As I packed up after a late night and headed for bed early Wednesday morning, I was relieved to hear flash TV news reports that 12 of the 13 miners thought killed in an explosion in Sago, West Virginia had in fact been found alive. Which made it doubly heart-wrenching to awaken six hours later and found out that all but one of the miners was dead.
The reasons for the tragic miscommunication were still a little hazy as of this afternoon but it appears that someone overheard a comment from a member of the rescue crew over a police band channel and misinterpreted it to mean that the miners had been found alive. That information was then communicated to the anxious relatives gathered in a nearby church. The news media assumed the information was correct. The governor chimed in with “Miracles really do happen!” and it was off to the races. It wasn’t till three hours later that the awful truth became known. This despite the fact that the mine’s owner, International Coal Group, knew within 20 minutes that the report was false.
The blogosphere has been all over this story today and there’s little I can add to the excellent analysis posted on John Cole’s Balloon Juice or the account of events posted on Rodger Morrow’s This isn’t writing, it’s typing. But since I’ve been following community journalism so closely, I’ll make a couple of observations.
First, Wikipedia shone on this story. From the first posting at 10:38 p.m. EST on Jan. 2 through nearly 400 updates and revisions during the next 40 hours, the site organized a voluminous amount of background information on the mine, the explosion, the dangers inherent in mining and the controversy surrounding the false rescue reports. The reports were so timely that they challenged anything you could have found in the mainstream media. While Wikipedia editors lacked the access to government officials that CNN and The New York Times had, they reported updates from those news sites within minutes after they were posted. Anyway, it turned out that having access to government officials wasn’t such a great thing in this case after all.
Wikipedia’s history feature, which allows readers to track edits as they are made, gives some fascinating insights into the chronology of the events. A comparison of the posts preceding and immediately following the news that the 12 miners had died is especially poignant. Students of history will no doubt study wiki revision histories of major events like this because they offer insight into how people reacted to events as they unfolded. They are like little snapshots of time, much deeper and more personal than what the media provides. The first draft of history, really.
Wikinews, the experimental news analog to Wikipedia, didn’t come close to providing the level of detail that Wikipedia did, raising the question of whether the smarter course in the future will be to build out news as a spur to Wikipedia rather than a separate site. I also thought that Wikinews’ angle on the story, which stressed the communication problems rather than the death of the 12 miners, was off base. Perhaps community news editing is impractical without an experienced news editor at the helm. I’ve noted this problem in previous posts.
The news media itself turned in a shameful performance on this story. Print, broadcast and online media all scrambled to report the good news that the miners had been saved based on what turned out to be very flimsy evidence. Standard journalistic practice dictates that you confirm any news before going live with it but there is no evidence that that practice was followed in this case since most accounts indicate that the sole source of the erroneous report was one individual with a police scanner. Even The New York Times got taken and several morning newspapers trumpeted the good news about the rescue hours after it had be confirmed that the miners had, in fact, died.
Of course, you would have been hard-pressed today to find much explanation in the mainstream of why so many professional news organizations got this one wrong. Mainly they blamed the governor, the mine owner or people at the scene for leading them down the wrong path. This excuse looked flimsier and flimsier as the day went along and it became clearer how little evidence there was to report the rescue in the first place.
Recent news media debacles, such as 60 Minutes’ reporting on President Bush’s National Guard service based on bogus documents, have raised a lot of questions about the mainstream media’s ability to participate in this more competitive news world. If the response of the leading news organizations to increased competition is to run with more speculative information and flimsier confirmations, then they will continue to drain away their most important asset, which is their credibility.
In the meantime, this was Wikipedia’s finest hour. The site provided fresh, accurate, current information and was a useful backdrop to ongoing coverage. It’s not a leap of faith to see Wikipedia evolving into an information resource that could be every bit as useful as CNN in understanding the context of breaking news.