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Miners: Dead or Alive?
I thought of one short thing to post on before I run out for the day. Should have done this yesterday as it would have been more timely, but oh well. Did you hear this thing about the miners in West Virginia being trapped? Everybody was wondering if they were still alive while rescuers attempted to reach them. Then a report came out that all twelve miners had been found alive and rescued. Supposedly “more than half” of news papers reported this as news, only for it to come out soon after that actually only one man had survived.
Not surprisingly, not 0ne is stepping forward to take responsibility for this huge media-mistake. Everybody is pointing the finger at everybody else. In a USA Today article, Len Downie, executive editor of the The Washington Post (which published a story saying the miners were alive) said, “I don’t regard it as our error, but as an error by the people in charge of the rescue.”
Of the more than half of 250 major newspapers that said the miners were alive:
Few of those stories raised doubts about the report’s credibility. Most did not make clear to readers, for instance, that the news was based on secondhand accounts from family members of the trapped miners just before midnight ET Tuesday.
I’m just wondering why nobody is using this story as the kind of leverage point that it could become. We could very likely make a case against a great number of news articles against their credibility. Some nagging feeling tells me this is not an isolated case, but merely one that they got caught in.
There’s also another more sci-fi theory that it might be interesting to explore: that in an alternate universe, the miners did all survive! Maybe that sounds crazy, but speculative physics does suggest the possibility that multiple overlapping realities branch off around major (and minor) events. Maybe what we’re seeing here is not just a slip-up of the news media, but evidence somehow of this. It’s obviously a wacky theory, but in some sense it explains why nobody can really explain what went wrong. Maybe that lets them off the hook too easily though.
Maybe what really needs to be explored is how the news media works, how information is spread, proven, bought and sold. Or maybe in some alternate version of the US, the miners all came out alive and became Jungian symbols of our national unconscious, showing that we could go down into the depths of despair and come back out again as a country, and bring with us treasures and jubilation that we’d found down in the darkness. I wish I lived in that version of America.
- This stuff doesn’t really happen, does it?
- Let the Dead Bury the Dead!
- Animals Sealed in Stone
- The Dead Rise!
- If The Dead Remembered…
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January 5th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Being from england i usually stay up just so i can marvel at the transmutation of reality that occurs through the media on the news in america. Its worth thinking about how the sattelites get up there especially when you find that 80% of them are owned by the american military so they are at source. for american media to operate they must get a license from the government (i think), if this is true then if you want to be in the media you better tow the line or else. hitlers top propagandist said “the best way to enslave a nation is to give them the illusion of choice while only really pushing only one message”. I have come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of knowledge, learned knowledge and experienced knowledge. A story that dissapeared as soon as it arrived recently over here was of g.bush saying to tony blair that he wanted to bomb al-jazeera, There was a courtcase and the media told to stop broadcasting it because of the official secrets act. Imagine the president of the most powerfull nation on earth suggesting pre meditated murder. Believe nothing, Question everything, we are all just people.
January 5th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
I think it probably was just a misunderstanding and the papers were too eager to get into print what someone thought he heard.
Another thing I’d like to note - I watched the coverage on ABC Nightly News last night and in the interviews with the miner’s families there were several people who accused local authorities or the media of lying. “They lied to us.” Under the circumstances I would be inclinded to give those people a pass. They are understandably in a highly emotional state. However, that is something that has recently become all too common. Everything that is not strictly true is a lie. There’s no room for mistakes, misunderstandings, even opinions. Everything has come down to facts and lies and everyone arguing over which is which.
January 5th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
A consequence of too many lies and too much false certainty, and too many people in power (politics, media, business) who appear to feel somewhere between no preference for truth and an actual aversion to it. For too many, the public response is all that matters, and any resemblance to actual events is coincidental.
