I am certainly delighted that the Chilean miners are safely home, but I have to say that I'm a little disgusted with the media coverage of the ordeal. The media, or at least that part of it that I've seen, is treating the rescued men like heroes and transforming them into celebrities when in fact they're not the real heroes in this narrative at all. Sure, they endured their difficulties while trapped in the mine with a grace and stoicism that is admirable, but the people who should be celebrated, the real heroes, are the people whose ingenuity and determination got them out.
Of these people we've heard next to nothing. The miners have been swamped with job offers, book deals, movie contracts, and gifts of all kinds. Have the engineers who masterminded this rescue been offered such rewards? These men of genius (forgive me if that sounds a bit too Randian) planned and executed an astonishing rescue, and then in anonymity they probably drove home to their families, turned on the television and watched the Chilean equivalent of the baseball playoffs. No one knows their names and the media doesn't seem to care who they are. Instead, the men who simply survived are feted as though they're the ones who did something extraordinary, when in fact they'd all be dead today if it weren't for the brilliance of the engineers and others whom the media seems to have ignored.
It's another example of how much of the media trivializes, diminishes, or otherwise gets wrong just about every story it covers. They simply seem to lack the ability to discern importance.
