Mining the Truth

I was awake at about midnight Tuesday writing my next blog (not this one) when I encountered CNN's Anderson Cooper touting the miraculous news.

Twelve of 13 miners trapped nearly 2 miles beneath the West Virginia surface for nearly two days after a mine explosion were alive!

For most of the day we had been lead to believe the news from the coal mine would be grim. The air was bad. One miner had been found dead. Then the mine car the men had used was discovered empty - an indication the men had survived a blast and had fled to a more secure area.

Then the bells at the Sago Baptist Church began to toll as word filtered from the command center at the mine that the remaining 12 men had been found alive!

For the next two hours, I was absorbed as reporters scrambled to cover the change in the course of events. Reportedly, the miners were to undergo triaged medical care and those who were in the best shape would be brought to the church to be reunited with their families.

At about 2 a.m., an agitated woman come up to Cooper to tell him "there's no miracle."

He looked stunned. And compelling television began to unfold.

I felt so bad for the poor families involved. To endure such a tragic roller-coaster ride of emotion is impossible to fathom. There appears to have been a 2- to 3-hour delay between the time the command center received the erroneous information that the remaining 12 miners were alive and the time that mine owner International Coal Group gave the correct information to grieving families: Just one miner had survived.

Why the delay? Did they not hear the bells tolling? Were they not aware of the cable news broadcasts? Were they unaware that everyone from the state's governor to a mine foreman had confirmed the news for the various media covering the story? Did they realize a Red Cross official had confirmed the rumors at the church where friends and families awaited? The mine company ultimately admitted it knew within 20-45 minutes that the first report was wrong. Why was that fact not as zealously transferred as the erroneous news?

I have a theory, honed after years of watching business leaders, politicians and other officials repeatedly bumble and stumble in the face of disaster and big news stories. This was a horrible situation made worse by the mine owner's naive, unfortunate (though understandably intentioned) decision to sequester the media away from both the command center and the church, where families were stationed. International Coal Group attempted to control the flow of information ostensibly to avoid either unnecessarily raising spirits or quashing hopes - unaware that to attempt this in an instant communications age is as problematic as catching smoke with boxing gloves. Hence, while someone at the command center may very well have overheard the original erroneous news and transmitted it back to the church via cell phone, the media was unable to check it out because its access was being blocked at two sensitive points. Conversely, members of the media were also unable to inform the command center of the obvious joy being transmitted to the rest of the world.

By all accounts, the mine rescue command center was filled with mine administrators, foremen, politicians, emergency workers, police representatives and the like. A press representative pooled from the many media covering this story should have been there as well. This person could have reported the miscommunication quickly and spared the families some of the heart-wrenching drama by reporting news in minutes, not hours.

Instead, late Wednesday afternoon it was revealed that mine officials had entrusted state police officers to ferry a message to the clergy at the church during the celebration to inform families that initial reports may have been too optimistic. That message was muddled.

Dumb. Just plain dumb. The area was crawling with communication professionals.

How many times do we have to watch clumsy officials, overly suspicious of the media, demonstrate they are far less media-savvy than they will ever comprehend? They pay big bucks to "press aides," read books on how to "deal" with the media, go to seminars on "spinning", yet they stumble repeatedly in the face of the big story because these officials spend too much time scheming to leave the media out instead of inviting the media in. The media are not the enemy. The media are the people. Never has this been more painfully evident than in the early hours of Wednesday morning as broken-hearted family members trudged out of the Sago Baptist Church to spill their hearts to American journalists.

In the end, mine officials could no more control this story than they could control the atmosphere in a dusty coal mine during a thunderstorm.

More later,


Mark