newspaper trade journal Editor & Publisher, the editor of The Inter-Mountain, a local afternoon daily based in Elkins, West Virginia, blamed the national media's inaccurate reporting on a lack of knowledge of local culture. "We get a lot of people here who sometimes believe they have an inside story because they hear it on a police scanner or listen to a conversation," Linda Skidmore said. "We know to be cautious of those situations." Media criticism of MSHA Critics suggested that the severity of the accident's aftermath was related in part to inadequate safety standards endorsed by the MSHA under David Lauriski, a mining industry executive appointed to head the agency by George W. Bush. On January 6, 2006, Scott Lilly, a columnist for the Center for American Progress wrote about Lauriski in his article, "MSHA and the Sago Mine Disaster: How Many Brownies are there in this Administration?" An August 9, 2004, story in the New York Times by Christopher Drew and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., "Friends in the White House Come to Coal's Aid", had summed up Lauriski's record. Other problems cited included the rejection of a proposed clarification of an existing standard, "Escapeways and Refuges," by Lauriski's administration, which requires that a mine "shall have two or more separate, properly maintained escapeways to the surface...." A January 5 editorial in The New York Times explicitly linked the safety conditions at the mine to the effects of "an industry with pervasive political clout and patronage inroads in government regulatory agencies." It noted that "political figures from both parties have long defended and profited from ties to the coal industry," and asserted that "the Bush administration's cramming of important posts in the Department of the Interior with biased operatives" created doubts about mine safety, singling out J. Steven Griles, a former mining lobbyist and onetime deputy secretary of the Interior who, The Times alleged "devoted four years to rolling back mine regulations." Federal responsibility for enforcing the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which governs the activities of the MSHA, was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Labor in 1978. A second editorial in the Times, on January 6 discussed budget cuts to the MSHA and "the Bush administration's ... [appointment] of a raft of political appointees directly from energy corporations to critical regulatory posts" in the context of the disaster, suggesting that