Disaster Undermined

SALT LAKE CITY: A federal judge yesterday rejected the news media’s request for access to the government’s investigation of the Crandall Canyon mine disaster. U.S. District Judge Dee Benson said there’s nothing in the Constitution that gives reporters the right to watch interviews or get other access to an active investigation. He denied a request for an injunction. “While it may be true that...

SALT LAKE CITY: A coalition of media organizations, including The Associated Press, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court on Monday seeking to halt a federal investigation into the Crandall Canyon mine disaster until a judge can decide whether the proceedings should be public. The U.S. Labor Department has refused to allow the public to attend interviews during the government's investigation of...

NEW YORK, Jan 17 (Reuters) - The chief executive of U.S. mining company Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold accused The New York Times on Tuesday of "disturbing and provocative misstatements" for criticizing the company's financial support of the military in Indonesia, where it operates a huge mine. Richard Adkerson also acknowledged that as a result of the newspaper report, the company has received...

After the pounding from nature the world took in 2005, our hearts were ripe for the "miners miracle" in West Virginia. We wanted to believe it. And there seemed to be ample reason to do so. Before I went to bed Tuesday night, I heard on the 11 o'clock news that 12 of the 13 miners were alive; their loved ones were euphoric. My heart went out to the family of the man who had not survived, but I...

Sometimes, even journalists want to believe in miracles. We are, after all, unfailingly human, which might help explain why we got it so wrong last week. In hindsight, there appears to be no professional excuse for the lapse in reporting that led so many television stations and newspapers to run stories declaring that 12 of the 13 men trapped in a West Virginia coal mine had been found alive. A...

The sad but safe assumption about the Sago miners is that when their funerals are over, we will forget about them, their mourning families, and the working conditions that still threaten so many like them. We will forget and, with occasional exceptions in the pages of liberal magazines and daily newspapers, we won’t be reminded until the next mesmerizing catastrophe shows up on the cable channels...

It was the most heart-rending and humiliating botch of a life-and-death story in modern memory, yet most journalists, naturally, aren't blaming themselves. It was everyone else's fault, they say. We just published and broadcast what we were told, and it turned out to be wrong. Tragically wrong, as in the Washington Post headline in Wednesday's late editions: "12 Found Alive in W.Va. Coal Mine." Or...

Tim Mulherin of Indianapolis was one of the many readers I heard from Wednesday morning. He and others let me know how disappointed they were at The Star's having printed the wrong information regarding the fate of 13 coal miners in West Virginia. The Star wasn't alone in reporting that 12 of the 13 miners had been found alive. Newspapers, most in the East Coast time zone, that were caught in the...

My folks grew up in a town whose fortunes rose and fell on coal mining. When I lived in that town, I thought the men had the most exotic-looking eyes. Try as they would in post-work scrub-downs, the miners couldn't remove all the coal dust from their lids and it looked like permanent eyeliner to my 12-year-old mind. I thought of those vivid, black-rimmed eyes this past week, watching and reading...

The relief I felt reading the paper Wednesday morning, with a headline assuring me the miners in West Virginia were safe, evaporated when I reached the newsroom and learned the truth: All but one were dead. The Star Tribune -- along with many other newspapers -- had a story at the top of the front page that was utterly inaccurate. Forty-one readers who felt similarly let down called or e-mailed me...