Helping Business With Spin
The Pensacola News Journal notes something that the national media missed: Feds’ report spins facts about oil in Gulf
“The way it was presented was more of a public relations campaign than trying to estimate the real impact,” said University of South Florida oceanography professor Frank Muller-Karger, who has been involved in spill research.
Chief among scientists’ complaints: The report’s wording leads readers to believe most of the oil is gone.
“If one reads carefully, it doesn’t really say that,” Muller-Karger said. “But it’s presented in a way that you can interpret it in a very positive way.”
Early news stories about the NOAA report were accompanied by headlines like, “Vast majority of oil gone from Gulf” and “75 percent of spilled oil gone.”
In reality, the report makes no estimate of how much oil remains in the Gulf — saying only that 25 percent was collected or burned, and the rest is being broken down naturally.
“That’s the big mystery in the report. That’s 75 percent of the oil that is still unaccounted for,” Muller-Karger said.
…“This is a shaky report. The more I read it, the less satisfied I am with the thoroughness of the presentation,” Florida State University oceanography professor Ian MacDonald told The Associated Press. “There are sweeping assumptions here.”
There is no magic involved – only 25% of the oil has been accounted for, and they don’t actually know what happened to the other 190 million gallons that poured into the Gulf.
They should have included my favorite Sidney Harris New Yorker cartoon on the front cover of this report.
