A Year after BP’s Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, the American Media Mostly No Longer Bothers to Report the Aftermath — but Al Jazeera Does, and Its News Is Not Good

© 2011 Peter Free

 

05 August 2011

 

 

American media’s attention span is so short, that it’s a wonder we can concentrate long enough to tie our shoes

 

Anyone with a brain, and a memory of past spills, would recognize that oil pollution as massive as BP’s last year in the Gulf of Mexico would have lingering negative effects of some kind.  But the American mainstream media hasn’t made much of an effort to detect these, leaving the non-involved public to believe the fact-concealing nonsense that BP’s publicists put out.

 

Sarah Palin’s description, “the lamestream media,” is too-often accurate.

 

 

Fortunately for interested Americans, Al Jazeera continues reporting on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

 

Two days ago, Lily Hough succinctly documented health and compensation fund complaints from spill-affected Gulf of Mexico residents:

 

Regarding health

 

"The residents [of Jean Lafitte, Louisiana] are sick," [Kerry] Kennedy [President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights] said.

 

"They don't know what the exact cause of their illness is, but because they never suffered this way before the spill and they were all out on their fishing boats throughout the clean-up, they suspect this has something to do with the toxins."

 

According to Anne Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade . . . nearly 75 percent of those who believe they were exposed to crude oil or dispersant reported experiencing symptoms consistent with chemical exposure.

 

"Coughing, respiratory irritation, and eye irritation were the most common," Rolfes said.

 

But Kennedy said that local physicians are hesitant to link their patients' symptoms to the oil.

 

"They don't have the expertise to make a diagnosis in toxicology, they don't know how to treat that diagnosis, and if they do attempt to treat it, they risk losing their medical licenses," she said.

 

And in a predominately rural region where a majority of patients are self-employed and uninsured, the health care facilities are too far away and access to toxicology experts is near impossible," Kennedy added.

 

© 2011 Lily Hough, BP disaster one year later: One year after the horrific BP oil spill locals still feel BP isn't managing the situation properly, Al Jazeera (03 August 2011)

 

Regarding lack of compensation

 

Earlier this month, US Attorney General Eric Holder informed Ken Feinberg, the man appointed to administer BP-related claims after his work with the September 11 Compensation Fund, that the Justice Department would initiate an independent audit based on complaints about the transparency of Feinberg's claims process.

 

A brief filed Monday called the process an "abject failure", and cited that the fund has so far paid only 16 percent of interim claims filed.

 

© 2011 Lily Hough, BP disaster one year later: One year after the horrific BP oil spill locals still feel BP isn't managing the situation properly, Al Jazeera (03 August 2011)

 

 

BP’s duplicitous twist of standards for proof of claim

 

Reporter Hough noted that the organization, Advocates for Environmental Rights, discovered that the BP claims process sets a higher bar for compensation than in previous disasters.

 

Unlike previous incidents, where proof of direct causation was not required, “Gulf residents have learned that their claims are denied if they cannot provide proof that BP and its dispersant are the exact cause of their illness.”

 

 

This nasty “gotcha” misapplies civil law’s tort standard, in order to disadvantage people who don’t have the money to hire medical experts and highly experienced attorneys

 

From the law’s standpoint, BP’s insistence on proof of causation is the reigning paradigm.

 

However, the whole point to a compensation fund like the one BP set up — with the Obama Administration’s apparent approval — is to compensate people quickly and fairly, while bypassing situationally unjust legal niceties.

 

 

BP’s tort-specific approach is good for Plutocracy, but not for the American people

 

If BP gets away with its misapplication of a strict tort causation standard to a situation in which it is not warranted, it will have won on three fronts:

 

(1) BP will escape the financial consequences of its reckless actions in drilling.

 

(2) BP’s financial escape will encourage the Federal Government to continue its own reckless lack of regulation in environmental affairs.

 

(3) These two wins will permit BP (and the rest of industry) to go forward, even more confident of their ability to defy the social contract that government allegedly has with the people it is arguably supposed to protect.

 

That’s why the fact that the American Lamestream is letting us down is important.  When we don’t know the facts, how can we respond effectively?

 

 

Notice the contrast in media focus

 

It is instructively curious that we have to turn to a Qatar-based media outlet to conveniently find the truth about American circumstances.  Al Jazeera’s emphasis is frequently on ordinary people’s lives.  That contrasts with the American media’s skeeter-brained focus on (a) the trivial and (b) sensationalized Reality-avoiding arguments.