In our work with various emergency services, we come into contact with the media in many forms. Occasionally, it is necessary for us to withold information from the media or families until we can confirm it. This is a perfect example of why. Those poor families that waited for those 11 men, were celebrating for three hours that they were still alive, until finally they were told that actually, that was wrong. This is why the media should respect privacy more than they do in events like this. All respect to them, the media do a great job without which searches for missing persons would be far more work than they already are, however, there are times when you shouldn’t report news.
In other news, I’m pretty exhausted having worked all weekend to get the AD migration done. I’ve two days of snag works, the final niggly one of which is permissions on home directories for folders redirected through GPO. Samba has provided its own little headache for which I really could slap a few people. All things considered, a huge effort has gone into what is essentially, a successful project. Thank fuck that’s over with.
Here’s looking forward to spending some time in the Beacons this weekend.
Actually, the media didn’t report the news to the families that they were alive – it was a stray communication that had come from the rescue teams, that had been mis-interpreted and passed on, according to information coming out of the area at the moment. The media reported the way they did as most of the newspapers would be printing early editions at the time that story was circulating – and twelve men back from the dead is a great life-affirming story, particularly when the eyes of the world are on the incident.
Yes, with hindsight, it was wrong for that story to have come out – to both the families and the press – but think about what things must have been like to be there at that time when this was all going on. Families would have been jubilant and crowing the news from the roof tops, and what media organisation isn’t going to report that – they’d be considered a bad one if they didn’t. It’s very much a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t a lot of the time within the media – people demand news, crave it, and are up in arms if things aren’t reported, but if it’s not the news they want to hear, or if it’s handled in a way that then appears bad with hindsight, it’s suddenly all bad.
Just my two-penny-worth, having sat in a newspaper office all day and watched this story come in.
Ah I hadn’t heard that – I heard on the news this mornign about 12 people being rescued alive, then on teh way to work heard the reversal.
Indeed, many communications from rescue teams “go astray” since we all operate on open radio frequencies. A mountain rescue team had an incident some years ago where a journalist was standing next to the control vehicle (where they shouldn’t have been) during a search and overheard a conversation about finding a body. Said journalist ran off to do his piece – not realising that the conversation was about a similar, but unrelated search. As it happens, the person was found alive, but very unwell and his life was probably saved by the rescue team in question.
It’s cases like that that I don’t like – unverified stories. People /believe/ the media, no matter how much of a disclaimer you put on it that “…an unconfirmed report of…” whatever, people will only remember what it is the report was saying.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a difficult job where information and misinformation exist side-by-side, often in places where I wouldn’t go if you paid me. All respect to them. But I still don’t like it when people go off half-cocked without verifying facts.
Anyway, how’s life down South? 🙂
always good for us to be kept on our toes!!
South? East from you, I think.
’tis ok. Having a nice time, and working hard.