On air: Was the BP oil leak 'over-hyped' ?

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I'm not sure if it was over-hyped but certainly was the most politicized and mis-understood. People can easily get their hands around a tanker on a reef with a big hole in its side leaking oil. But this very sophisticated and leading edge well blow-out leaves industry-wise people confounded far less the people whose only contact with the Industry is the gasoline pump.

Hard to say at this point. Like Nigel said though, it has been very politicized and publicized. I think that was good though because things seem to have been dealt with. I mean I don't know for sure but I have been told that things similar have happened in other parts of the world, 3rd world, and don't get taken care of as well.

Do we not remember the massive oil spill on off the Orkney Isles a few years ago that polluted the beaches and was then said to be the UK's most serious such incident? A few days later a storm came and after a few days it all just disappeared! Surely there was always the possibility that Nature would have a major say in what happened in the Gulf and a level headed, measured and rational approach was the right one?

"Over-hyped"? I am a Gulf coast resident, in Southwest Florida, and we are feeling the effects. Ask any of the numerous families that I serve through my food pantry every day if this is over-hyped. We aren't even affected here physically, but that doesn't matter, since the tourists and many other jobs are gone, and for how long? This spill has physically affected more people than any other spill in history because of it's location, and the ripple effects are coming in still, the totality of it is still unknown. Saying this has been over-hyped is a truly offensive statement, ignorant of the facts.

Given how much oil was spilling into the environment, no, it wasn't over-hyped at all. Imagine if BP had taken a relaxed attitude to capping the broken well and cleaning up the spill, instead of the frantic attitude they did take -- there would have been a lot more environmental and economic damage than there already is now.

Yes it certainly was but at least it shoowed up President Obama and that awful committee of US senators with the chairman that struck a remarkable resemblance to Rattie out of 'Wind in the Willows'
Now perhaps their remarkably infantile president can turn turn his attention to the mess his country has made in Bhopal and is still an eyesore there and pay some decent compensation to the relatives of the many that lost their lives in that accident and those who have suffered all forms of bad health since. The Americans are good at shouting and squealing if something happens in the USA but do next to nothing if their companies behave in a worse manner abroad. Little wonder that they are the most hated nation in the world. One rule for them and one for everybody else.

If the oil leak was supposedly over-hyped, then let's not make the same mistake and over-hype the aftermath and its seriousness. How many hundreds of millions of litres were cast out into the environment. Make no mistake the release of this oil put an incredible amount of toxins into the environment that will end up in biological life and those all important, self-indulgent creatures... people. I suspect those in authority with a vested interest in oil and its production, and the oil industry themsleves will be playing this tune as loud as they can to anyone who listens. This was a disaster on a massive scale and unless they have a crystal ball no one can tell what the long term effects will be here and to say oh what about this or that, does not minimise what this disaster represents.

Yes,it was certainly over-hyped. Bad news is good news for the various media,and they always make things worse than they really are. In other words a gross exageration of doom and gloom. Mad cow disease and swine flu are two examples of over-hype. No doubt contributers will be able to link other world shattering none events.

The oil can be removed, but the animal life lost cannot be brought back to life.

From what I've heard, there was "missing" oil...no one knows where it went..microbes perhaps. The whole lot is sensationalism. It keeps the media fueled with advertizers, and dollars/pounds. It's really not news after all this time.
The stories stop when the advettizers say "not any more money coming in".

Yes, the oil spill was over-hyped as is much television news in the US. They routinely whip up excitement over the latest issue, and jump to the next topic when a new one grabs the headlines.

Yes, it is a huge spill (5 times greater than the previous oil spill disaster), but there are more toxic waters in the region: Chesapeake Bay is a noxious soup of nitrates which is corrupting wildlife and the environment and not enough is being said or done about it.

As not enough was done to help the people affected by the Bhopal disaster - decades later, its dead victims' families have received derisory compensation, if any. It took twenty years for a report to be issued.

The oil spill was an opportunity to reproach a foreign company for risks that American companies also take, and to demand utmost compensation, diverting attention from other serious current issues in North America.

