BP’s Catastrophic Fictions

In 1938, Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of War of the Worlds — a story about Martians invading New Jersey — caused 1 in 12 over-credulous listeners to run out of their houses with towels over their faces, screaming, tripping, breaking limbs, basically caught in a mass hysteria. Back then, listeners had a hard time distinguishing the simulated from the real; today, we seem to have the opposite problem.

We all know by now that the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well is spewing between 1.5 to 2.5 million gallons of oil a day (this is day 83) and has pretty much destroyed the entire gulf coast ecosystem. What pictures and footage the press is able to capture show miles and miles of oil on the surface of the ocean, oil washing up on shores, animals flailing/dead/smothered in oil, enormous plumes of smoke from burnings of oil on the ocean, super toxic Corexit dispersant being sprayed like napalm, fishermen raking up net after net of dead oysters, crabs, fish, livelihoods ruined, it’s raining oil, the seawater is either hazy with chemical or bubbling with acid, fish in marshes and streams float belly up, and the list of catastrophic horror continues. It’s basically a real life nightmare going on over there, and yet people are hesitant to believe that this degree of devastation is actually happening.

One of these “renegade journalists,” photographer John Wathen, posted a video on youtube that showed what he saw while flying over the gulf. Many comments (maybe 1 in 12) believe that the video is a “fake,” simply because the footage hasn’t been picked up by “mainstream media.”

“The ocean will take care of this,” says Rush Limbaugh. Evidently, this kind of ignorant optimism is easy to get behind.

If coverage of the spill seems watered down, it’s not because the situation has improved, it’s because BP isn’t allowing the press to enter crucial areas. CPJ announced that on July 2, a ProPublica PBS Frontline photographer was stopped by BP security and local police. His photographs were reviewed and social security number recorded. It’s not a unique incident; reporters everywhere are being turned away. It’s no wonder we’re having a hard time getting the big picture.

" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

“[The dispersant] doesn’t clean pollution, it just hides evidence.”

This is a delicate fiction that is being constructed by BP. An example: why don’t they give their workers respirators and proper safety gear? “They’re concerned about poor media image of workers wearing respirators and rubber gloves.” BP has also denied help from volunteer organizations such as French oil spill response company Ecoceane. An offer from Shell to use one of their oil recovery rigs has also been rebuffed. In other words, BP doesn’t want to admit that this is an extremely dangerous and toxic situation, or that the cleanup might be larger than they can handle.

So what are we to believe? What is sensationalist journalism and what is the truth? At this point in the crisis, does it matter?