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The horrible mining accident in Sago, West Virginia again focused the news media’s attention on the treacherous work of coal mining.

At one point, in live, late night coverage, CNN’s Anderson Cooper reminded viewers that this Appalachian region mines a lot of coal, which is used to fuel many of the power plants supplying electricity to viewers around the country. (In fact, more than half of the electricity used in the U.S. comes from coal.)

As elementary as Cooper’s observation seemed, it was an important connecting of the dots between the electricity we effortlessly consume and the dangerous labor conditions of coal mining.

But, the news media have themselves to blame for our collective ignorance on the coal industry. (Imagine a reporter from Saudi Arabia feeling it necessary to tell us that this is where a lot of our oil comes from.)

A review of network and cable television news over the past four years indexed by the Vanderbilt Television News Archive suggests that the news tells us about coal mining literally by accident.

• In 2005, national television news carried a total of four reports about coal mining, including a Fox story on a deadly China coal mine flood, and a CNN “Then and Now” story on the 2002 rescue of nine trapped coal miners in Pennsylvania—a story CNN liked so much they broadcast it twice. An exception to the accident-related coverage was an ABC News package and a full Nightline report on coal’s comeback as an energy source.

• It was more coverage by accident in 2004, with two reports for the year, covering mine explosions in China and Siberia.

• In 2003, the TV networks did a few reports on trapped miners in Russia, and another piece recalling the Pennsylvania mine rescue of 2002.

• Coverage of the Pennsylvania Quecreek Mine disaster and rescue accounted for nearly all of the coal mining-related reports of 2002. Here was the story so good it seemed like it came from Hollywood (and eventually was sold there). A total of 43 national TV news reports, most in just a few days in late July and early August, gave us wall-to-wall coverage of nine miners rescued from a flooded mine 240 feet underground.

Editors might argue that there is no “peg” for news about coal mining unless there is an accident involved.

Yet accidental coverage tells only part of the story. The news media habitually jumps from accident to accident, and misses disturbing patterns that could be the basis for a different kind of story.

First, The United Mineworkers of America (UMWA) union charged that the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety & Health Administration (MSHA)—a regulatory agency whose top ranks are staffed by former coal industry officials—is lax in enforcing Mine Act safety violations, and doesn’t have sufficient manpower to properly inspect the nation’s 1,400 mines.

Recent accidents illustrate the problem. In the Quecreek incident, it was later discovered that the workers had been supplied with faulty maps that led them to accidentally drill into flooded, abandoned mine tunnels. In Sago, as journalists quickly discovered after the disaster, the mining company had a list of more than 200 health and safety violations last year, including several that the company knew about but didn’t fix. Other mining accidents in recent years illustrate the same situation of preexisting safety problems gone uncorrected.

Second, the mining industry likes to point out the declining fatality rate in mining – 28 in 2004, compared to 133 in 1980, and more than 1,000 annually in years before the 1940s. But, the industry (as well as the industry-friendly MSHA) have ignored miners’ requests to reduce unsafe levels of coal dust, which is both a hazardous explosive in the mine and dangerous to breathe—more than 1,000 miners a year die from black lung disease.

As the United States steps up coal production, let’s start purposefully telling more stories about coal and how it is produced. The big arguments for coal are that it’s our coal, and it’s cheaper than other forms of energy. But, we need to start a public discussion about all of coal’s costs – to the land and water where it’s mined, to the atmosphere where it’s burned, and to the workers who risk their health and lives to dig it up.

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