Media forced to explain inaccurate reports on tragedy

USA TODAY
Media forced to explain inaccurate reports on tragedy

By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY Thu Jan 5, 7:19 AM ET

Newspapers, wire services and cable news networks all failed in one degree or another to do their jobs properly when they reported that 12 men had survived the coal mine disaster in West Virginia, media critics and chastened editors say.


The collective failure was most apparent Wednesday morning on front pages across the nation. Headlines, including in about 45% of USA TODAY's 2.2 million copies, proclaimed the miners were alive. Other newspapers that put similar reports on their front pages in at least some editions include The New York Times, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis and The Washington Post. (Related item: A note to our readers)

Mike Fetters, a spokesman for The Newseum, a Washington, D.C.-based museum about the media, says that slightly more than half of the 250 U.S. newspapers examined Wednesday by the staff at the museum published front-page stories 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. Officials from the company that owned the mine had not confirmed that the men were alive.

In truth, as cable news viewers learned about 3 a.m. ET Wednesday, only one man survived the tragedy in Tallmansville, W.Va.

Greg Mitchell, editor of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, called the media's performance "disturbing and disgraceful" in an online column Wednesday morning.

"The job of reporters and editors is to stop and say 'we've got some possible good news, but it's not confirmed yet,' " Mitchell said later Wednesday in an interview. "That really didn't happen."

Mitchell thinks reporters and editors "got carried away" by what appeared to be miraculous news. Newspapers were also under deadline pressure, he said. Many were in the process of printing Wednesday's edition as the news was breaking.

Mitchell does not exempt cable news networks from his criticism: For three hours, "all of them were reporting, without qualification, that the miners were safe," he said.

Jack Shafer, media critic at the online magazine Slate, said the episode "should underscore to readers that we in the media are fallible. Ours is a flawed business."

Many editors said the incident is prompting self-examinations in their newsrooms.

John Hillkirk, an executive editor at USA TODAY, said the editors there "are talking to everybody involved" in the story's reporting and editing "to scrutinize the way we covered it." The newspaper will publish a correction in Thursday's editions and at www.usatoday.com.

At usatoday.com, editors relied on reports from The Associated Press as the story developed - meaning the website followed the news as it turned from miracle to tragedy.

"This is not a good day for news organizations," said George de Lama, deputy managing editor for news at the Chicago Tribune, where 373,000 of Wednesday's 656,000 copies went to readers with a front-page story stating the miners had survived. At his newspaper, "we're all sick about this...conversations are underway across the newsroom on how to prevent it from happening again."

At the Star Tribune, all 325,000 copies of Wednesday's newspaper reported that the miners were alive. "All of us in the business need to do some sorting out today about what we actually knew and from which sources," Scott Gillespie, the newspaper's managing editor, said Wednesday.

Many newspapers published accounts produced by the Associated Press, which first reported at 11:52 p.m ET Tuesday that "family members" said the 12 miners were alive. But by 12:25 a.m. ET Wednesday, AP had dropped the attribution to family members from the first paragraph of its main story on the mine disaster.

The service had added a quote from West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, who said "they told us they have 12 alive." But it was not clear who Manchin was referring to when he said "they." He told USA TODAY Wednesday that he "never confirmed" to any media that the miners were alive.

Mike Silverman, the AP's managing editor, said in a statement Wednesday it "was reporting accurately the information that we were provided by credible sources - family members and the governor. Clearly, as time passed and there was no firsthand evidence the miners were alive, the best information would have come from mine company officials, but they chose not to talk."

The AP also reported Wednesday that Manchin had said he heard the miners were alive from "rescue people."

Cable news networks defended their work. Jonathan Klein,. president of CNN U.S., said "two pretty good sources" had appeared to confirm the news - Manchin and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (news, bio, voting record), R-W.Va. At 12:28 a.m. ET Wednesday, CNN broadcast an interview with Capito. Asked what she could confirm, Capito said "12 miners (are) alive."

Len Downie, executive editor of the The Washington Post, defended the media. "Our story was a reflection of what was being said at the time," said Downie. "I don't regard it as our error, but as an error by the people in charge of the rescue."

The Post's account, which stated flatly that the miners "were found alive," also appeared in many other newspapers that subscribe to the Post's news service.

One newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, says it was able to destroy copies of an early edition that carried the erroneous report. "Every copy of today's Los Angeles Times" that went to newsstands and subscribers "carried the correct information about the mine disaster," David Garcia,. the newspaper's spokesman, said in an e-mail.

Contributing: Jill Lawrence.