Trapped
It’s seems that every time I’ve watched CNN for the last year (which is pretty much every time I’ve had a few minutes to kill at an airport bar) there’s been a story about miners trapped in a shaft. Why? When did this become news?
Miners have been getting killed weekly since the early Victorian era, and for the first century and a half nobody really cared. Now it’s a national headline? I guess it’s a welcome respite from war coverage (I know, another roadside bomb in Fallujah, I get it already) but other than that it’s pretty boring.
Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for miners who get trapped and/or killed. Hell, I feel bad for miners who don’t get trapped and/or killed. Being a miner is reason enough for pity. But trapped or otherwise, it’s not news. It’s the sort of thing that should be covered in one of those local papers in West Virginia. You know, the ones every suburbanite gets, that you don’t subscribe to and yet they seem to keep showing up in your paper box anyway, and that often have a name like The South Side Leader and are comprised of three sloppily-written articles and 24 pages of classified ads. That’s the correct venue for a story about anyone trapped in anything, not Headline News.
Unless it’s about a dwarf with his penis trapped in a vacuum cleaner. Now that’s front page.
