buckaroo
Here kitty, kitty, kitty
Each and every morning, one of my rituals is to read the daily paper. After about 10 minutes of poring over the headlines and comics this morning, the wife hollered at me and said that they had found twelve bodies and that all were dead except one. I turned my head, furowing my brow and said, no darlin', yer wrong. Says right here on the front page that 12 miners were found alive. Well, you all know the story now. Through rumors and scuttlebutt, people were told that the rescuers found 12 live bodies. It wasn't until 3 hours later that those same people were told that it was all a misunderstanding and that all but 1 were found dead.
The publisher for our local paper lives on my route and all morning long, I wished that I could see him and ask him about this. However, having been on this route for over two years, I've only seen the man on four or five occasions. But to my astonishment, he came out to greet me when I reached his home. I asked him point blank, "What about those headlines this morning?" He told me that the deadline for printing the paper is ten minutes to 3 in the morning and at that time, the story was that there were 12 survivors. He told me that he stayed up to watch the coverage and at five minutes to three, he called them to put a stop to the presses, but it was too late. The story was already printed. We discussed his sources, which he said was the governor of W. Virginia, but was instead the AP, who gave the governor credit for their source. While I did tell him that I didn't fault his organization from printing erroneous/wrong information, I did tell him that he needed to find a different source for his info. (yeah, right, I'm sure he, along with all the other newspapers who printed the story will change.)
What I found disturbing was that the publisher couldn't stop the presses after they started printing five minutes earlier. Overall, it's the bottom line of the cost of running the business, rather than the honesty of the news that counts. Just checking their site, I see that the only thing that is changed is the AP report that states that many eastern newspapers printed the wrong story.
The publisher for our local paper lives on my route and all morning long, I wished that I could see him and ask him about this. However, having been on this route for over two years, I've only seen the man on four or five occasions. But to my astonishment, he came out to greet me when I reached his home. I asked him point blank, "What about those headlines this morning?" He told me that the deadline for printing the paper is ten minutes to 3 in the morning and at that time, the story was that there were 12 survivors. He told me that he stayed up to watch the coverage and at five minutes to three, he called them to put a stop to the presses, but it was too late. The story was already printed. We discussed his sources, which he said was the governor of W. Virginia, but was instead the AP, who gave the governor credit for their source. While I did tell him that I didn't fault his organization from printing erroneous/wrong information, I did tell him that he needed to find a different source for his info. (yeah, right, I'm sure he, along with all the other newspapers who printed the story will change.)
What I found disturbing was that the publisher couldn't stop the presses after they started printing five minutes earlier. Overall, it's the bottom line of the cost of running the business, rather than the honesty of the news that counts. Just checking their site, I see that the only thing that is changed is the AP report that states that many eastern newspapers printed the wrong story.
