Quinn Wilhelmi

DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN!

Just wanted to point this out before Jon Stewart gets to:

- New York Times: Miners Found Alive

- Washington Post: Miners Found Dead

- San Francisco Chronicle: Miners Found Alive

- LA Times: Miners Found Alive (since removed from their site) AND Miners Found Dead

In a fairly dramatic move the LA Times actually sent its original daily headlines email at 12:23 AM saying the miners were alive and then resent it at 1:07 AM to make the correction. It was the only major news service I could find that actively attempted to remedy the mistake.

If anyone has access to many of these hard-copies I would love to see what stories they actually ran with in print.

But regardless, the question begs to be asked - are our news agencies increasingly pressured to get the story first rather than get the story right? Ever since the night of the 2000 presidential election Americans have been used to cable and network news running inaccurate or incomplete stories but usually the print media is more careful. Sure, reporters were probably misled by the coal companies or the governor's office on the state of affairs in this case. But the frenzy caused by the news media around this kind of tragedy seems to have contributed to the confusion that caused the miner's families to rejoice one minute and grieve the next.

I'm sure those families would have preferred no information over false information. Yet media outlets (and their consumers) tend to prefer anything over nothing. Is any news really good news?

Quinn Wilhelmi: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 3:18 PM, Jan 04, 2006 in Media
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