This doesn't diminish the damage, but it needs to be kept in perspective. Time will tell if BP honours its promises to compensate for losses suffered due to the spill.

I don't hold out much hope for the Bhopal victims.

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Spare me! The after-the-fact question of "over-hyping" appears to be today's standard procedure following the resolution of a serious problem. (Think swine flu. Even think Katrina - when "over-hype" went missing and disaster followed.) One must take decisions with the best information at hand and harness all available means to avert disaster. When disaster is averted, a sigh of relief should be heard, NOT finger-pointing and arm-chair quarter-backing. "Over-hyping" sounds more like a critique made by those who sense political advantage in criticism. We will never know what might have befallen the Gulf (and even the Atlantic) if the present path had not been followed. And we still don't know the long term effects of the tons of dispersant still floating in our waters. The handling of the Gulf Oil Spill has been a giant experiment; without a "control" to compare the choices made, there is no way to measure "what ifs". We can only be glad for apparently better results than we feared and make changes to our deep water methodology in future to mitigate the worst that could have happened here. By the way, "over-hyping" did NOT cause public hesitation to travel to the coasts or to eat seafood from the area; in a population sensitized to water-borne pollution, the initial mention of an oil spill causes the public to think twice about where it will vacation or what it will put in its mouth.

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Yes, it was over-hyped. The biggest damage so far is economic--and I'm sure the tourists are staying away more because of the news stories than the actual effects.

Call me cynical, but I wonder if the American media would have been so aggressive if it had been an American company rather than BRITISH petroleum. Could there be some xenophobia at work here?

Was the oil-leak overhyped or was the clean-up overexaggerated. What to believe when politicians and the media tell you a story?

No, it was not over-hyped. Even using the smallest estimate of volume, it is the largest US oil spill ever and into one the most productive aquatic ecosystems on the planet besides. The rapid clean-up merely demonstrates that holding folks' feet to the fire actually gets results. I favor continuation of this tactic.
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Over Hyped? NO!

Over Reported? Obviously!

A long lasting, environmentally detrimental problem with incalculable effects on wild life and mans future in the gulf? You Know It!!!

75% of it is gone! I don't think so! Some one is trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Any intelligent person can easily conclude that there are huge amounts of the oil or it's dissolved by products floating on unseen currents or stuck to things permanent and mobile.

Lets just hope mother nature is more capable at dealing with it than man is.

I do applaud those working on clean up and all those helping out. You people are awesome!

Here we go again: “I blame the media”. One of the problems with today’s obsession with rolling news, that hasn’t done WS much good as a matter of fact it used to have a much more interesting and varied schedule, is that something is news today and gone tomorrow. The insistence on instant solutions, “I want it now and if I don’t get it now, I scream and scream until I’m sick”, also leads to extremely superficial treatment of events.
I cannot see how all the effects of the vast amount of oil that did actually get away, some 30% I think, let alone the effects of those chemical dispersants can possibly be assessed this early on. I know there is evidence of natural dispersion by micro-organisms but that in itself can upset the eco-balance, as giving one species an overabundant food supply can cause that to multiply to the detriment of others – just look at all the algae problems in European seas caused by excess nitrogen run-off from fertilisers. .
It is terminally stupid to talk about over-hyping at this stage, there may well be more environmental damage that is not yet apparent. It seems to me that “big oil” is very busy accusing the media and certain US politicians of over-hype just so they can get back to “business as usual”, making pots of money and threatening the very existence of the planet.

Leaving aside the over-hype argument that I don’t agree with (see previous post) this whole issue was seized on as a political football. The US witch hunt against that wicked “foreign” company was as cynical as you can get, although at least the Gulf residents whose livelihood depends on the fishing and tourist industries are lucky in that sense, had it been a 100% US company the oil would have “disappeared” (from the media) in record time, and their compensation deals would have been minute in comparison. Those who are wingeing about the moratorium on deep sea drilling and actually want to risk the whole thing happening again only deserve sympathy for their wilful myopia.
Now everything has allegedly been fixed, and the oil has “gone away”, the politicos can claim the credit to boost their image in the polls. Anyone with half a brain cell can see through the way politicians exploit stories and spin them to a) absolve them of any blame, b) find the, usually foreign, culprit (a.k.a. scapegoat) and c) turn themselves into to the heroes than have kicked lower parts of the anatomy to sort everything out.
The oil disaster was, is and I’m convinced will still be a big story and therefore one that deserves big coverage, I am much more suspicious about its apparently miraculous end – “not with a bang but a whimper” (T.S. Eliot) maybe?

