Wednesday, January 04, 2006

who to believe?

so, i was watching tv (flipping between the orange bowl & scrubs - both great) and saw the crawl on the screen about finding the 12 miners alive, and one deceased. i was surprised, and very pleased. really, that's amazing. as i spent some time later in the evening reading blogs and checking emails, i hit up the news websites i frequent. read a little story on l.a. times about finding the miners. was watching nightline and they were interviewing families of the miners. saw similar story on bbc.com. happened to flip over to drudgereport and see counter story about breaking news, all dead. wha? wha? flip back to la times. no changes. flip back to bbc, front story still same, but top crawl is saying breaking news, possible all dead. meanwhile, i'm still watching nightline, a freaking news program. no updates. check cnn.com. front page says 12 alive. refresh. still same. wait a few seconds. refresh. breaking news, possibly 12 dead. nightline is ending. oh, now they've got a little break in with the westcoast feed. mixed reports, now we're hearing from the mining company that it's true, there are 12 dead, and possibly just one alive. nightline ends, martin bashear doesn't seem to quite know what to say. then they show another breaking news clip to say that 12 dead. so, i flipped to nbc, nada. flipped to cbs, nada, but bill o'reilly is on letterman. i get sucked in, start watching for a while. then the crawl breaks with the news of the twelve dead. flip to jimmy kimmel, which i shouldn't watch but should go to bed but always end up watching for a while. show seems normal, then the crawl with the news.

so, it looks like it's official, twelve didn't make it out. which is terribly sad. i hope that the 13th does make it. shoot, i really hope that tomorrow i'll wake up and find out that over the next 3 hours the news changed and they all made it. if not, my condolences go out to the families.

4 comments:

Adam said...

Well, it seems to be the more unfortunate of the options. A tragedy.

edluv said...

damn. i'm not blaming the news for getting it wrong initially. it's just confusing, and i kept hoping that as it swung towards the negative that it wouldn't.

Scott and Malisa Johnson said...

All of the newspapers that went out this morning said twelve alive one dead. I saw the paper only hours after hearing on the way to the gym at 5:30am that twelve died. NPR didn't even mention the discrepancy. Weird hearing the misinformation after hearing the truth. I couldn't figure out what was going on.

I wonder how confused people got with information before phones, television, and the internet? It wasn't that long ago.

edluv said...

yeah. like you said, your paper had it wrong. so, it'd be the evening newspaper @ the earliest to break the bad news. or maybe even the next day.

i really appreciate a lot of aspects of our immediate culture. it just stinks when it bites you in the rear. of course, i'm only complaining as an outsider. i could not imagine if i was personally affected/involved with this tragic event.