I defended The New York Times this morning. Let me lay into it a little bit this afternoon.
On Friday, the paper led its front page with a credulous story headlined “BP Says Limits on Drilling Imperil Spill Payouts.”
BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The company says a ban would also imperil the ambitious Gulf Coast restoration efforts that officials want the company to voluntarily support.
Oh, noes! BP says it may run out of money if it doesn’t get offshore permits.
It says that, but is it true? Of course not.
Here’s BP’s net income from the last four years:
— 2009: $16.6 billion
— 2008: $21.2 billion
— 2007: $20.8 billion
— 2006: $22.3 billion
Those are free and clear profits.
The Times only gets at those huge numbers indirectly down toward the bottom of the story when it writes this:
He estimated that the gulf generated $5 billion to $7 billion in profits annually for BP, or about a quarter of the company’s total.
And even that undermines the premise of the story, noting as it does that the gulf only generates about a quarter of its profits. And the company is selling off tens of billions of dollars worth of assets to clear up money, too. But the $20 billion fund is in peril?
Come on.
Now, it’s news that BP is lobbying Congress with this nonsense. But such a totally bogus claim doesn’t deserve front-page treatment in the Times, especially when it gets just about zero pushback from the paper. The Times doesn’t make any attempt to show whether BP’s claims are legitimate or just bluster other than a single weak he-said/she-said quote from a congressional aide.
That’s a big miss. Without countering this nonsense, it’s just amplifying the BP PR department’s bogus spin with the biggest megaphone in the world.
there was a report out that the administration allowed BP to isolate the claims liability to the gulf exploration sub-corp. so the whole company is no longer liable
#1 Posted by rjs, CJR on Wed 8 Sep 2010 at 05:45 AM
sorry, here's the story:
The $20 billion fund for victims of BP Plc's oil spill will be backed by the company's U.S. oil and gas production, an arrangement that an advocacy group called a conflict of interest for the Obama administration.
Provisions of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Trust were released today at the White House. BP agreed to the trust fund, to be administered by Kenneth Feinberg, after a June meeting at the White House with President Barack Obama and BP executives including Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.
Using BP's production as collateral is "wildly inappropriate" because it may give the administration pause in pursuing criminal charges against the London-based oil company and in cracking down on its safety failings, Public Citizen, a Washington-based advocacy group, said today in a statement.
"It's to their advantage to have an upper hand with an open-ended criminal investigation still pending," Tyson Slocum, director of the group's energy program, said in a statement. "The upper hand is an agreement that directly links a continued robust presence by BP in the Gulf of Mexico to financing an Obama administration priority, the victims' fund."
A White House spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/08/oil_spill_claims_fund_to_be_ba.html?utm_source=API&utm_medium=twitter
#2 Posted by rjs, CJR on Wed 8 Sep 2010 at 06:12 AM