Oh dear

All the way to work this morning, 5Live kept playing the soundbite, "They're all alive!" ? and the whoops of joy as people above ground learned that 12 of 13 trapped coal miners had survived the underground explosion in a Virginia coal mine. Now, whoops, the Guardian reports that instead of just one miner being killed, in fact just one of them is still alive.

(As you can see from the screenshot, the NY Times is still reporting that they're alive.)

I've said before that in our 24-hour news culture, the first reports are always garbled and wrong. Yesterday, I heard an interview with the peace activist who was kidnapped with her parents in the Gaza strip over Xmas, and she was saying how they were hearing television news reports that they'd been released, three hours before they were, in fact, released.

In the war to be first with the news, factuality is the first casualty.