UPDATE 1/10/06 1 a.m.: This was an unfinished post. The finished account is available here, I recommend reading that version instead.
Hi all. I am back in the Daily Grind, the quaint little Buckhannon, W. Va. coffeehouse we here in the assembled press corps are affectionally calling the “Buckhannon Bureau.”
Here’s my account of what happened with the whole “miner’s alive” flub. I’ll just try to tell you what happened from my perspective.
It was closing in on midnight Tuesday night. My photographer Todd and I had slept in our rented SUV, grabbing about three hours sleep, in case the miners were rescued or found dead overnight. I had figured they were dead ever since I heard Monday night that there was no debris boxing in the miners. I figured this would end badly. My photographer, Todd, was getting rather cranky and wanted to call it a night. I had permission to leave from my editor, but still felt uneasy about it. But I heard that the rescuers had exhausted their air supply and were pulling out for a few hours. I made arrangements with a friendly reporter to call me if anything went down, then figured to grab a few hours of shut-eye. At this point we had been working since about 7 a.m.
As we started to pull out of a neighbor’s muddy front yard turned into a media parking lot, Todd stopped me. What’s that sound, he asked. It was the tolling of church bells. We have to check this out! he says. Of course.
Getting out of the SUV, things are happening. A portly man runs by me, on his way to the CNN compound. Tears are in his eyes. They’re alive! They’re all alive! he yells at me.
Huh? I start sprinting toward the church. The state police who had kept us back earlier make no attempt to do so now. It is happy chaos at the Sago Baptist Church. Gov. Joe Manchin makes his way to his car, making no effort to stem the celebration. I try to get in a question, but he’s getting swarmed by the press. I don’t hear it, but apparently he tells a reporter from his car windows that “yes, miracles do happen.”
Anna McCloy is so joyful, so thankful the father of her two kids is alive. She has tears in her eyes and gives a Baltimore Sun reporter a big hug. Raymond Weaver is sad about the one miner who perished, but happy about his brother Jerry and the rest of the men.
I quickly call my editor with the update. It is past deadline; papers are already rolling off the presses. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I do remember telling her, “you should run with this!” And I remember the joy in my voice. She’s been watching the scene on TV and sounds equally happy as she tells me, “We’re going to!”
Todd has tears in his eyes, too. Can you believe we almost missed this, he asks. No, I tell him. People are singing hymns and praising the Lord.
This is going to be a scene I remember for the rest of my life, I think. Right up there when the reporters onboard a ferry in front of the Statute of Liberty put aside our collective cynicism to sing “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)” with a teenager, holding the Olympic flame, who had lost his father in the World Trade Center a few weeks after 9/11. Why hadn’t I held onto hope, I asked myself, resolving to be less cynical in future.
I get a few more quotes. Geraldo Rivera is there, butting in on interviews. He’s working by cell phone and stands so close to his subjects it looks almost like a lover’s embrace. Amid the celebration, I find my friend Alexa with People magazine. We’re both thinking the same thing: we need to find Nick and Amber Helms, the children of Terry Helms, the only miner to die. They seemed like the most decent, wholesome kids you can possibly imagine … amid all the celebration, we didn’t want their grief to go unrecorded. We don’t find them, but I do track down Michelle Mauser, Terry’s niece.
Eventually the state police shoo us back down the hill. Todd drives off to send his photos at a WiFi hot spot downtown. An ambulance drives off with the first survivor. I join other reporters huddled around a fire for warmth. (THANK GOD for the Red Cross).
Geraldo is there, as is Chris Cuomo, co-anchor of ABC’s Primetime Live. Chris, who hasn’t yet had to file a report, is uneasy about how this is being reported. How would you do it, I ask. He says he’d be clear this is information from the families, that authorities hadn’t confirmed it. I don’t have any such qualms. And how could you run video of that celebration without leaving a clear impression in people’s minds, that these miners were all alive?
(As a side note: I have an anti-authoritarian streak a mile long. I don’t believe in waiting until “the authorities,” give my stories some magic stamp of approval by saying “this story has been Officially Confirmed.” That just makes the media another government cog. As we saw during Katrina, the authorities can be just as wrong as anyone else. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and often government officials can be more neutral and knowledgeable than others. But they’re all only human, with their own motives, just like everyone else).
Okay. People are waiting for me here. I’ll continue this post in Part II.
