Consider The Source

The jarring thing is that just about everyone who picked up The Kansas City Star on Wednesday morning, January 4, knew that the headline was horribly and tragically false: 12 MINERS ALIVE AFTER 41 HOURS.

On one level, it’s hard to blame The Star. That paper was hardly unique in its misreporting of the Sago mine disaster in West Virginia. USA Today ran a comparable headline. So did other newspapers across the country. The hurt that this misreporting caused the family and friends of the deceased is too painful to even calculate.

What this incident should do, however, is to teach the established print media a little humility. Their writers and editors are forever cautioning their readers to “consider the source” when taking information from the electronic media, especially the Internet, or even from print publications like our own. This warning is inevitably given with some considerable condescension.

We’ll return the favor. When reading the daily newspaper,“Consider the source.”

In this era, when electronic information is all around us, the print media have a higher degree of responsibility than they have ever had before. Internet publications can change a headline in a nanosecond. The broadcast media can ditch a story so quick you doubt you ever saw or heard it in the first place.

But print is forever. I suspect that The Star may have set a record on January 4 for newsstand sales. That botched headline is now a piece of history. I know that we kept our copy.

Another similar but less offensive incident dates back to November 1948, when The Chicago Daily Tribune rolled out the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline. I think we all can remember the photograph of our proud Missouri President Harry S. Truman holding the newspaper up in celebration. I’d guess that deadlines have pushed newspapers to roll out editions irresponsibly time and again, but perhaps never with the inhumane result as this recent issue.

For us here at Ingram’s, it is a useful reminder of where cavalier reporting can lead you. That is not to say we have never made any mistakes, but we have surely never made one of this magnitude.

When fate intervenes, we try valiantly to align the new reality with the old. In 1999 when printing Ingram’s 25th Anniversary edition, for instance, and after we had gone to press listing Federal Judge Joe Stevens as one of our “Living Legends,” I received a call from Mrs. Stevens to learn of the untimely death of the Judge. We reprinted that section of the magazine and wrote a tribute to the memory of Judge Stevens. It certainly wasn’t cheap, but it was absolutely essential to Ingram’s standards.

A more chronic mistake that The Star can correct is its impulse to blame the workplace before the facts have been sorted out. On the same day that it was reporting the miners rescued, The Star was citing the 208 safety violations the mine had allegedly committed the year prior.

Any entrepreneur who has ever been visited by OSHA, let alone by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, can tell you how devoid of meaning so many of these violations are. The mine owners may prove to have been reckless and indifferent to safety, but that is not something the media can even begin to sort out in the hours of and days after this disaster.

Even months after a catastrophic event, the media have a tendency to accept the plot line conveniently fed to them by for-hire communications people and trial lawyers. Some receive that propaganda as though it had come from a burning bush. And then sometimes, only years later, when all the jury pools have been poisoned and the company bankrupted, does the public learn that Alar on apples does not kill children, or that Ford fuel tanks do not just blow up, or that silicone implants do not explode in women’s breasts.

No, in business reporting especially, discretion is among the highest virtues. It is the rare entrepreneur who needlessly jeopardizes his own workplace. Those who do, deserve our wrath. Those who don’t, deserve our appreciation. And all of them, and all of the families affected in any tragedy, deserve our patience.

Please share your views about this and other articles by emailing us at Editorial@IngramsOnLine.com.

 

Regards,

Editor-In-Chief & Publisher

Editorial@IngramsOnLine.com