Dave Foulk Internet Flyer

Everybody has some kind of diet.

There’s the South Beach, The Bible Diet, The Sonoma Diet, and all kinds of companies where you pay money for information on how you can lose weight by their method. I suppose they all work to one extent or another.

My wife found a diet of her very own. It’s called “The Have My Innards Re-Plumbed Diet”. It works better than anything I have seen. After five months, she can run around inside clothes she used to wear, and never touch the fabric.

But I am not too big of a fan of leaving the operating room with tubes placed in naturally occurring body orifices, plus a couple of extra tubes where the doc made his own sump.

I think I will write my own diet book. People tend to buy diet books without ever considering whether they will follow the rules of the diet. So I believe I’d be pretty safe, plus, if they bothered to follow it for a few days, think of the endorsements from happy followers.

The first day would go something like this:

Breakfast: A cat head biscuit or two with country ham and red eye gravy made with strong coffee, fried apples, and extra biscuits with cow butter and some apple butter made outside in a copper kettle over an open fire. If you have coffee or tea, please use artificial sweetener.

Dinner: Pot Roast with carrots and onions, Irish Potatoes boiled and served with butter, green beans, and cornbread. Banana Pudding and plain tea with no sugar. If you drink sweet tea made with artificial sweetener instead of sugar, your eyebrows will grow together and you will want to move up north.

Supper: Meat Loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn on the cob, slaw, and macaroni and cheese. Please make sure the macaroni is not from a box, but from scratch. Yeast rolls, but leave off the butter to save calories. You may, however use some gravy on them in moderate amounts. Coca Cola or Pepsi, not “pop”, and not “diet” anything. After dinner; odd-man for the rest of the “nanner puddin”.

Evening snack: Slice of chocolate layer cake, or cornbread and buttermilk in a glass. That ought to hold you ‘til morning.

That’s a diet I could live with. But somewhere, my doctor’s stethoscope is burning.

I can't imagine how awful it was for those families in West Virginia to have hope, then relief, and then everything snatched away from them in a moment.

Of course, I'm talking about the horrible mistake that was made, when somehow the families waiting on news from a mine explosion were told their loved ones were found alive, with only one fatality. Turns out, it was just the opposite, only one man had survived.

So who gets the blame for making the mistake of telling family members that the miners were found alive? We may never know. But I am sure that the person, or persons responsible know themselves what they did.

This event will be the object of studies in many journalism and public relations courses. I think it shows several things:

• The need for one person, and only one person who speaks for emergency crews and the company or persons involved in a crisis. There should be one place to go for information, and one person to give it. That human funnel's job is to make sure the correct information is given.
• Family members should have been the first to be notified about their loved ones. Why in the world did the Mine Company wait so long, knowing that the families were celebrating, when they should have been making funeral plans. Bad news is hard to break to people, but it was terribly wrong to delay it.
• Talking in "code" as they were inside the mine...such as "one item found" when they meant one person found...is extremely dangerous when communications equipment does not work properly. Better to talk "in the clear" and be clear. And why was a loudspeaker open to an entire tent full of people at the command post?
• There's a tremendous competetion in the news business, and newspapers are time conscious also...because of their web sites. The pressure on reporters at-the-scene to "get it first" is tough.
  
• Did reporters make a mistake by releasing the news? Not if their source had been reliable and official, such as a mine company executive, or someone with the rescue team, or better yet, from a family member who sincerely believed their loved one had been found alive, and had been told so by somebody...(who knows who, yet?)
• Mine work is complicated, dangerous, and tough. Few people understand exactly what happens under the earth. There were many common mis-speaks, the most often statement was that "oxygen" was being pumped into the mine. They meant "air". Oxygen would accelerate any fire, much more than air.
• And, we are talking about the middle of West Virginia, in a place that is not used to scores of reporters and cameras, and not used to dealing with that kind of magnifying glass scrutiny. It's easy to see how the claw for information could get out of hand.
  
• I really fault the governor's office for following rather than leading. Why didn't the governor assign someone to help the mine company with handling accurate information?
  

 I got a long distance call from my youngest daughter this evening. She wanted to know if I had been called to go to West Virginia where thirteen miners are trapped below the surface.

She remembered the story I had told her. And her call brought back memories. None of them were good.

In Whitesburg, Kentucky in the late 1970's, The Scotia Mine blew up. And when a crew went in to rescue trapped miners, it blew up again.

More than twenty men died. I remember the family members standing, waiting on word on their loved ones. The weather was cold, miserable, and wet. And the inky dark seemed to soak up the illumination from your headlights.

Nobody was telling reporters much of anything. I spent the night in some guard shack, waiting on any information to call back to Channel Ten. This was before cellular phones, but I doubt they would have worked in Letcher County, anyway. We had to bum a telephone, and call the newsroom collect.

But my misery was nothing. Those people waiting to hear if their daddy, brother, uncle, husband was alive or dead...that was misery.

The story ended like so many other mine accidents where men work way below the earth's surface to gouge coal out of the Kentucky earth.

They were all dead.

And I don't care if I ever cover another mine explosion again.

From this listening post, there's a lot of heat, and not much light coming from the syndicated talk shows at the end of this year.  And television news is as stuck as a phonograph needle on an old '78 RPM record.  For those who are not familiar with how a a stuck phonograph needle sounds, ask your grandpappy.

There's no denying that the issue of federal snooping on it's own citizens is a major issue, one of the top ones of the year. After the second week of talking about it, though, we are running out of things to say.  Talk show hosts are repeating themselves and the callers are saying the same thing.  It's under investigation, Congress is home drinking hot Dr. Pepper and eating chicken salad finger sandwiches.  The issue has been talked to death for now.  Please, wait until something new happens.  The self-appointed Washington TV experts need some time off, too.

There are some excellent reporters in Washington, DC.  One of them is a former WSB newsman, Peter Maier.  He is fair, conscientious, and  a hard worker.  Hence, he is on radio. Listen for his reports on CBS, and Westwood One.  Peter was the "go to" reporter when they needed someone with experience, compassion, and ability to cover the horrific Tsunami when it happened.

If I see one more Katrina recovery story, I am going to evacuate myself.  Every potential angle has been followed in the past two weeks.  Why?  Because it is a slow news time.  Those year-ender pieces from New Orleans say very little that's new.   Same for  Tsunami pieces.  They are rebuilding a shattered  piece of the world.

If you ever hear "continue" in the first line of a news story---beware. "The clean-up continues" , "The furor over internet snooping continues".  The word "continues"  is news-speak at best for:"nothing new is happenning", and at worst for:"whoever wrote this couldn't come up with a compelling lead".

Here are just four on my list of stories that I believe are not getting the coverage they deserve right now:

• Newspapers in Europe and in Turkey say the United States and allies are planning a pre-emptive strike against Iran and it's nuclear industry.
• What is happening in the housing and construction industry?  Is there such a demand for materials to the Gulf Coast that prices in other places might cause a big slowdown in new home building?  And what would that do to existing home sales, home improvements,etc?
• Our southern border is broken, and bleeding immigrants.
• What are our elementary, junior, and high school students learning.  How does this state compare with others.  And how many teachers are saying "forget it"  to disclipline problems and government paperwork, and either entering another field or private school?