The New York Times ran a story on May 4 that advanced a rather unusual argument: BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill was probably bad, but not that bad. Helping the paperflesh out that line was a group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times dubbed”a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Texas. ” As we pointed out, ProPublica blogger Marian Wang did some digging, and found that”at least half of the 19 members of the group’s board of directors have direct ties to the offshore drilling industry.” The Times published an Editor’s Note admitting that they should have hinted at this to readers.
But another point the Times made in that piece struck us as rather far-fetched:
The ruptured well, currently pouring an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the gulf, could flow for years and still not begin to approach the 36 billion gallons of oil spilled by retreating Iraqi forces when they left Kuwait in 1991.
36 BILLION gallons? This estimate sounded wildly inflated (as Richard Ward pointed out at CounterPunch). And it turns out that it was roughly a hundredfold exaggeration, as the New York Times explained in a correction today:
A news analysis article on May 4 about the severity of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, using information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, misstated the amount of oil that was spilled in 1991 into the Persian Gulf by Iraqi forces in Kuwait. The agency now puts the figure at 252 million to 336 million gallons–not 36 billion gallons, as it initially estimated.)
The paper’s admittingits error, but blamingit on NOAA? According to the Energy Information Administration, the entire Persian Gulf produced 14 million barrels of crude a day in 1991, the equivalent of 588 million gallons–so a spill the size the Times was claiming would amount to the entire Gulf’s output for two months. This should have sounded improbable to anyone writing or editing the story. But since the point of the piece was to downplay the severity of the BP/Deepwater disaster, one can see why that didn’t happen.
please go to Wayne Madsen’s website, globalresearch, and his oilprice.com websites to get an idea of what the NOAA out of the DEPT OF COMMERCE is trying to coverup and how widespread the coverup is becoming–it is all of course so typical and expected with corporations running the media–these are all fascist pigs, the government, the corporations–it’s disgusting
NYT must have gotten rid of all of their fact checkers when they had their massive layoffs
It’s the same argument we use for everything now. “Well they did, so why can’t we?” Like torture for example…
In my lifetime I’ve seen the corporate ruling class devolve to such a level of logical justification that wouldn’t fool most elementary age children. So what doe that say about the rest of us? You know the ones who really do have the power to change things…
It was exactly this article which caused me to finally call and cancel my NYT subscription. When they asked why I was canceling, I replied “Because I am tired of reading propaganda.” I’m sure there ain’t no box to check for that one.
Send unprinted NYT mullet wrappers to the Gulf to soak up the oil and allow no further Gray Lady publications until the Gulf is clean, again!
I noticed NPR has reporters “embedded” with BP at the spill…