does – make a long-distance judgment about the quality of information just as we would if the news were coming from Australia, Africa or the Arctic. There were numerous positive reports that the miners had been found alive, reports on which we based that judgment. Some examples:
· An Associated Press dispatch filed at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday said, “Twelve miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive Tuesday night, more than 41 hours after the blast, family members said. Bells at a church where relatives had been gathering rang out as family members ran out screaming in jubilation.”
· The Associated Press and other organizations quoted West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin as saying, “They told us they have 12 alive. We have some people that are going to need some medical attention.”
· The New York Times quoted a West Virginia government official as confirming a rescue, saying “Forty-one hours after an explosion trapped 13 men in a West Virginia coal mine here, family members and a state official said 12 of the miners had been found alive Tuesday night. Joe Thornton, deputy secretary for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, said the rescued miners were being examined at the mine shortly before midnight and would soon be taken to nearby hospitals. Mr. Thornton said he did not know details of their medical condition.”
Despite the presence of others miners, rescue workers and government officials, apparently the mine owner, International Coal Group Inc., was the only real disseminator of “official” news, and it inexplicably took about three hours after the initial jubilation over the false condition report for the company to debunk the report and announce that all but one miner was dead.
This is, of course, a topic that will be hotly debated for a while because of all the hot debates over the state of the very soul of the news media — credibility. You’ll be able to find one of the more interesting collections of pros and cons on the topic at the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank and educational organization in St. Petersburg, Fla.