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Generational shifts - new coverage, abiding stories

Thursday, April 8, 2010

TWO ALMOST SIMULTANEOUS mining disasters on opposite sides of the world are making the media rediscover - as they seem to periodically - the distinctive qualities of community life among workers and their families in this dangerous industry.

It seems to take miners’ deaths, and the occasional astonishing rescue from death, to get journalists, whether reporting from Montcoal, West Virginia or Wangjialing, Northern China, to dig out not just their more elegiac vocabulary but also their deeper sociological observations.

The drama of an agonizing, prayer-filled delay between a catastrophic event (collapse, explosion, fire or flood) and the almost inevitable announcement of human fatalities, makes any such story even more compelling. And always the media coverage will stress in almost awed, usually somewhat surprised terms the uncommon “way of life” that mining communities lead and the evident uniqueness of their culture.

 

This slightly distanced, anthropology-tinged air of bemused curiosity is doubtless linked to the perception that mining is an industry of the past - this despite the fact that half of America’s energy needs are still supplied by coal - and the frequent geographic isolation of coalfields from urban centers (that more common habitant of journalists). Perhaps too, there’s the comfortable but utterly untrue notion that physical danger at work is also a thing of the past. That’s heightened in West Virginia by the horrible paradox of industry celebrations being held only two weeks ago in Washington because last year was counted to be the safest in national mining history.

In fact, the 25 and sadly perhaps even more deaths at Upper Big Branch Mine represent this country’s worst mining disaster for a generation. A whole new slew of journalists is encountering afresh the enactment of old communal rituals (stoic yet sentimental, and deeply necessary) that have developed out of the shared experience of work that’s simply brutal on a daily basis - and life-threatening both long-term and suddenly, violently.

  

 

MY EARLIEST LONG-TERM assignments were in Northern England’s then-vast Yorkshire coalfield of the 1970s, and my immersion in King Coal culture came from being based in a mining village throughout a long and bitter strike. (It was a willing stay, but also a tad enforced. My TV network boss, John Edwards, refused to let me leave even for my planned family break at Christmas. Edwards’ own renowned dedication to journalism-via-direct-experience once involved himself swimming from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown in the midnight hours to test at first hand the credibility of Ted Kennedy’s account of Mary Jo Kopechne’s death.)

I developed a facile conviction during that Yorkshire assignment - and through my subsequent specialization in mining stories, developed thanks to journalism’s frequent yearning for “more of the same”, plus Britain’s slump into years of labor disputes, with miners to the fore - that I’d discovered the one job I would not do for a million UK pounds a year (1970s' money-value, remember). I was later to identify even more distressing ways to earn a living, but for then, my idea of horror was being a face-worker in a deep-level, undersea pit, wielding a pick and shovel with only a helmet-light to guide me, up to a mile out beyond the coastline.

I inevitably soaked up both the folklore and facts of mining life, with its harsh realities and self-replicating tropes. One evening I called on the widowed mother of a 28-year old pitman who’d been badly injured that day in a vicious clash with police on the picket-line, only to discover that her other son had recently died in a shaft accident, just a month before the strike began. It seemed excessive, but was true, that her husband’s death a few years earlier had been due to pneumoconiosis - the pits’ occupational disease known as “black lung”. She showed me her widow's pension-book stipulating the cause of death.

She also held up a photograph of the three men in her life – two now dead, the third in intensive care. “That’s the price of coal,” she said flatly.

  

 

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THOSE WELL-PUBLICIZED FIGHTS with miners’ unions led to Britain being ruled by the Conservative Party, first under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major, for a mind-numbing, and eventually very sleazy, seventeen years.

Yesterday’s announcement by the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown of a general election for May 6th marks (I compute with a slight shudder, now I think about it) almost as long a period of uninterrupted rule by the Labour Party. It’s 13 years, after all, since Tony Blair won his landslide victory with Brown at his side, patiently and later impatiently awaiting his own turn.

Britain’s print media are dividing up on their predictable partisan lines (British broadcasting, at least, still seems constrained by its statutory obligations to be neutral, especially in the short – to American minds – official campaigning season of under four weeks). The central issue now seems oddly sophisticated compared with the simplistic “Who rules Britain – government or unions?” question of 1979. Now, it’s The National Deficit (are you watching, Washington?) … who has the best plan to cut it back? 

Will the Conservatives hack it crudely, and end up pushing the country back into recession? Will Labour’s much-maligned, but nonetheless pretty effective economic managers (notably Brown himself – seen above right with his veteran Cabinet colleague Jack Straw) prove to possess the steadier hands for restoring expansion, without worsening Britain’s overall debt and even becoming – the gods of Europe forbid! – another Greece?

But over and above all this, I suspect – and we cannot forget the media’s recent powerful revelations (with The Daily Telegraph leading the probe) of shameful expenses abuse in Parliament – that incumbency will bring Brown no benefits, only blame. Not least from a generation of younger voters who have really known only his party’s governance, and will probably go with the unavoidable Obama-like siren calls for “Change”.

 

APPLE’S LONG-AWAITED LAUNCH of the iPad found me reflecting further on generational change in communications – of the digital, technical kind, to be sure, but in the content of communication as well.

I’ve been happily playing host to my visiting 14-year old grandniece Katherine Sailor, who naturally displays all the facility you might expect with a new electronic device, bridging the gap as it’s meant to between smartphone and laptop. More importantly, though, I’ve found my curmudgeonly prejudices about high-schoolers’ and middle-schoolers’ capacity for meaningful expression totally challenged by Katie.

And by her peers. I’ve also been privy recently to the judging of essay-contests for different groups of young people across the nation, mounted by my colleagues at Maryknoll Magazine. The writers’ thoughtfulness and creativity – especially those in grades 9 through 12 – gave me great pause, and moved me profoundly at times.

As for Katie herself – well, I must report that to be engaged in conversation by her (and I mean engaged) is to learn … about pre-Colombian native American history, about fast-moving plotlines in contemporary mystery fiction, about contrasting dress-sense between West and East coasts. And – in contrast with most popular culture’s depiction of teen mannerisms – all this is delivered with nary a “like” or a “you know”.

Oh, and she helped me navigate through the iPad’s killer apps, too.

 

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