What a performance it was!

Destined to become must-see-viewing in every crisis communication consultant’s training seminar.

Bob Murray is the owner-operator of the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah where six miners have been trapped 1500 feet underground since the mine collapsed before dawn on Monday morning.   

Murray violated every canon of crisis communications during a televised news conference Tuesday morning.  In the course of the extended appearance on live national television Murray:

·         Spent precious little time expressing concern for the trapped miners and their families.

·         Spent comparatively little time explaining what was being done to reach the trapped miners.

·         Devoted most of the news conference to arguing the disaster was the result of an earthquake, not a collapse of the mine itself.

·         In the process of making his argument for earthquake versus structural failure of the mine, Murray contradicted scientists from the University of Utah and the National Earthquake Information Center who have suggested that seismograph readings registered at the moment of the collapse are more consistent with the failure of a mine than an earthquake that caused a mine collapse.

·         Murray attacked the former head of the U.S. Mine Safety Administration, Davitt McAteer and another former federal mine safety official, Tony Oppegard, calling them “lackeys for the United Mine Workers” union.

·         And Murray criticized the news media, singling out and the morning news on the Fox network and Seth Borenstein, a reporter for the Associated Press, for quoting the likes of McAteer and Oppegard who raised questions about mining practices at the Crandall Canyon Mine.

It was left to Al Davis, the District Manager of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, who stepped to the microphone after Murray finally relinquished it, to finally make the appropriate statement, “I will not make any conjecture about the cause the disaster.  We have one focus: the rescue effort.”

Thank you.

After that lopsided performance of misplaced priorities, does Bob Murray really expect any of us to believe he cares more about the safety of his miners than the crushing weight of the judgment that will befall him if subsequent investigation shows the mine failed because of his mining practices?

This was hardly an out of character performance.  Murray once sued the Akron Beacon Journal for a billion . . . that’s a billion dollars for reporting . . . among other things…that he was a “coal baron”.  (It should be noted the newspaper reached an undisclosed settlement with Murray.)  And CNN is airing video of a heated confrontation Murray had with California Senator Barbara Boxer at a hearing on mine safety.

Only the bitterest critic of federal regulators and the news media could have taken pleasure in Bob Murray’s performance.  Murray cast himself and his mine operation as the victims of this tragedy.  The real victims, of course, are the miners and their families.