Always Behind, Always Blind

In the last few days, the news media has been expressing outrage over the fact that the British Petroleum well that blew out on April 20 has been gushing far more oil into the Gulf of Mexico than British Petroleum said it was (80,000 to 100,000 barrels a day v. the BP claim of 5,000 barrels a day). In fact, British Petroleum claims to be siphoning off three or four times as much oil as it said was gushing out (16,000 to 20,000 barrels a day siphoned off v. the BP claim of 5,000 barrels a day leaking). And still the oil gushes.

And the media is now wringing their collective hands saying, "Oh, my! We just can't trust British Petroleum!" as if this were news.

It is not news. If you examine this blog you will find an entry on May 18 where I commented that independent experts had viewed the video feed of the leaking well and estimated that it was leaking from 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day, not the 1,000 to 5,000 barrels a day that British Petroleum was currently admitting. This wasn't some secret that only I knew. It was reported in the news media, once, then forgotten.

Similarly, in the last few days there has been media outrage over the fact that the spill response plan filed by British Petroleum with the Minerals Management Service when they applied for the permit to drill this disastrous well was obviously cut and pasted from some other response plan, not designed specifically for this well or even this region.

The response plan includes information for how British Petroleum will handle walruses and sea otters who are affected by a spill from this well. There aren't any walruses or sea otters in the Gulf of Mexico. Or anywhere near the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, the plan indicates that, if there is a leak from the well, British Petroleum will call upon the services of an expert who had been dead for years before the plan was filed. It includes telephone numbers for experts they planned to use that are wrong - numbers that have never been right. They include a reference to a website that is defunct, but when it was active it was for some goofy thing in Japan. Not even related to the oil industry.

This also is not news. Weeks ago, Rachel Madow announced on her show that her staff had looked at British Petroleum's spill response plan and found references to walruses. She made a big deal about it. Weeks ago.

This poor reporting, poor investigating, general lack of workmanship, and, in some cases, downright ignorance and stupidity on the part of the media is characteristic. It is reminiscent of the reporting by the media leading up to the war against Iraq.

In that case, when the media began to report that there were not, in fact, any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I found myself screaming at the CNN television screen, "You had the head of the weapons search team on your network saying definitively that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that his team had been there for months, if they'd been there his team would have found them - months before we went to war! And you idiots just dismissed him as some sort of crank! What on earth were you thinking back then?" Obviously, they weren't thinking. They weren't investigating, they weren't analyzing, they weren't even doing a very good job of reporting. They were just repeating.

Then there was the whole "Mr. President, it's a slam dunk" thing. When they started reporting that, I was jumping up from my couch screaming, "You idiots! It was in Bob Woodward's book published a year ago! And you all just yawned! Where were you then? Where are you when we really need you?"

So, don't say I didn't tell you so. 'Cause I did. Pay attention.