CJR profiles Ken Ward Jr., one who stayed home

by: CA Berkeley WV

Tue Nov 29, 2011 at 12:33:13 PM EST

It is even a nice sketch, of a real journalist.

Not that I don't know others, with beards.

I saw these kids when I was growing up, and it wasn't coal, it was the paper mill. The mill hadn't been hiring new people for years, and as workers retired they just downsized their work force. But guys I went to school with, their grandfathers had worked there, their fathers were still working there, and they were convinced that when they got out of school they were going to get a job at the paper mill. Things are going to get booming again, it'll be great. And what politicians in West Virginia are trying to convince people of now is, if we can just stop these crazy Obama people, then we'll have our next coal boom and we'll have 100,000 coal miners working in West Virginia again. Then we won't have to worry about things like how we educate kids for some kind of future where they can live a good life and provide for their families. Because the coal industry will take care of that again. That's the kind of false hope that they're trying to give people.

Sound familiar, from the whole pile, both sides of the isle in this state and and in other parts of Applachia, "just get EPA out of the way and we can have our pony back"?

Way back when Jim Noelker and I used to ride around and talk to people in the coal fields, we never found one that wanted their kid to be a coal miner. They always said, "I'm doing this terrible work so that my kid can go to college." Now, the politicians have sold this idea that coal is their only way of life, and that they need to fight to make sure their kids can do that. It's a complete reversal, and that notion is kind of maddening.I find, reporting about coal over the years, that when you get a really good story, a story that really explains something that isn't right, when you listen to the criticism you get, it isn't that the story's wrong, it's that you did the story in the first place. You're disloyal. And it comes from the coal industry, of course, but from the miners too. I've known a lot of coal miners and I have a lot of respect for them. They do ungodly difficult and dangerous work and they deserve every penny they get paid for it. But there's all this romanticism about coal mining. Ten thousand people died of black lung in the last decade. Is that modern?

You don't have o be a DFH to see the writing on the wall.