Actively embedded, passively acquiescing
Posted by Thomas Nephew on 20th May 2010
Remarkable video from CBS, showing BP and Coast Guard personnel turning journalists away from investigating the effects of the Gulf oil spill on marshlands:
I first saw this video in a story posted by Karl Burkart of Mother Nature News (MNN), who writes:
I never thought I would say this, but for once I actually agree with Rush Limbaugh. The right-wing radio host is attributed with calling the Gulf Oil Spill “Obama’s Katrina.” [...] Despite Obama’s half-hearted attempt at displaying anger over the government’s “cozy relationship” with BP, I believe Obama is aiding and abetting a foreign oil company as it perpetrates an environmental crime on American soil…
While I share Burkart’s simmering anger at both BP and the Obama administration, I hesitate to go as far as Burkart in suggesting that’s a quid pro quo for BP’s campaign contributions. Granted, it’s not comforting at all to learn the video of the oil gusher had been on display in the White House Situation Room for weeks before its release to the public — and immediate calculations that the spill rate was an order of magnitude greater than government estimates.
But I think a response by the Coast Guard (appended to the end of Burkart’s article by an MNN editor) inadvertently suggests a different analysis, both of the incident itself and of the Obama administration’s responses:
…Neither BP nor the U.S. Coast Guard, who are responding to the spill, have any rules in place that would prohibit media access to impacted areas and we were disappointed to hear of this incident. In fact, media has been actively embedded and allowed to cover response efforts since this response began, with more than 400 embeds aboard boats and aircraft to date. Just today 16 members of the press observed clean-up operations on a vessel out of Venice, La….
(Emphasis added.) Sadly, it’s not hard these days to imagine BP or Coast Guard personnel construing “embeds” as the only authorized form of journalism — we’ve all seen it before in Iraq and elsewhere. Indeed, it speaks volumes about journalism today that the CBS crew itself acquiesced in a plainly wrong demand.
In fact, the Obama administration seems to have accepted its own “embedding” — buying the absurd notion, for example, that the underwater video of the oil gusher (one of the principal ways of gauging the extent of the disaster) is simply “proprietary information” that is BP’s to control. It’s not just as if the United States government has ceded control of its shores, its territory, and its authority to provide for the common good and common defense. They’ve gone and done it — in the face of the organization responsible for the the greatest environmental disaster in our country’s history .
It seems as if Obama and his administration think there’s a tension between making BP pay for the disaster response, and exercising authority and oversight over that response. To be sure, there may be legal issues to be solved, but there first needs to be executive will to solve them, and that has seemed lacking. As McClatchy News’s Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof put it, BP withholds oil spill facts — and government lets it:
BP’s role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize it and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf.
Indeed it has.
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UPDATE, 5/20: More from Renee Schoof and other McClatchy News reporters at the Real News Network video “Spill may be 19 times larger than BP & Gov’t say.”
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Kathy — can I call you Kathy? great! — I’ve been a little upset about the story in 
