Blog
06.22
BP: When spinning has spun way out of control
Back to the water hose with the gushing news provider that is BP.
Thanks to the investigative prowess of the Wall Street Journal (or perhaps just a real weed to stick it to the man), we discover a side of the dreaded oil spill that perhaps none of us have considered - the bright side.
...In Planet BP — a BP online, in-house magazine — a “BP reporter” dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint an even rosier picture of the disaster. “There is no reason to hate BP,” one local seafood entrepreneur is quoted as saying, as the region relies on the oil industry for work.
Isn't that great? Did you see that? Tony Hayward's mama was quoted in this rather objective article. Moving on to the complete farce... the 'local seafood entrepreneur.'
“Much of the region’s [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams,” another report says. Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that “BP has always been a very great partner of ours here…We have always valued the business that BP sent us.”
Man, I completely misjudged the apocalyptic mess that big rig created in the Gulf of Mexico. I suppose this recent article from The Daily Green is in need of a math professor to check these harrowing numbers then:
- 60,000 barrels a day (or 2.5 million gallons) spewing from the pipes below the Gulf
- 11,300 miles is the distance around the world the current amount of leaked oil would stretch if it was placed in milk jugs lined up side by side. To quantify, that's farther than New York to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and back.
- $1.6 billion is the confirmed cost of the oil spill... so far.
Yeah, my bad. MEMO to BP: Keep up the good work interviewing every one of Hayward's kin folk. There's no way you can go wrong with them. They must have medical degrees in spin doctoring because none of us would have ever caught on with that kind of meticulous number crunching. Whew!
Personally, I think your next Planet BP cover should feature a baby seal with a scared look on its face with the headline reading, "Don't worry. That comment about you and exotic shoes was just a "crude" joke."
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