Media bashing

So now most media outlets like wire services, network television and most especially newspaper are under the radar of scrutiny because of the false and erroneous report saying 12 miners alive and survived the blast there by giving false hope to many of the miners relatives when in reality they were dead already! Whose to blame of all these bad reporting?

Mike Fetters, a spokesman for The Newseum, a Washington, D.C.-based museum about the media, says that slightly more than half of the 250 U.S. newspapers examined Wednesday by the staff at the museum published front-page stories that said the miners were alive.

Few of those stories raised doubts about the report's credibility. Most did not make clear to readers, for instance, that the news was based on secondhand accounts from family members of the trapped miners just before midnight ET Tuesday. Officials from the company that owned the mine had not confirmed that the men were alive.

Greg Mitchell, editor of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, called the media's performance "disturbing and disgraceful" in an online column Wednesday morning.

"The job of reporters and editors is to stop and say 'we've got some possible good news, but it's not confirmed yet,' " Mitchell said later Wednesday in an interview. "That really didn't happen."

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