The BP Valdez!

So this little blog beat the MSM to some news with help from the the internets and the MSM.

All week long I have insisted, here and on my radio show, that the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico is likely far greater than the media was reporting all week long. One of the reasons I have been adamant is because of what I read in the WSJ on April, 30, a good member in standing of the MSM. This was backed up by the most reliable blog on climate science, Joe Romm's Climate Progress, which asserted the likelihood was that this was a more accurate account of what was spewing into the Gulf than the 5,000 barrels a day per day that was then being reported in the media. That, it needs be noted, was up from the 1,000 barrels a day BP initially reported.

A couple of days later though, the numbers had been reduced in the media once again by a factor of 5 back down 210,00 gallons (5,000 barrels) instead of the possible 1,000,000 gallons industry experts were suggesting was more likely. Whoops!

So today one of the NYT's reports on the oilspill first repeats the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf as being 5,000 barrels but admits that number may be off, "...experts suggest, by an order of magnitude." Did you get that? Because that's an easy one to let slip by in two page article on the hows and whys of BP's failed attempt at a fix that was pretty much pie in the sky to begin with.

Order of magnitude, by the by, means it could be ten times greater. Whoops!

So here's the problem with my being more acccurate here. It means that a lying narrative has already been injected into the media bloodstream and people who do not have the time to fact check or stay on top of this story are not only going to believe the lie. Chances are they will pass it on to their friends, and they'll tell two people, and they'll tell two... The blogosphere calls these zombie lies. Debunked stories that should be dead but still live on. Makes it easy for the guys at BP to whitewash the extent of their malfeasance.

More to the point this means that the actual numbers were out there and available in the first place to anyone who wanted to report them. Say, a journalist who is employed by a newspaper that in the business of putting news and facts out for the public to digest so that they can make informed decisions about who to vote for and what national policies to support etc.

We came up with the best name for this disaster all on our own: The BP Vadez. The idiots at the helm of BP were drunk on arrogance, hubris and thoughtlessness - some pretty cool people agree. We at NM&P got that right on our own and we got it with no help from the willfully blind MSM.