The Mind of A Journalist

Last week in class, we got to listen to Don Meyers of the Salt Lake Tribune talk about the Mind of a Journalist. We learned more about the coal mine collapse in South Central Utah a few years and the fun of a press conference with the now-AWOL Bob Murray.

I never would have guessed that there were still mining towns where the mine owners still ran things and the miners and families were under their thumb. But the town Mr. Meyers described sounded like the town out of October Sky (I'm sure many of you have seen the Jake Gyllenhaal movie) or The Price Of Coal (a terribly sad play Box Elder High wrote for their one-act at State 4A Drama competition my junior year which did little more than depress its audience, fill the room with the smell of Kerosene, and provide inside joke fodder for my friends and I). I didn't think what Mr. Meyers described "could really happen here" (as Elphaba sings in "Bad" from Wicked).

The journalists down there, including Don Meyers, eventually found out that Bob Murray, the mine owner, basically ran the town, had in fact been lying to the press at what is possibly the most bizarre press conference ever, as they suspected, and had basically threatened the families of the trapped miners with a pension cut or erasure if they talked to the press.

That's not cool. That is just plain not cool.

People died in search of miners who were probably already dead because of Mr. Murray. He has disappeared from the media since.

In a way, this doesn't surprise me, because, hey, would YOU stick around after something like that? But, on the other hand, how has the media NOT found Bob Murray? This guy should have been found by now and been subjected to a crucifixion of his reputation--it has been done to men for lesser offences than his. Ok, that actually didn't come out like I wanted it to--when I say "should have" I mean in other such cases, at this relative point in time, it would already have happened. But then, maybe it's a good thing for Utah's mining industry that "Crazy Uncle Bob" has disappeared. They were calling for criminal action because he lied to federal authorities, saying that an earthquake caused the collapse rather than the company's own less-than-safe mining practices http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/us/09mine.html?_r=1&ref=robert_e_murray.

But I honestly never expected that this sort of thing--a massive coverup/PR disaster--could happen here. Maybe it's because I'm on the younger side and fairly optimistic. But the thing about journalism is that we're supposed to have an internal bullcrap detector because we are paid to call bullcrap on people when it needs to be called. This is a problem because I am naturally inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I'll gain more experience as time goes by. Part of the issue is the fact that I worked for the feature section all of my time at the Standard-Examiner, so writing hard news is, well, new and hard.

But it helps that I absolutely believe in calling bullcrap when it should be called. There was a situation when the Standard didn't call bullcrap on Roy City police and prosecution after no evidence was found to justify the hasty arrest and subsequent trial of my high school drama teacher. I was so mad--half of Roy doesn't know the truth!! He was innocent!

I don't want that to happen to people if I can help it; for them to be innocent with nobody knowing, because a newspaper that should have said something said nothing.