BP Underestimates the Power of New Media While it Attempts a Press Lockdown

There have been many stories about BP's attempted cover-ups about the severity of the BP oil spill in the Gulf. Mother Jones reporters have done some good reporting about what journalists are dealing with at ground zero of this disaster. Mother Jones posted an article today, for instance, entitled "BP's 10 Biggest Screw-Ups".

Some insightful reports have managed to surface, while many mainstream news organizations have taken the easy way out, spending a great deal of time simply speculating what BP and the government's next steps will be. Independent news provider Democracy Now ! covered the oil spill this morning, getting first hand accounts from the residents of southern Louisiana.


According to the report, fisherman who work on the cleanup sign confidentiality agreements that bar them from speaking to the news media. What BP is forgetting is that in this day and age putting a cap on this story will be at least as difficult as stopping the spill. If people want to know the truth, there are endless avenues for the truth to be exposed, the Internet being the marquis example of this.

For example, there have been senators who just in the last week or two have apparently lied about military service. Today their was a report that Arizona Governor Jane Brewer wrongly claimed that her father died fighting Nazi Germany. Recently Mark Kirk and Richard Blumenthal have both been caught in lies regarding military service. As Bill Maher puts it in the below video, the internet allows the public to hear from the other side-"inconveniently called reality",  bad news for corporations and government officials who are managing PR initiatives rather than focusing on the REAL crisis.

 

"BP's Oil Slick Logo" by Flickr user Noah Scalin under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 Generic

 

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