Chilean Miners: Super Victims Or Super Villains?

Un­less you’ve been trapped un­der­ground for the past 69 days as a re­sult of a Chilean min­ing dis­as­ter you’ll have heard the sto­ry of the 33 min­ers trapped un­der­ground for 69 days as a re­sult of a Chilean min­ing dis­as­ter.

When the gold and cop­per mine first col­lapsed on 5th of Au­gust the cov­er­age was min­i­mal, but like an ag­gres­sive tu­mour the sto­ry has rapid­ly grown in size with glob­al news net­works re­port­ing every twist and turn in the tale to the point where to­day, the day that the min­ers fi­nal­ly gain their free­dom, the cov­er­age is all up in your eyes like cataracts.

The Guardian are do­ing a minute-by-minute re­port akin to a Cup Fi­nal, as is the good old Beeb, with videos and all sorts of da­ta so you can quan­ti­fy the res­cue. It’s al­so live on BBC1 right now, in ad­di­tion to the stan­dard rolling news cov­er­ing, which is in­evitably reach­ing fever pitch. I’ve al­so heard un­con­firmed re­ports* that Sky have an an­i­mat­ed progress bar rep­re­sent­ing num­ber of min­ers saved. I imag­ine it looks like this…

…al­though I ad­mit it may be slight­ly more so­phis­ti­cat­ed.

But Sky can af­ford to be flip­pant be­cause even though these min­ers have been trapped for 69 days at an as­tound­ing depth of 2,300ft -  twice as long as any oth­er known sur­vivor of a min­ing ac­ci­dent - the sto­ry has shift­ed in fo­cus from whether or not they will sur­vive, to how much mon­ey they will make when they get out. Re­ports sug­gest that TV com­pa­nies are of­fer­ing up to £250,000 to each min­er for their ex­clu­sive sto­ry and pub­lic­i­ty agents, like vul­tures cir­cling a dy­ing an­i­mal, are bat­tling to sign up fam­i­lies of the still trapped work­ers. How­ev­er, in a shrewd move that sug­gests their skills might have been bet­ter used as tal­ent agents rather than hit­ting rocks un­der­ground, the group of 33 have sought le­gal ad­vice and drawn up a con­tract so that they will all prof­it equal­ly from any mon­ey raised as a re­sult of their or­deal - all or­ches­trat­ed from their un­der­ground lair.

Now that makes the 33 sound like su­per vil­lains who mas­ter­mind­ed a head­line-grab­bing min­ing dis­as­ter in or­der to se­cure for them­selves glob­al celebri­ty and fi­nan­cial­ly se­cu­ri­ty, and I’m not say­ing that’s what they did. That’s for you to de­cide. But even if they are su­per vil­lains, which they are, they def­i­nite­ly are, they have played the me­dia like a cheap fid­dle by cre­at­ing a sto­ry so com­pelling and me­dia- friend­ly, that it caused the ma­jor news net­works to reach a state of or­gas­mic fren­zy.

The sto­ry had dan­ger, dra­ma, ten­sion, weep­ing women and chil­dren, ob­vi­ous vic­tims and a man-stuck-down-a-well premise that is so sim­ple it has been mined by TV writ­ers since the medi­um be­came pop­u­lar. I think the best way to solve this prob­lem isn’t with an elab­o­rate cap­sule sys­tem that takes an hour to free one man, they should just send in Skip­py. Fail­ing that Lassie, or for dis­as­ters at sea, Flip­per.

* Ben­jamin Franklin said “be­lieve none of what you hear and half of what you see”. An id­iom that holds true to­day. The on­ly ad­di­tion I would make is “…and none of what you see on Twit­ter”.