Reporting the Mine Tragedy
There’s been a lot of talk about the reporting of the Sago, West Virginia, mine tragedy. On Monday, an explosion trapped some miners. Rescue efforts began. Tuesday night, I saw a brief piece on the 11 pm news claiming the miners were still trapped. Wednesday’s morning paper carried a story saying the miners were supposedly alive. On my way to work, I noticed the front page in a newspaper box was different and indicated the news was bad, not good. More recent news on the Web revealed there was some confusion about the news from the command center. It seems that someone misinterpreted the report of finding the miners to mean that rescuers found them alive. Someone told the families the miners were alive. Soon after word began to spread, officials of the mining company knew the information was incorrect, but waited to make sure they had their facts straight before beginning to correct the misinformation. About three hours passed between the first wrong report and the company disseminating the accurate information.
Meanwhile, many media outlets were reporting the wrong news that the miners had survived. Newspapers printed and began distributing the day’s edition, some with the faulty good news instead of the accurate bad news.
What are media outlets doing now? Does this kind of situation warrant a correction?
According to a chat on Newslib, some outlets aren’t publishing corrections because this kind of situation doesn’t fall within their correction policies. Others are publishing follow-up stories explaining the situation. Some editors and columnists will write about the confusion.
There’s a lot of pressure in situations like this to deliver good news. Timing complicated things because word was going out as a lot of newspapers were moving through the presses. Would this incorrect information have spread through print media as it did if events were happening at 10 am instead of midnight? Unlikely. Print journalists would have had time during the day to verify the reports and get official statements.
The first news story in a fixed medium I read about the miners said they were "reportedly" found alive. For some reason, I didn’t clue in to the fact that the media outlet was publishing an unverified claim and that’s why it used "reportedly." I wondered about the use of the term when I first read it, but I didn’t realize exactly what its use meant until I saw the second version of the same paper with the different front page and a story explaining the miscommunication.
This situation shows how complicated controlling information can be during a crisis and how imperative it is to get facts correct. I imagine we’ll discuss what happened in this situation the next time we discuss communicating during an emergency at work. Sometimes, the devil really is in the details.
More:
Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher looks at the situation and includes this quote from Poynter faculty member Scott Libin:
"This case reminds us of a lesson we learned, at least in part, from Hurricane Katrina: Even when plausibly reliably sources such as officials pass along information, journalists should press for key details….If we believe that when your mama says she loves you, you should check it out, surely what the mayor or police chief or governor says deserves at least some healthy skepticism and verification. I understand how emotion and adrenaline and deadlines affect performance. That does not excuse us from trying to do better."
Romenesko has bits from various outlets about how they handled the developing story, including stopping the presses.
Regret the Error lays some of the blame and responsibility on the mining company, since they seem to have known shortly after the rumor began spreading that it wasn’t true, yet did not actively combat it until several hours later.
The Newseum’s Web site offers front pages each day. Perhaps they’ll keep an archive of these pages because of their importance to the history of journalism.
This seems like the kind of thing Bob will talk about in his journalism classes. I wonder what he’s going to do with it.
What will people remember about these media reports? What will the historical record show? Will people only remember the headlines of the miners surviving they glimpsed during their commute? Or will they read deeper to uncover the series of mistakes that led to the media having incorrect information?
January 5th, 2006 at 11:39 am
Here’s the San Francisco Chronicle “Reader’s Representative” (ombudsman) take on the issue.
The Chronicle got it right for most copies, because it’s a West Coast paper (and because they interrupted the press run).
What’s particularly interesting about the piece is that it’s not on the op-ed page; it’s fairly prominent, above the fold on the same page as the cutover portion of the ongoing story itself.