Via TV and Internet, millions worldwide share joy of Chilean miners' rescue

This mine rescue was a different kind of story, visceral, primal, a joyous achievement.

"What a great thing for humanity," said CNN's Wolf Reynolds, a weatherman, no less.

It was a universal human story.

Trapped underground. There's no nuance. It's open-and-shut peril that has been understood since before there was language, and family or tribe mates poked one another and grunted, to rally to rescue somebody caught up a tree or stuck in a crevice.

Television, at its best with that kind of emotional, unintellectual story, brings the whole wide world into the family these days, live via satellite. Chile is almost the perfect place to pull it together. Except for a few disgruntled Peruvians, nobody dislikes Chile. "Our brothers are stuck in the mine," say the Chinese or the Moldavians or even the belligerent North Sudanese. "Do you think we can get them out?" This sense of global solidarity was much in evidence throughout the world of blogs and social media.

And because these 33 brothers had been stuck for 69 days, everybody had time to show up and tell the story. Estimates varied from 750 to 2,000 reporters and technicians circling the remote rescue scene, seeming to settle Wednesday, as estimates do, on the highest number. As many as 200 countries were represented. "Even journalists from North Korea are here," said Fox News' Adam Housley.

Each organization provided its own bells and whistles, but the whole world also watched exactly the same thing. Only Chile's state TV, feeding organizations from the BBC to Al Jazeera to Japan's NHK with a 30-second delay so any potential miner miscues could be cut, was allowed to shoot close-up at the rescue shaft. Even more than usual, TV took us where we cannot go ourselves. The scenes from the mine itself, 2,040 feet below the surface, were astounding.

Web-based technology also served the story. Blurry streaming video sometimes provided images of reporters or the surrounding countryside in one box on the screen, while the high-resolution feed from the top of the rescue shaft played alongside in another. And on the Web, the convergence played the other way, with Web news sites blaring LIVE COVERAGE and others, such as Al Jazeera, advertising live blogs.

Reporters spoke of a billion TV viewers. Similar guesstimates pepper the conversation at the Olympics or World Cup, even the Oscars. Nobody knows how many people actually watched, as Florencio Avalos became the first one out, at about 10:55 p.m. Tuesday, Philadelphia time.