Papers regret the error, but also the timing

NEW YORK – “12 Alive.” “MIRACLE IN THE MINE.” “They’re Alive!”

Those were just a few of the newspaper headlines that greeted Americans on their doorsteps Wednesday morning. Joyful, dramatic – and of course, flat-out wrong.

As the painful truth emerged that all but one of the West Virginia miners was dead, news organizations were forced to ask themselves: Had they gone too far in reporting the original, much happier ending?

The answer, like the story itself, is murky.

Undoubtedly, the timing was bad and the circumstances challenging. It was just before midnight Eastern time when news, or what seemed to be news, came from family members that the remaining 12 miners had been found alive. (One body had been found earlier.) The governor appeared to confirm it, saying, “They told us they have 12 alive.”

On cable news channels, late-night viewers saw euphoria erupt in the black West Virginia night. Family members whooped. Anchors such as Anderson Cooper and Geraldo Rivera were swept up in the joyful scene. Newspapers across the country rushed to update their front pages.

Three hours later came the terrible truth: Only one man had survived, the mining company said. It was 3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, too late for many papers to change their initial front pages.

Not since premature reports of George Bush’s election victory in 2000 had so many papers announced the wrong news. The reversal also called to mind the Munich Olympics story in 1972, when the Israeli hostages were initially reported safe, when in fact all had been killed.

Were the media at fault in the mine story?

“I’m not sure there’s much of an issue here,” said Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe.

His editors worked throughout the night, adjusting the story as more information came in. One edition had the headline: “Twelve Miners Reportedly Found Alive.” A later one went stronger on that angle, Baron said, and the final edition was “Jubilation, Then Horror” – a version that reached 145,000 of the paper’s 400,000-plus readers.

Baron noted that reports the miners were safe had come from a number of credible, named sources, including family members and Gov. Joe Manchin.

“At some point you have to publish,” Baron said. “You can’t sit there waiting for every last piece of information because the paper would then go out at noon, and people would wonder why they didn’t get their paper.”

The word “reportedly” in the Globe headline was commendable, said Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a journalism school based in St. Petersburg, Fla. Many headlines, he noted, went too far because they allowed “no wiggle room.”

An example was a Newsday headline that took up most of the page. “Miracle in the Mine,” it said in large white letters emblazoned against a black background. In an early edition before it stopped the presses, the Rocky Mountain News said, “They’re Alive!” The New York Daily News reported: “ALIVE! Miracle in West Virginia.”

The error, Tompkins said, was that “we took what appeared to be good information … and added a level of certainty that it did not warrant.” Besides the headlines that went too far, many lead paragraphs dropped any attribution for news that the miners were safe.

The Associated Press cited family members in its initial dispatch, at 11:52 p.m., saying the miners were alive. Five versions later, at 12:25 a.m. EST, the story added the quote from Manchin – “They told us they have 12 alive” – and dropped attribution for the miners’ rescue to the third paragraph.

“AP was reporting accurately the information that we were provided by credible sources: family members and the governor,” said Mike Silverman, the news agency’s managing editor. “Clearly, as time passed and there was no firsthand evidence the miners were alive, the best information would have come from mine company officials, but they chose not to talk.”

The New York Times said in a statement that it reported the miners alive based on “attributed sources, including a named official from the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, and victims’ family members.” The paper was unable to correct its print editions in time, but it updated its online coverage once the deaths were confirmed.

West Virginia’s largest newspaper, the Charleston Gazette, had an initial headline of “Twelve Alive!” but was able to correct the story to “Only 1 Survives” in its final edition.

Some newspapers said they would run stories today explaining how the story was handled. The (Toledo) Blade and the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer both planned columns after receiving e-mails and phone calls from angry and confused readers.

“There was nothing we could do,” said Kurt Franck, the Blade’s managing editor. “It was unfortunate timing.”

Naturally, papers farther west had better luck because of the time difference.

First-run Idaho editions of The Spokesman-Review carried a report that 12 of the miners had survived, but when news broke at midnight that all but one of the miners was dead, editors remade the front page for later editions and about 85 percent of paper’s readers got the latest news.

Spokesman-Review editor Steven A. Smith noted the paper’s story, picked up from the Washington Post, attributed reports of the miners’ survival to company officials, to family members and even to the state’s governor who issued a statement.

“As a former reporter, I’d like to think I would have included some qualifying language in any story I’d have written – ‘reportedly’ found alive is one such qualifier,” Smith said in an online discussion of how the story was handled. “But being on the scene, hearing the news as reporters did, I can’t imagine NOT reporting that the miners were found alive.”

Melanie Sill, executive editor of the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., wrote an “editor’s blog” to readers Wednesday explaining her paper’s coverage. She also planned an editor’s note expressing regret for that erroneous headline: “Miracles Happen in West Virginia.”

Her message, she said, was that “there’s a difference between journalistic failure and getting bad information – which I call an honest mistake.”

No such regrets were felt at CNN. “Our coverage was outstanding on every level,” said Jonathan Klein, the network’s president.

“Unlike print, which has to live with its mistakes etched in stone, TV is able to correct itself immediately,” he said. “I think the audience accepts that.”