Not to be cynical,too, but I’m just wondering when the first person from the media went, “Hey…has anybody actually SEEN more than one survivor?” Habeus corpus and all that?
Very interesting and riveting.
I want to link to this, but you’re not going to get in trouble for writing it, right? (Just making sure).
naw. I am also trying to interview a few other reporters who were there to get their perspective.
I will write more as soon as I can, but running ragged trying to track down these damn notes and funerals. Tomorrow will be crazy. I should be back Monday, I think. Many many unread emails and comments, so don’t be offended if I haven’t replied to anyone yet.
Hi. Fascinating stuff – brilliantly written. Have you changed your mind a bit though about getting stories officially confirmed? How on earth do journalists decide if something is valid if you just go by what an excitable crowd of people are saying? Surely there are rigorous standards in reporting? (well – obviously not). Just curious!
To answer your question from my own journalistic point of view (I just thought I’d chime in) – this is a pretty classic question in journalism. How long do you wait to break a story, if a lot of sources are saying something is true? Because of the competition with the other news outlets, there is a limit to how long certain news organizations will wait. This doesn’t mean they’re going to be irresponsible in most cases, but there are some cases where they think things are 90 percent confirmed and they go with it so they won’t be beaten out. If they didn’t have to worry about confirming the story, they might be able to hold off for a few extra hours or another day.
Newsweek had the Monica Lewinsky scoop a day before the other papers had it, but they held off because it wasn’t 100 percent confirmed. Then they got beaten. THey wrote about it later on. Would it really have made a difference for them to have the story in time anyway? It’s not like it hurt the public for them to be a week behind in Monicagate. But I’m sure they would have liked the scoop. They just didn’t have 100 percent confirmation, though. They couldn’t take the risk in a case like that.
Competition is good for journalists because it keeps them focused and makes sure that no stone is unturned. There are so many regions of the country these days that are down to a few or no newspapers, and it’s almost scary. Things go unreported because there is no competition and no reporters fighting to get to a certain source or to keep at a story.
So you need competition. I still believe the best in the press (save for the Enquirer, etc.) and despite rare cases when they goof on a big level, most of the time, they are reporting mundane yet important stories – and not getting credit for it because people yawn and turn the page. But yes, the rush to get the scoop first sometimes means that they jump the gun.
I am sure that this wasn’t just a case of an excitable crowd, but I’ll wait to read more about what happened. It’s interesting and well worth debating.
[…] Hi all. I am back at my Hell’s Kitchen apartment. Here is the full account of what happened with the whole “miner’s alive” flub. I’ve made a few minor edits to my earlier draft. I’ll just try to tell you what happened from my perspective. […]
Have you changed your mind a bit though about getting stories officially confirmed? How on earth do journalists decide if something is valid if you just go by what an excitable crowd of people are saying? Surely there are rigorous standards in reporting? (well – obviously not). Just curious!
Good question. Keep in mind that the families had been getting official updates before the reporters had been. Mine officials Roger Nicholson and Gene Kitts, and later CEO Ben Hatfield, would first brief the families at the church and then drive a few miles and brief the media. After a while, I started simply skipping the press conferences and just talked to families. (It wasn’t like I was doing my editors any good going to the press conferences; they could watch them live on CNN from New York).
Anyway, my point is, at the time I didn’t think I had any reason to doubt what the families said was true. In retrospect, of course you can realize that rescuers wearing clunky breathing equipment might be misheard, and that misinformation could spread to the families via cell phone. But that never occurred to me, or anyone else, at the time.
I think this experience will make me a bit more cautious in certain situations. But I still don’t think that you need a badge or a government title to be a credible source.
Thinking about this a little more … there really aren’t any rigorous standards in reporting, no, not in the sense of hard-and-fast rules. The one rule that everyone thinks they know — needing two sources to confirm something — was really a total invention for the Watergate movie “All the President’s Men.”
The journalism business is constantly changing. Twenty-four hour news networks let you see news unfolding as it happens … a process that is rarely predictable or perfectly packaged. Websites like the Drudge Report, blogs and talk radio mean that the mainstream media really can’t function as a gatekeeper anymore, deciding certain details are not relevant or too salicious for our readers. (JFK’s affairs, FDR’s polio, etc.) Standards, I think, are changing too. But the quest for truth remains.