At Huffington Post, Arianna and her crew have been following this angle of the Utah mine story. And it really deserves a lot more attention. We’ve seen a series of these mine tragedies in recent years. And pretty much every time it ends up being a mine — not surprisingly — with a terrible record of safety violations.
Again, that’s not exactly a shocking correlation. But it does throw into sharper relief the essential fact that these are not random lightning bolts of tragedy visited on small towns in middle America. These are guys who got killed because they worked for companies that routinely broke the rules put in place to keep their employees alive.
And there’s more. It turns out that the guy in charge of mine safety for the federal government, Assistant Secretary of Labor Richard Stickler, couldn’t even get approved by the Senate back when it was under Republican control because his own record on safety issues was so questionable. President Bush had to put him in with a recess appointment.
Perhaps it’s not time to assign fault while active rescue operations are underway. But once that’s over, maybe it would be worth the networks taking a tenth of the time they use milking ratings from these mine sagas and cast a little light on how a lot of this is preventable if the mine owners would stop breaking the rules and the federal government stopped looking the other way.
Deal?
