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Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, a new text for Introduction to Mass Communication classes.

Tuesday - January 31, 2006

Support Our Reporters Dept. Part II

Monday - January 30, 2006

Friday - January 27, 2006

Thursday - January 26, 2006

Wednesday - January 25, 2006

Ethics Readings

UPDATED AT END: Once again, I'm putting up some links for the benefit of my students; in this case, the links are for my ethics students. But all of you want to be brushing up on your ethical principles, don't you? Watch for additional material here later today.

Also, be watching tomorrow for updates on media consolidation. Lots of news on the Disney, Pixar, CBS, Warner Brothers fronts.

Tuesday - January 24, 2006

Who Are The Media?
When you think about "the media," you typically think about the channels that you see – the cable networks, the movies, the newspapers, the CDs, the magazine, etc. These links take you to the corporate side of the media business rather than the entertainment/news side. (Today's entry is being posted specifically for my Intro to Mass Comm students, but the rest of you might find it interesting as well. Remember, the primary purspose of this blog is to assist in teaching journalism and mass comm classes.)

Friday - January 20, 2006

Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

Wednesday - January 18, 2006

Tuesday - January 17, 2006

Friday - January 13, 2006

Wednesday - January 11, 2006

Tuesday - January 10, 2006

Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

Friday - January 6, 2006

More Thoughts on the Sago Mine Coverage
Watch for updates throughout the day.

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Thursday - January 5, 2006

What Went Wrong With Reporting on the West Virginia Mine Disaster
I live in Morgantown, WV, and for the last few days it has been the epicenter of round-the-clock coverage of the Sago mine disaster. For those of us who live here, this is not a made-for-television saga, this is a hometown story. Our friends and neighbors are coal miners. We are not far from where the nine Quecreek miners managed to survive being trapped underground in 2002.

So let me start by saying that journalists, especially those in the national press corps, need to remember that this is a story about real people with real losses. This is not an opportunity to feed the beast with compelling stories - this is a story about the worst thing people can imagine.

As most of you no doubt know at this point, an explosion early Monday trapped 13 miners deep below ground in the Sago Mine. About 9 p.m. Tuesday, the first body was discovered in the mine, according to a timeline in Thursday's Washington Post. At 11:45 p.m., one miner was found alive more than 2 miles into the tunnel.

At this point, things started to get confusing. According to the Post, at 12:18 a.m. the rescue command center heard a report from a rescue worker that 12 miners were found alive. Apparently this early report was overheard and spread instantly through a crowd that had been praying for a miracle. Church bells started ringing. People started crying, singing, cheering. According to the Charleston Daily Mail, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin had come out to the mine to wait with family members, and says that he asked for confirmation of the good news. Although he didn't get the confirmation, Manchin said he was quickly caught up by the joyous mood: ""[W]e went out with the people and they said, ‘They found them.' We got swept up in this celebration. I said, ‘The miracle of all miracles has happened.' "

Now there would seem to be some level of official confirmation, if the governor was making a comment.

But within the next half hour, reports started coming into the command center that only one miner was alive - reports that were not passed on to families or the press until nearly 3 a.m.

Now if you have ever worked in the newspaper business, you know that morning papers, such as the Charleston Gazette, start going to press around midnight (if not a little earlier). Newspapers have to make really tough calls on a breaking story, and unlike television, they leave a permanent reminder of the times they get it wrong.

For example, the Gazette had the headline "Twelve Alive!" in its early edition, something that was corrected in the final edition.

Matthew Thompson, writing in the Daily Mail, gives a good sample of how the story progressed throughout the night, going from jubilation to tragedy. (This link is to the second page of the story.)

National papers were every bit as likely to have had problems with the story as were local papers. USA Today , with perhaps the best national distribution, devoted third of the front page to the rescue story on Wednesday. On Thursday, this was followed by a pretty intense look at how the story was botched.

I should note here that the Daily Mail is an afternoon paper, and hence did not get caught in the same time trap that hurt so many morning papers. According to industry newsweekly Editor & Publisher, the Inter-Mountain, an 11,000 circulation afternoon daily out of Elkins, WV, managed to get the story right, not only its print edition, but also on its web site. E&P quotes Inter-Mountain editor Linda Skidmore as saying:

"I feel lucky that we are an afternoon paper and we have the staff that we do. We had a reporter there all night at the scene and I was on the phone with her the whole time."

"I was on the phone with her and I was hearing things on CNN and FOX that she was not hearing there," Skidmore said about reporter Becky Wagoner. "She heard that the miners were alive just before it was broadcast, around midnight. She talked about hearing church bells ringing and people yelling in jubilation--but nothing official."

Wagoner, a seven-year veteran of the paper, told E&P she had been covering the story since it broke Monday, and took a photograph at the site that was widely carried by national news outlets. She said rumors about the miners being found alive began circulating at 11:00 p.m. last night, with broadcast reports beginning at about midnight. "We heard that they were found alive through CNN, then it snowballed to ABC, then FOX and it was like a house afire," recalled Wagoner, who said she was at the media information center set up by the mine's operators, International Coal Group Inc., when the reports spread.

"A lot of the media left to go to the church where family members were located, but I stayed put because this was where every official news conference was given--and we never got anything official here," she said. "Something was not right. Then we were hearing reports that 12 ambulances had gone in [to the mine area] but only one was coming out. There was so much hype that no one considered the fact that there was no [official] update."

For myself, I went to bed Tuesday night with reports on the Internet announcing that the miners had been found alive. When I sat down to breakfast and my local paper on Wednesday morning, though, I knew immediately that something was off with the story. The report from the AP read:

Twelve miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive Tuesday night, more than 41 hours after the blast, family members and Gov. Joe Manchin III said.

