BP and a Compliant Media

Apparently no amount of facts or reports to the contrary will change or make the various medias disregard BP's estimate that 210,000 gallons per day are being spilled into the Gulf. Almost every news site I visited yesterday had the lying BP estimate - the singular exception was the NYT's article linked below. Stenography would seem to be the order of the day, and newspaper companies ask why more people don't subscribe.

Starting a full 2 weeks ago those numbers were discredited and reported by outlets in the MSM as being off by a factor of 5 and perhaps 10, and yet strangley they go back to the BP numbers.

Today scientists in the Gulf say, and the NYT's is reporting, they've discovered giant plumes of oil underneath the surface. One such plume measures 10 miles in length, 3 miles in width and 300 feet in thickness. That's a plot for science fiction movie! And you'll note that NYT's report mentions likely amounts spewing are more likely between 25,000 to 80,000 barrels (1 to 3 million gallons per day!).

Briefly today there was good news in the attempts to do something about mitigating the amounts of oil and gas gushing into the Gulf. BP managed to get the siphon inserted into the broken pipe but that was quickly followed by a setback - as reported by NPR - when two remote control robots crashed into each other and knocked the pipes partially apart and dislodged the mile long pipe. Hopefully they'll get this to work in the near future.

Of all the lies, obfuscations and stonewalling BP has engaged in, it was this from the NYT's report that infuriated me most: BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We're not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It's not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."

If that's not enough to worry about, there are also significant amounts of natural gas being spilled into the Gulf which depletes oxygen in the waters and could result in the creation of a massive dead zone. "It could take years, possibly decades, for the system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas," Joye said. "We've never seen anything like this before. It's impossible to fathom the impact."

Finally, here's a report from National Geographic on the possible effects of the toxic soup now circulating in the Gulf of Mexico.