CNN's Soledad O'Brien Misses the Mark Completely in Special About Mountaintop Removal Mining

from AlterNet:



CNN's Soledad O'Brien Misses the Mark Completely in Special About Mountaintop Removal Mining


With a mounting deathtoll and a 40-year rap sheet that marks it as our nation’s most urgent health and humanitarian crisis, mountaintop removal mining is hardly a new issue.

Enter Soledad O’Brien, whose CNN special last night, “Battle for Blair Mountain,” arguably reached more Americans during prime time than any other film documentary in the past decade.

O’Brien is no stranger to tragedy. The acclaimed journalist brilliantly handled reports on Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Asia; her special, “The Black Woman & Family,” exposed the devastating and unfair burden of HIV and AIDS.

In a move that has bewildered many affected residents in central Appalachia, O’Brien and her producers decided to tell the story of Blair Mountain and mountaintop removal, an admittedly criminal mining practice that provides less than 5 percent of our national coal production, stripped jobs and gutted the miners’ unions, and left the central Appalachian communities in entrenched poverty and illness, through the eyes and experiences of seemingly embattled strip miners who are afraid of losing their jobs. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/650758/cnn%27s_soledad_o%27brien_misses_the_mark_completely_in_special_about_mountaintop_removal_mining/

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

We couldn't bear the typical corporate BS.

Granted, it could have done more to establish the link between MTR and illness, but the issue was definitely raised. The water in the area was found to be polluted, and the high incidence of cancer was mentioned. I can't object to hearing "the other side", either: the pro-coal (that's what they called themselves) supporters stood in front of the cameras and denied that there could possibly be any connection between coal dust or pollution and illness, and engaged in all the usual hyperbole -- "If the deer aren't droppin' dead, it's not that toxic", to paraphrase only *very* slightly. They were given free rein to discredit themselves with their own words, and were fairly effective in doing so. The fact that their very own neighbors, even people who worked for the coal companies, expressed more realistic concern, didn't help their case either.

The documentary was weak on forensics. More science and more statistics were needed, but who wants to watch that? :dunce: CNN may very well have judged its audience accurately.

I was impressed enough that the coal co. workers who did the "reclamation" pointed out that there was little more than rock there, and it wasn't supporting much growth even 20 years later. It's been pointed out before that "reclamation" is mostly PR--they do a quick, cheap job of bulldozing evverything into a mountain just to deflect criticism, not to actually restore anything in any effective way.

The one thing this documentary needed was more depth, and that would have required more air time. For a 1-hr program aimed at the general population, it wasn't bad.