I have a little personal experience in this: http://moonwaves.com/exceive/2006/01/05/writing-the-story-first/
January 5th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
My response was to the media in general and not in regard to the miners, The relatives deserve privacy and respect. But the media is satans spawn
January 5th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
The media is indeed satans spawn. Best put by the Vicar of Dibley I think. “Oh I’m sorry they didn’t have horns or a pitchfork so I didn’t realize they were reporters.”
January 5th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
The media made simulare mistakes during Katrina, but as of yet no major media source has bothered to point it out.
They did lie, they told family members and friends that the miners where alive. They didn’t comform the story that is bad journalism and they should lose their jobs over it. To many reporters are lieing or has you would like to say makeing understandable mistakes and no one is holding the publishers responsible.
January 5th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
My version..I meant too put this in my own blog by now (just haven’t got to it)
But I think The Mining Company knew when they drilled the hole that the miners were dead on Tuesday Morning at 6am. Because they said later on that the 12 were found nearby the hole that was drilled. Surely, if they dropped a camera in the hole and which it said this “experiment showed no signs of life”, and the men were nearby, the camera would have showed this! They could have kept this info too themselves, just like they did when they learnt that the 12 weren’t alive but actually dead.
The whole thing makes me angry. I don’t know why i care so much as far as I know none of my ancestors were miners, though they may be ancestors I have never known about, but it made me so angry and I’ve watched CNN like these miners were my family members too. It’s been the oddest thing for me too experience.
I think Sago Mining Officals Know A WHOLE LOT MORE than they are letting on about the entire thing. I think there could have been a way for them to go in quicker, at first they said there was a roof cave in and walls of debris, but there was neither, just the gas. The gas was so deadly that I bet the miners died before tuesday at midnight.
The mine had over 100 safety violations and part of the mine had been sealed off in december 2005 and if I remember correctly it is this part where the ingition went off.
If it was Lighting, then the mining company should know that lighting could strike off an explosion at any time. That’s science, and they should have known that gas + lighting traveling through ground = death.
January 6th, 2006 at 9:30 am
interesting that some of the miners were able to leave goodbye notes.
January 6th, 2006 at 9:41 am
goodbye notes can be mocked up after the fact. eye feel for the familes and for their rights to hold the mining company accountable for unsafe conditions if what firefox points out is true. but eye question the patterns of the news cycle which has put so much focus on this story at this time. many a time, eye feel that this is a 1984 world and we are the proles and the entertainment, news and other cultural signifiers given to us are given for the purpose uv keeping us sleeping…
let us protect and feel for and connect with the miners in our non-televisual, actual everyday lives. let us watch the communities we inhabit in real space-time and nurture new tribes therefrom. for our sakes and theirs.
January 6th, 2006 at 11:11 am
My girlfriends father worked in a coal mine in PA many years ago. He told her while the miners were being rescued that there was no chance they were alive. If he knew that, then the mining company certainly knew that as well. Also, safety violations or no, working in a mine is extremely dangerous, which is why pay rates are so high for it. Not saying that makes it okay, of course.
January 6th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
I find it interesting that when the rumor they were alive came out, everyone was quick to credit the will of God and miracles for it, but when the actual death toll was revealed, families began agonizing about losing their faith.
There’s an interesting discussion here.
IMO, attributing every miraculous rescue or recovery to a miracle not only trivializes the concept of miracles, but calls into question what exactly they are (in a theological sense; I know that the word is often used colloquially with no religious context to it– ‘that home run was a miracle,’ etc). It’s a miracle when someone lives, but *can* it also be a miracle if they die– for instance, if their death is quick and painless? Whose criteria are we using to judge whether it’s a positive or negative event?
January 7th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
I dont want to go offtopic here but ive often wondered why it is that people who know that they are going to heaven want to live so long. low carb diets,exercise and the suchlike, if i was so sure it would be come here hedonist lifestyle i want to meet my creator and get away from here a.s.a.p. its human to grieve loss but how about rejoicing at the birth of an angel, is that not a miracle?
January 7th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
hollow earth …
January 7th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Fertile ground…..