[Hoot Gibson]

Here are a couple of more photos with links to the articles promoting the new series with which they appear. The photos that I have linked actually appear on multiple web sites promoting the new series. One think that I am dead certain of is that the new reality show will feature lots of white men with black faces.

The media does not like showing clean, articulate coal miners. If miners come out of the mine with a clean face, you can bet that the director will have some coal dust handy. Of course, what coal miner does not want to light up a Marlboro after putting in a 12 hour shift in a mine tunnel.?

("Tunnel" is not a term commonly used in mining but the media usually dumbs down its reporting or they are too lazy to learn about the industry themselves. In coal mining lingo, a "tunnel" is generally referred to as an entry and sometimes as a "room" or a "drift." Hard rock mining has its own jargon to describe mine structures.)

The promo material for this series says that the show will be showing traditional mine shaft operations but if the mine has only 24 employees, it seems unlikely that there will be a shaft mine featured. Shaft mines require a lot of capital investment and usually employ far more people than drift mines. Drift mines use horizontal entries to access coal seams that are accessible from the surface, as opposed to vertical shafts.

Maybe this will be the first show on coal mining that will actually try to portray the industry accurately, but I am not optimistic.

Spike TV Greenlights Coal-Mining Reality Series

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The 2012 Report: Spike TV Announces Coal Mining Reality Show

[Image: http://videogum.com/files/2010/10/coal_miner.jpg]