Yet Another Heckuva Job

Arianna makes a very good point about the consequences of the media’s credulity when it came to Bob Murray’s hokey benevolent grandpa act:

What if, instead of giving endless airtime to Bob Murray, they had brought on some of the experts we saw last night and asked them questions about the chances of another collapse occurring? What if they had given us Professor Larry Grayson, who was interviewed last night by Dan Abrams on MSNBC, and other experts who could have contradicted once and for all Murray’s assertion that the company had not been doing retreat mining where the original collapse had occurred? What if they had gotten Stickler on the record on this, and had him definitely say whether or not Murray was lying when he repeatedly denied the dangerous technique was being used in the Crandall Canyon Mine?

What if they gave as much airtime to the seismologists denying that the collapse was the result of an earthquake as they gave to Murray who kept repeating the bogus (and responsibility-avoiding) claim that it was an earthquake, a natural disaster, an act of god?

Might things have turned out differently? We’ll never know. But we do know that a number of miners – perhaps as many as a dozen — had asked to be moved to a different part of the rescue operation out of fear for their safety. And that Murray had abruptly pulled Bodee Allred, the Crandall mine’s safety director (and the cousin of one of the missing miners), away from the microphones when the questions Allred was being asked veered too close to the bone for Murray’s comfort.

Here’s a question for the media: Since when do the owners of mines — especially owners who have been fined millions of dollars for numerous safety violations — set the news agenda?

All along, Murray called the shots and he wrote the media’s script for them. There was much to suggest that his agenda was not mine safety but rather Ass Covering 101 from the time the initial collapse happened. Had the media been more skeptical, probed a bit deeper, perhaps Murray and Stickler would have been pressured out of their roles as decision makers and the deaths last night might have been prevented. We’ll never know, but it’s clear Our Elite Media have learned nothing from the lessons of Michael Brown.

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