Media only as good as sources

ALBANY, N.Y. — My wife and I pumped our fists Wednesday morning when we saw the lead headline in the Albany Times Union: "12 found alive inside mine."

"It's a miracle," she said. Too good to be true, even.

You know the rest by now. Too good to be true, even.

After 9/11 and the initial reports of 20,000 dead in Lower Manhattan, after "proof" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, after Hurricane Katrina and the "breaking news" of large-scale rape and murder in the Superdome, we apparently needed another reminder: Initial news reports can be wrong.

Many times the chief culprit isn't the media's internal dynamics; instead, it's simply bad information.

Newspapers across the country reported in their Wednesday morning editions that a group of West Virginia miners trapped underground had been rescued. An exultant "They're Alive" was the banner headline in several papers, including the Hartford Courant and the Rocky Mountain News.

The news had broken shortly before midnight Wednesday, when television reports showed the celebration of family members, with comments from officials up to and including West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin.

Fully three hours later, the truth emerged: Except for one badly injured survivor, the miners were dead. The earlier report was blamed on a "miscommunication" between underground rescuers and their command center that made its way to families and the media.

Had the incorrect news arrived during almost any other three-hour window in a given day, the nation's newspapers would have had the correct report on their front pages.

But the news of the supposed rescue came out just as East Coast papers were on deadline; the heartbreaking correction didn't emerge until many of these editions were on delivery trucks. (Most West Coast papers managed to get in the corrected story.)

"I don't understand those who want to point a finger at the media in this instance, and claim that a tragically erroneous message was the fault of the messenger," Times Union Editor Rex Smith said Wednesday.

"The news doesn't stop at our deadline; it keeps happening after our press shuts down for the night and after the newscasters have delivered their reports on television. And the news changed."

The Times Union's Web site had the correct version by 3 a.m.