Saving Face

How does one tell loved ones that in fact, all but one of the miners are dead?

I'm sure by now you have all heard/read/saw the commotion about the miners that were trapped after an explosion. After forty some hours they found a body, then shortly after they found the rest. The problem is that there were apparently "communication" problems. These "communication" problems led to the word going around like a bad game of telephone and it quickly turned into church bells ringing and the word "miracle" was being used a lot.

Less than a half hour later many people at the site (and the mayor) learned that the news may not be correct and that in fact most of them were dead.

Nearly three hours after the celebrations started the real news was told, all but one was dead.

Was this a case of an over zealous searcher who over heard the wrong thing? Did someone give the news over a cell phone with bad reception? You would think if nothing else the tone of the first person giving the news would have told the story, dead people, mostly dead people.

Now everyone wants to blame someone, and there may be people to blame, they may even be at fault, but lets hold on a second and think about all the "false positives" we've had lately, and by lately I mean since we have had 24/7 news, news on your cell phone, our blackberry, our Treo or our laptop on at all times...I do it too.

Iin a rush to be the first to press some networks, websites and publications are getting burned.

We create the need to know ASAP and then we shun the world for trying, if they make a mistake that is. Granted, this was a pretty bad mistake, but ten years ago this probably would not have happened this way.