I received an email yesterday from Peter Heimlich, son of the doctor now best known for the “Heimlich maneuver,” a method of saving a person from choking. Unfortunately, the senior Heimlich also promoted his method as a way of reviving drowning victims, an idea that has apparently been thoroughly discredited by medical science, according to his son.
The younger Heimlich spotted a news story about a visiting firefighter who received an award from the City & County of Honolulu for coming to the aid of a woman found floating face down at Hanauma Bay on April 18, 2011.
By his own account, the man gave her “abdominal thrusts” which, Heimlich fears, could have worsened her condition.
Heimlich’s account of the situation appears on his blog, The Sidebar.
It’s really a story within a story.
Heimlich first questions whether the city knew about the firefighter’s “abdominal thrusts” when they approved the award? Does the city approve of this discredited emergency response? And did they know what happened to the victim?
Turning to Google, Heimlich turned up a Star-Advertiser story, repeated by Hawaii News Now, reporting the woman had died.
However, Heimlich then contact the city’s Department of Emergency Services. The reply from Loise Kim McCoy provided this further clarification:
On April 18, 2011, a woman was transported from Hanauma Bay to Straub Hospital in critical condition. The media reports that stated she died at the hospital soon after arrival were incorrect. We do not have information on her current condition.
Heimlich learned the woman had actually remained in a coma, and was later airlifted back to Seoul by her husband.
When he reported this back to the editors of the two news outlets, Heimlich reported getting two different reactions.
Star-Advertiser managing editor Ed Lynch acknowledged the error and quickly added a correction to the original story. However, it was apparently different at Hawaii News Now.
Here’s what Heimlich had to say about it.
Honolulu News Now News Director Mark Platte chose the Orwellian route and simply disappeared the mistake.
Date: 7/30/2011 12:10 AM
From: Mark Platte
To: Peter M. Heimlich
Subject: RE: corrections request re: Hanauma Bay near-drowningMr. Heimlich,
When we realized the Korean visitor had not died, as EMS officials told us, we removed our story from our Web site.
Thanks for letting us know the sequence of events for a future story. We will call you if we need more information.
Aloha, Mark
[emphasis added]
Who said disappeared news!
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Kudos to the SA”s admission.
As for HNN, this immediately raises the question of how many more mistakes have not been corrected and how many more incomplete/inaccurate stories got zero follow-up. This just gives mainstream-media-haters all the more political ammo.
Don’t patch the road, eliminate the vehicles, that will end the complaints.
Sorry a comedic response but this whole era is a comedy… of errors.
On a couple of occasions I’ve received tips from readers but the link didn’t work. Most were not significant enough to me to chase down further (unlike the story you cited). If the Wayback Machine has grabbed it, then I would know that the news was “disappeared,” but it crawls infrequently and so is seldom helpful.
Equally bad, in my view, is running a short correction on some inside page of the print newspaper but never correcting the on-line version, which remains in virtual perpetuity as the paper-of-record’s record.
Any one who knows Platte’s record at the defunct Honolulu Advertiser will not be surprised.
Quite a fascinating read.
Ian, I turned to this article to get a sense of how easy a document can be removed from a news site. I am wondering if after all the money a family is compelled to spend in order to print an obituary, it would be wasted to a degree if its online manifestation was later deleted from a server.
Also, if a newspaper is charging an outrageous amount to print an obituary, that may not be just the predictable outcome of a print monopoly it might possess.
It might be a symptom that the newspaper is failing financially!
That newspaper might have a lower circulation than it admits — perhaps radically lower. It may have to construct a pay wall to try to staunch the shift to free online viewing, but that might backfire in an economic downturn and when online viewers figure out that there are other online news sources. What to do? Squeeze the obituaries.
High obituary prices could be a symptom of decline and ultimate doom, not of monopoly victorious.