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Let us hope that, if there is an afterlife, there is a
place in Hell reserved for the creators of the 24-hour
news cycle.
It brings us all manner of speculation and
misinformation, and precious little news.
When I picked up the Post from the sidewalk at sunrise
Wednesday morning, I felt sorry for whoever had put
together the front page with its lead headline, Hopes
fading at W.Va. mine.
That edition had obviously gone to bed before the
wonderful news had come out late Tuesday night that 11 of
the 12 trapped coal miners had been found alive. That must
have been so, for I saw it on fair and balanced
Fox
News at about 11 p.m. Tuesday just before I went to bed.
The paper went to press before that with Hopes
fading,
and instead, the good people of Tallmansville
were celebrating the miraculous survival of their husbands,
brothers, sons and uncles.
But on Wednesday morning it turned out that the older headline was more accurate than the more recent TV story. Of the 13 trapped coal miners, only one had survived, and he was in critical condition.
How did the wrong story get out so quickly? First, we start with the 24-hour news cycle, which demands constant reporting. That gives us the scene -- a herd of on-air personalities along with their camera operators, producers and the like. They all need to keep feeding the beast with recent developments. If they don't have any, people might change channels and that hurts ratings and the company's bottom line. To insure that there's something on the air about the disaster du jour, find a couple of telegenic experts, and get them to speculate interminably about what might be happening.
Further, the reporters are roped off in some zone where they can't know much about what's really going on. There are good reasons for that. The herd would be in the way where the actual rescue work was underway.
And if I were in church with friends and relatives, all supporting each other while fearing the worst for a loved one trapped underground, the last thing I'd want would be some blow-dried android sticking a microphone in my face and asking me how I felt.
So, lots of broadcasters with lots of technology, all eager for a new development. None was anywhere near the actual site of the tragedy; they all had to rely on, not on what they saw themselves, but on what they were told -- and that often came at third- or fourth-hand.
Now it's time to hear from Ben Hatfield, CEO of the mining company. He held a press conference and explained that people overheard cell-phone calls with the rescuers in the mine. They had only confirmed finding 12 miners and the rescuers were checking their vital signs. But it got interpreted by the eavesdroppers as 12 miners being found alive.
The information spread like wildfire, because it had
come from the command center,
Hatfield said, and the
state's governor, Joe Manchin, said he had been told of the
survivors.
So in a sense, the TV reporters were doing their jobs
properly. The command center and the state's governor are
certainly official sources,
and they reported what
came from those sources. It just happened to be wrong.
And that's the systemic problem with the 24-hour news
cycle.
It demands constant updates, which means
reporting what everybody at the scene is talking about,
without time to check things or to wait for details -- such
as the condition of those miners.
As a print journalist who has generally had time to tie
up some of those those messy loose ends before filing a
story, I know that the real situation is often quite
different from the initial reports.
The TV reporters
and mine personnel doubtless know that, too. But excitement
and wishful thinking led them astray.
The fault was not all theirs, though. The fault is in
the system. And this system exists because of us. I can't
ne the only one who thought I want the latest on the
trapped miners before I go to bed.
We want the latest
developments, and the 24-hour news channels try to deliver,
even if the latest
turns out to be wrong later.
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