Chilean Miners: News or entertainment? I don’t care…

I hope at least one of the Chilean miners had seen The Shawshank Redemption. Never have Andy Dufrense’s words seemed more significant.

Andy: “You need it so you don’t forget.”

Red: “Forget?”

Andy: “That there are places in the world that aren’t made out of stone…that there’s something inside that they can’t touch. It’s yours.”

Red: “What’re you talking about?”

Andy: “Hope.”

Red: “Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane; it’s got no use on the inside. You better get used to that idea.”

Fortunately none of the 33 was willing to. Andy would be pleased to know that the area around the San Jose mine, teeming with family members, engineers, journalists and politicians, was renamed Camp Hope. The baby born to Ariel Tincona, the 32^nd miner rescued, while he was underground was also named Esperanza, meaning “hope”.

Feel-good factor

Looking back on the Chilean miners’ story, it was a brilliant piece of feel-good news. For a world that is sick to death of hearing about a recession apparently caused by the greed of individuals, here was a story about 33 ordinary men who achieved something extraordinary. Their ordeal put everything else in perspective and illustrated what feats humans can accomplish – both the miners in surviving and the rescuers in engineering such an escape.

I unashamedly welled up watching some of the rescue: it was brilliant live television. But being a budding journalist I detached myself briefly from the emotion to focus on the coverage. Sky News devoted the whole day to the rescue operation, having advertised it in advance with slogans such as The wait is nearly over. It was like a radical take on Big Brother.

Planned entertainment?

Sky had planned the news in advance: What if David Beckham had been hit by a bus or Al-Qaeda had attacked London? Did they have a contingency plan in place if other, bigger news broke? Or was the miners’ rescue fixed in their schedule like a Big Brother eviction on Channel 4?

News has been planned in advance previously, the best example being election coverage. But in the future, will news be directed more and more to entertain? Watching the live rescue was more like watching reality TV than the news. There was something voyeuristic in witnessing the reunions and the outpouring of emotion. Despite the vast number of journalists, very little reporting was actually done. Background on the everyday lives of the miners and the politics of the Chile were left unmentioned. Instead we learned that one miner’s mistress was present instead of his wife. The lengthy watching and waiting was filled with human-interest and not news information. Was this news or entertainment?

I’m not sure I care. Watching the rescue was uplifting and the celebrations in Chile were as jubilant as if they’d won the World Cup. This can only be a good thing.

There are serious questions to be answered. The incident should never have been allowed to happen and, given the inadequate working conditions, it wasn’t particularly gratifying to see the President on hand to hug every miner as they emerged.

He has now pledged to improve working conditions throughout the country and the lives of miners, another positive to emerge from this story.

News is changing

As the BBC’s former Brazil correspondent, Gary Duffy, highlighted recently, Britons have preconceived notions about South America. We tend to ignore anything that isn’t football, cocaine or carnival related. South Americans are viewed stereotypically as people who make a mess of things, particularly politics. The Chilean miners’ story has helped put South America in the spotlight for positive reasons.

The way we receive news is changing. It is getting faster and more visual. As Garry Duffy noted, ‘will anything ever not be filmed again?’ Whether or not it is dumbed down for entertainment purposes remains to be seen.

Andy Dufrense would have said the Chilean miners’ story came down to a simple choice: ‘get busy living or get busy dying‘. The miners chose the former and I am happy to take the positives out of their ordeal – as far as I can tell, there are many.