Media Musings

Just so you know, it's been a long day and I can't be bothered to find links for everything I am going to mention. But you might have heard it yourself or can look it up....

anyway I heard a few days ago on some major news network (prob CNN but might have been CBC) that BP (or maybe it was TransOcean specifically, my brain did not retain that fully) has been responsible for a very high percentage of the fines over the past decade. Something crazy like 95%, no less than 75% for sure.

So then I started wondering about this offshore drilling block and wondered why all those other companies should be penalized, all those people be out of work for a minimum of 6 months, when it's one group by far who has committed all of these 'violations'. Then I heard the news today about a federal judge blocking that ruling and figured at least SOMEONE was paying attention to these finer details, since the media couldn't seem to put it together themselves.
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Another thing I noticed this week was a piece on my local news about how one of the Greenpeace members who has been arrested a few times over the years is actually from my city. But at the end of the segment they were talking about the tar sands (as they kept calling it) and the woman they were speaking to pointed out that 'only one reclamation certificate has EVER been issued'. My local news left it at that.

It annoyed me because I just happened to read about reclamation certificates a couple of months ago and it is a very long process. You'll have to look it up for sure, but my mind recalls that in order to be issued that certificate, the land must be replanted and growing, and flourishing, reseeding itself, etc for 20 years. That's a long time - so while 'only one' certificate has been issued, how do we know that 5 10 or 15 or 20 more aren't due up soon? Maybe only 3, who knows. But my local media did not take the extra time to look up what a reclamation certificate is, or what it entails, and report that to the public. They just went along with the woman's main ending point, speaking of it in stressed words to make it sound bad, and then left it at that. That is not responsible, unbiased journalism to me. It's either blatant ignorance, or it's a reporter not wanting to show his lack of knowledge by asking about reclamations. It just irked me. How will the public get a clear picture of what's going on up there if no one tells us about it? Mind you - the public could hop on google and find out for themselves if they really cared to know... I just think it's important if someone is going to report on a topic, they should do their job as fully as possible. Is that too much to ask?
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One final mention is the constant media chatter about how many people along the Gulf coast are out of work due to the spill and how it affects their jobs - fishermen etc. Yes it is a bad bad event. Terrible... But I have yet to hear any mention whatsoever about how many oil rig workers are out. Scratch that - I saw one reporter talking to a company in Lousianna that sends workers out to the rigs as cleaners. It's not just rig workers that were waiting to see what would happen, it was a host of other people from cleaners to techs to transport workers,,, but who cares about them eh? Their rigs did not blow up, their rigs did not have 75-95% of the violations, but they were told they could not work for at least 6 months. Where is their govt bailout? Where are their claims for lost work? And where is the media chatter tallying up how many of them were out of work due to the President's wish to stop them working for at least 6 months?