Ooops

Man, I bet whoever is responsible for this feels like crap today. I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the trapped miners story, but I had seen some headlines about it and saw a report on World News Tonight last night that seemed to indicate that it would take a miracle for those guys to be rescued.

When I checked in on CNN just before going to bed last night, there was a big "breaking news" headline saying 12 of the 13 were found alive. I even mentioned it to Ed since it seemed so opposite of what everyone was expecting to hear. We were both quite shocked (and a little confused) this morning when we saw the new headlines saying that instead of 12 survivors, there was only 1.

The guy who let that mistake happen should probably join the Michael Brown School of Disaster Management. President Bush would probably be first in line to pat him on the back.

But what's seemed really weird to me today is not so much that some asshole screwed the pooch big time on this, but that the news media (or at least the only two news outlets I keep up with during the day, cnn.com and msnbc.com, were making such a huge deal out of the screw-up. It would have been one thing if they had huge "breaking news" headlines screaming out about the tragedy itself, but it just seemed strange to me that they were totally focused on the screw-up. All day long, the headlines on both sites were focused on the mistake. It took Ariel Sharon's massive stroke to relegate the story to secondary status.

I don't know why that bothered me, but I think it's a pretty clear example of how the news media tends to focus attention on those stories that are shocking and/or sensational. No better way to "serve the public" than to scream out about some blunder of epic proportions, while ignoring the actual tragedy and its causes.

I can hardly wait to get home to see what Mary Hart has to say about it. Something tells me she'll be all over this one, probably asking Jennifer Aniston for her thoughts on the matter.