DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, again

In a tragic echo of the erroneous Chicago Tribune headline on the results of the 1948 presidential election, newspapers all over the country (including the New York Times) are arriving at doorsteps and newsstands announcing "12 Miners Found Alive 41 Hours After Explosion". Unfortunately, the headlines are exactly wrong: the bodies of 12 dead miners have been recovered from the Sago mine in West Virginia, and a single miner was rescued alive but in critical condition. (Newspapers are not the only media outlet that got this wrong, but they are the only ones so far who have committed the erroneous information to paper. Most TV news outlets have been hastily rewriting their newsreaders' scripts to reflect the correct information.)

As someone living in what was once coal mining country (prior to the 1959 Knox Mine Disaster, which also killed 12 miners but effectively ended coal mining in this area) and descended (like most people in this region) from coal miners, I feel a visceral connection to the people affected by the tragedy. My heart, and the hearts of many in Northeastern Pennsylvania, goes out to them.