Disaster Undermined

Our lead headline and story on the front page Wednesday were wrong, and we regret it. The headline, which varied in our three Triangle editions, and The Associated Press story said 12 coal miners in West Virginia had survived being trapped after a mine explosion. By the time the papers hit driveways, officials from International Coal Group Inc. had emerged to say the miners were dead. Newspapers...

Put yourself in the shoes of CNN's Anderson Cooper. He had heard that 12 West Virginia coal miners, all presumed dead, had been found, miraculously, alive. He had witnessed the jubilation occurring inside the Sago Baptist Church in Sago, W.Va. What more proof did he need? Two hours later, the shock clearly registered on his face, Cooper reported his error. There were not 12 survivors. There was...

It was the news everyone ached to hear: Twelve of 13 miners survived. But that information – which The Associated Press sent just before 11 p.m. Tuesday as most newspapers approached their final deadlines – was wrong. Three hours later, around 2 a.m. Dallas time, came the sad truth: Only one of 13 trapped West Virginia coal miners was found alive. But by then, many newspapers had finished their...

SAGO, W.Va. -- Amid outrage over conflicting reports from the deadly Sago mine disaster, the mining company's top executive said Wednesday that he regretted allowing family members to believe for hours that their loved ones had survived. A choked-up Ben Hatfield, chief executive of International Coal Group Inc., said company officials mistakenly allowed family jubilation "to go on longer than it...

How the events of Tuesday night and early Wednesday produced inaccurate newspaper headlines: Newspapers throughout the country, including the Akron Beacon Journal, reported in their Wednesday print editions that 12 trapped West Virginia miners were found alive. As we know now, that wasn't true. Here's how it happened: When the Beacon Journal initially went to press Tuesday night, at 11:30 p.m...

NEW YORK One day after most of the country's newspapers falsely reported that 12 trapped miners had been rescued in West Virginia, editors published on Thursday corrections, explanations, apologies or defensive statements about what had happened. Some editors offered their personal perspectives in interviews, with remarks ranging from we-did-nothing-wrong to "we're all sick about this." Toledo...

TV news people tossing around the word "miracle" is bad enough. Proclaiming a miracle with no verification is a travesty. Media credibility took another hit this week. Both electronic and print news outlets stumbled badly late Tuesday and early Wednesday with an emotionally charged factual error that was not corrected for three hours. Finger-pointing continues in the wake of the erroneous report...

WHEN IT comes to drugs, they used to say, speed kills. When it comes to journalism, they still say, speed kills reputations. In a horrible case in which journalistic prudence was spiked by the scramble to get the story first, the nation received the joyous news around midnight yesterday morning that 12 West Virginia miners had survived. In Philly, we went to sleep counting two victories - Penn...

In Philadelphia and much of the country yesterday, Americans awoke to newspaper front pages proclaiming, with varying degrees of certainty, that 12 of the West Virginia miners had been found alive. To a large degree, this unfortunate and embarrassing error was the result of bad timing. Word that family members had been told of the miners' survival moved on the Associated Press wire at 11:52 p.m...

EVERYONE WANTED a miracle, from the families of the trapped miners, to the mine company owners, to cable TV. When this miracle turned into a disaster, newspapers paid the price. It is hard to read the cruelly incorrect stories from Sago, W. Va., that were published in many Wednesday morning newspapers, including some early editions of the Globe, and not entertain grim thoughts about the challenge...