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Smoking

Will Chilean miners stick together or follow the media money?

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

October 13, 2010 | 4 min read

33 men, 69 days underground and a multi-million dollar opportunity. Rick Gutteridge of Smoking Gun PR believes that only time will tell whether the freed Chilean miners can stick together during forthcoming media frenzy.

This rescue has been an extremely slick operation so far. Worldwide media coverage at saturation point. The world holding it’s collective breath as a rescue capsule seemingly fashioned by Anthea Turner’s leftovers from Tracy Island lowers itself into the abyss.

The President Sebastian Pinera’s popularity ratings have never been higher and Chile’s stock as a country able to mount a successful and highly complicated rescue mission is now beyond doubt.

This has been no run of the mill baby pulled from the rubble story though. The hardy group trapped half a mile below ground have been in contact with the outside world and the world’s media has lapped up images of pining wives pasting letters from their partners onto noticeboards for all to read. One of the group has also been appointed official photographer and updated the world with

shots straight from Tolkein’s Helms Deep.

On the surface, amongst the smoke filled make-shift camp sites where daily bread has been baked as the families patiently wait, long lost family members and mistresses have appeared out of the ether.

Call me a cynic but is it love that has brought them to the fore now?

The real life story market devours such fodder. Triumph over adversity. Testing the limits of human endurance. This is a media story that has had Hollywood script writers frantically working to put scripts together before even the drama has finished unfolding.

This disaster is serious business.

A lawyer had already been drafted in to write a contract as the men have agreed to equally share the profits form their dramatic survival story in the hope they need never work again. That is surely beyond doubt.

From Oprah to BBC Breakfast, NBC to News of the World, The Tonight Show to Jeremy kyle (sorry wrong human interest story) the media with the biggest wallets will elbow grannies out of the way to secure the much vaunted ‘world exclusive’ first interview. First after all is everything.

How far down the food chain will Daybreak be I wonder? Maybe they can land the first shots of the second cousin of the man who cleaned up the site.

More seriously, how long will it be before one breaks ranks and decides he wants a larger slice of the fame game. Will his story be more tear jerking, more heartbreaking and more sellable than the rest? Who will speak first of the 17 days before the borehole reached them and the vow of silence is broken over the unspeakable acts that presumably went on?

Will Max Clifford, the slickest publicist of them all, be appearing on Sky News speaking on behalf of his latest £10,000 a week minimum fee client? In this media frenzy who knows but one things for sure we’re going to hear a lot more about this incident and there’s not going to be a single fact we don’t know about these men once we’ve watched the film, documentary, the book’s out and been serialised, and they’ve toured the world. Oh and don’t forget the app.

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