Live From Chile: "This Media Event"

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A taste, via the New York Times, of what’s to come this week (emphasis mine):

Such is life in Camp Hope, a moonlike outpost that has sprouted up as the temporary refuge for family members and about 1,300 journalists, many of whom have arrived in recent days to this gold and copper mine in northern Chile.

…

The journalists who have invaded Camp Hope — representing more than 200 foreign media outlets and 50 Chilean ones —record seemingly every move of family members and government officials as they wait for the moment when the men who have survived for 67 days in a sunless, humid, confined space deep in the earth are lifted to freedom.

They have come from 33 countries on five continents, from Japan to Hungary to South Africa, a government spokesman said Sunday.

The government will transmit the rescue of the miners, which is expected to begin on Wednesday and to take up to two days, via a free, live satellite feed to the world.

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More media outlets are covering the fate of the miners than reported on Chile’s 8.8-magnitude earthquake last Feb. 27 , one of the most potent in human history,said Tomás Urzúa, a government spokesman. The quake killed some 300 people and left swaths of rubble in cities and towns across the country.

Also, this:

(The BBC rented four toilets for its team of more than three dozen reporters and technicians, but has scaled back to two.)

(Which is still more, this sentence seems to say, than the Times has rented).

There’s this:

Some [miners’] wives have begun trying to negotiate fees for interviews in what will be a feeding frenzy once the miners reach the surface.

And, this:

“We are on the surface of the moon here, it’s rocks and sand,” said Jeffrey Kofman, a Latin America correspondent for ABC News. “Yet the Chileans understand that in a certain way this media event, not by design but by circumstance, is really going to paint the world’s perception of this small country.”

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Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.