Theodore Dalrymple says that in this case modern media culture helped its subjects:
For once, media attention was wholly beneficial in its effects. The miners were in the eye of the world. They knew that what they did, how they acted, would be known to untold millions... Here, then, is an illustration of the evident but often forgotten fact that social pressure is conducive to virtue as well as to vice. We generally imagine that so-called peer pressure leads only to such activities as taking drugs and vandalism; but it also leads, or rather can lead, to emulation of virtue, self-respect and decent pride. No man but an out-and-out psychopath wants to appear worse than his fellows in the eyes of the world; and the miners' (justified) pride in appearing brave and self-composed helped them to survive their ordeal.
And then many reverted to being disloyal money-grubbers.