Bells at a church where relatives had been gathering rang out as family members ran out screaming in jubilation.

Relatives yelled, "They're alive!"

Manchin said rescuers told him the miners were found.

"They told us they have 12 alive," Manchin said. "We have some people that are going to need some medical attention."

A few minutes after word came, the throng, several hundred strong, broke into a chorus of the hymn "How Great Thou Art," in a chilly, night air.

How could a reader tell there were problems with the story?

In short, the story read like it was passing along second-hand accounts. When I went back to the Internet to see the latest updates, all the bad news was there.

How did the press go so wrong with this story?

So what now can journalists do to atone for our sins? I would say that the press, especially the press outside of West Virginia, needs to do a much better job of talking about mine safety standards and enforcement. It's not nearly as easy or as much fun to write about as the latest snarky scandal out of DC, but it needs to be done. We've already started to see some of this. Let's hope that the press doesn't forget this lesson quickly. The people of West Virginia will not.

Additional Coverage

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Tuesday - January 3, 2006

Top 10 Media World Stories for 2005
Over the last year, I've written more than 100 pages of blog entries. Here are the top 10 topics I've covered during 2005:

    1. Plamegate
      Clearly I spent more time on this story than anything else this year. And while it's turned out differently than anyone might have expected, it clearly was the big battle of the year over press rights and responsibilities.

      Then, of course, there was also the celebrated Plamegate: The Opera, complete with poster and mention at Wonkette.
    2. Hurricane Katrina
      A lot of debate took place over how the federal, state and local governments responded to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This archive looks at the issues surrounding media coverage of these conflicts from September through December. Take a look at the top entry, which looks back at what we've learned about the press and disasters in retrospect.
    3. Selling Television Shows Directly To Consumers
      No, the iPod video is not one of the top 10 media stories of the year, though the device is undeniably cool. But the idea of selling popular television shows directly to consumers the day after they air without commercials is a mammoth change in the media world and qualifies, I think, as an aftershock of Ken Auletta's "earthquake in slow motion."
    4. War on the "Liberal Media"
      Regardless of the actual liberalness or conservativeness of the mainstream (or any other) media, there is undoubtedly a war on the "liberal media" by people who want to promote "conservative" values. (Good heavens, during the whole fuss over Harriet Miers, Laura Bush was accused of being a pawn of the liberal media!) And there was the whole "War on Christmas" front as well.

      Interestingly enough, Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, said he has not complained about the "liberal media" because       he feels the media is "less liberal than it is oppositional."

      I would hold that there is no question that the costal media, conservative or liberal, do not understand the rural states between the coasts. And that's why I liked this story about a midwest-born reporter traveling through the red states.

      I would also hold that we have some very good media out there that do an excellent job of trying to report what is actually news and not just hit some mythical "balance.
    5. Buying Coverage
      Newsmakers and advertisers have been buying positive coverage for themselves this year in ways that audiences aren't being told about -- record companies did it, politicians did it, bloggers and columnists did it. Advertisers bought their way into the plots of movies, the lyrics of raps, and even into videogames.
    6. Why We Still Need MSM
      With all the fuss over bloggers and new media, we still need the mainstream media, and need to be careful before we get to high-and-mighty about how MSM are so-last-century.

      Journalists continue to be willing give their lives to get stories for newspapers and broadcast organizations. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 47 journalists died world-wide in pursuit of stories, and 11 more died under suspicious circumstances. This is up from 17 the year before.

      The Washington Post's Dana Priest gave us at least two big stories on potential abuses of power that show what reporters can do when they are serving as watchdogs rather than lapdogs.

      Even the beleaguered NY Times had a great story on an Ebola outbreak in Africa that you won't see reported on in many blogs.

      Of course, the MSM are still quite capable of suffering from the same problems as bloggers do....
    7. What's Wrong With Hollywood?
      According to movie critic Michael Medved, the problem is that Hollywood is too liberal. Funny.... I thought the problem was that they weren't making movies people wanted to pay money to see. I mean, look at what did well. The wonderful March of the Penguins clobbered the banal Stealth and turned a much better return on investment than Dukes of Hazard.

      A second, more likely, argument is that movies are now moving much faster from the theaters to DVD. And then there's always file sharing, though if you really care about a movie, you don't want to watch one of those downloaded abominations.

      When Hollywood remembers why people go to the movies, they seem to do a lot better. (This is not saying that they go to see great movies. Cheapie, exploitative horror flix are some of the most successful movies, at least in terms of profit.) This Christmas brought about a number of successful movies - Harry Potter, the Johnny Cash biopic, and Narnia. Jury's still out on the Big Monkey.
    8. Deep Throat
      In June,       reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein confirmed Tuesday that W. Mark Felt, the former #2 person at the FBI, was "Deep Throat." Deep Throat was the secret source who provided guidance and background to the two reporters as they worked the Watergate story in the early 1970s. Two days worth of extensive coverage of the conclusion of the story that sent many of my generation to journalism school.
    9. Dead or Missing White Women
      Why is it that when something happens to a white woman, especially a white, middle-to-upper class woman, its all over the news for weeks at a time, and when a woman of color disappears, it barely rates a mention?
    10. Growth of Podcasting
      Podcasting made it into the Oxford English Dictionary this year and made it onto a Washington Post list of topics that are already "out." But podcasting is much more than a quickie fad It's part of a whole new industry trend known as long-tail media. (And if I were doing more than 10 items on this list, the long tail would have easily made the top 15.)

      Also, here's the MSM version of my podcast commentary.

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Living in a Media World Archive