A couple of months ago I compared the media coverage of BP’s Gulf Whoopsie to the kind required for reporting a war. It’s not a story that lasts days or weeks, but one that goes on and on; and even though other events may muscle it off the front page for a week or more, it’s still going to be there. Perhaps foolishly, I figured that this story would keep itself a little closer to Page 1. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are far away, and the effects here in America are largely confined to the troops, veterans and their families (to whom very few important people pay more than the minimum of attention). The despoiling of expensive resorts and fancy beach homes, on the other hand, seemed more likely to garner sustained attention. It seems I did not take my war comparison far enough.
While we may not literally be at war in the Gulf of Mexico, that has been no impediment to the imposition of wartime media restrictions. These include, but are certainly not limited to:
- Law enforcement detaining journalists for questions by BP employees
- Threats of arrest for not complying with BP’s whims
- Federal felony prosecution for just coming close to areas where clean-up efforts are underway (needless to say, such areas are hazily defined)
- General harassment and discouragement of protected First Amendment exercises
On some level such restrictions are patently absurd. It’s not as though we lack for visual evidence of BP’s massive fuck up. On a more fundamental level, though, it makes perfect sense. The interests of BP and the various levels of government with which it is interacting don’t entirely coincide, but they overlap completely when it comes to the public perception of the spill. The smaller the problem appears, the better they both look.
Compounding the desire to hide their shared shame is the very longevity of the issue. If we’re lucky, the gusher itself may be shut off next month. But the oil is going to linger in the Gulf and related waters for years. The sooner the impact of the gusher can be minimized, the easier it’s going to be to claim retroactively that people are overstating the harms caused by it.
Worse, such belief in perception over reality is now being applied not only to nosy reporters, but clean cut science types as well (via):
And the lack of accurate information has taken its toll, he said. If BP had properly understood what was going on 5,000 feet below the surface, it never would have attempted to stop it with a “top hat.” And had they realized the pressure from the oil reserves was beyond the threshold for “top kill” they wouldn’t have wasted time on that, either.
“We could have effective containment systems available now, if we’d had the measurements,” he said.
We’ll never know if that’s actually true or not, but we can already say for certain that BP’s public statements and their actions so far have resembled nothing so much as the famous Five-o’clock-Follies of Vietnam fame. And a year or two from now, after the well is capped, but while its effects are still being felt, some intrepid reporter will write a book about it. That book will likely document not only massive incompetence and lying on BP’s part, but also the various ways in which this could’ve been handled better had public relations been banished to the back seat at the beginning. It’ll make a little stir for a week or two, before we inevitably move on to something else.
Nor is there much comfort to take in the fact that various media organizations have gotten themselves in a twist over BP’s aggressive anti-journalist practices. They remain all too ready to obsequiously defer to Authority. BP just doesn’t command the same flag waving respect as the government or the military.
I don’t have a point here, I don’t even have a question to ask. I just think it’s telling that even an ongoing catastrophe of this magnitude can’t shock our various media and political systems out of their obsession with image over reality.