The only birds not affected by this terrible pollution seem to be the headless chickens.

I see two different threads here, and I utterly disagree with both of them.

The first one talks about environmental disasters that may have occurred elsewhere and went under-reported in the US media. As if that was the reponsibility of US media. Hey guys, *we* raised a big stink about this spill *because* it occurred here. Just as *other people* should be doing in their own back yards. It is not the duty of US citizens or US news media to baby-sit everyone else, remember?

The second thread is that Americans only complained because this was a British company. Complete rubbish. Americans moan and groan about anything, given half a chance. Wasn't Exxon the bad guy for the Exxon Valdez spill? Of course they were. Corporations are always made out to be the bad guy, by mostly hypocritical consumers, and by far it is US corporations that are given this treatment most often. *In* the US.

The press over-hypes almost any story they cover. That's not news. But the negative comments towards Americans, as a people, is totally wrong in this case. On the contrary, what Americans have done is precisely what other people SHOULD be doing in their own countries. Perhaps then, we wouldn't have to deal with people being enslaved by medieval superstitions in so many problem countries.

A few years ago when the American owned and operated Piper Alpha drilling rig exploded in flames in the North Sea well over 200 British citizens were incinerated. Not once was emphasis given to the "American" aspect of the tragedy and the loud-mouthed Obama could learn a lesson from this.

I honestly cannot believe the premise of the blog question!!!
Surely this is catastrophic to anyone who has watched the footage, listened to the folk from the Louisana coastal towns, the Florida beach areas and of course, the still-yet-to-be-paid-compensation professional fishermanfrom the Gulf. That the whole thing was politicised by Obama to the extent he kept saying British Petroleum rather than its now correct corporate name BP , seems to have got right up the skirt of some respondents here. That it was handling poorly by all parties cannot be contested. And 1.3 million gallons of dispersentisnt going to help "nature take its course" as one person said here. Its a real, long term disaster, by any judement. I am incredulous that this blog question was even allowed to be set by the BBC....the last bastion of sensibility.

The oil leak has affected the livelihood of many people living in the Gulf of Mexico area.
If it had been in China or Nigeria, we would not have heard as much about it.
I don't think that it has been overhyped, just like I don't think that the coverage of Three Mile Island, Tjernobyl, Exxon Valdez og Hurricane Katrine were overhyped.
Anything that happens in America is going to get news coverage.
And if it can raise public opinion to prevent future environmental disasters, it is fine by me.

Obama's approval rating has plummeted like a lead balloon. He now has the worst rating of any President in the last 50 years. What better way to boost flagging approval ratings than to orchestrate an overhyped response to an oil spill. It is interesting that BP's American partner, Anadarko Petroleum, who was partially responsible for the oil spill came away from the whole incident unscathed and that an American has now been elected as chairman of BP.

The Political right in the US has grabbed this issue in order to bash President Obama. As well as bashing BP. I don't recall the same nastiness toward President Bush and FEMA for quite a while after Katrina, but iot could be because people in the Gulf of Mexico have become hyper-sensitive. I think that a lot of the publicity has to do with the fact that it was not an American oil company and it did not happen on Bush's watch.

This is another important step toward Americans getting out of their cars and quitting their dependency on fossil fuels, an addiction which is going to pollute the planet so much that we cannot live on it.

It may not be the biggest but deffinitely the worst. Because we should have learned of its dangers by now and avoided it happening. It couldn't be over hyped, only those responsible for it could claim that.

Once the US is involved the story will be over hyped.
Reason being that it happened at a time when the US needed something to distract its citizens of the economic mess that the US is in and they relentlessly went after Mr. Hayward so that they could get a US citizen to head British Owned BP.

The worst spill ever? Not even close. US companies have perpetrated worse spills and those get no mention because only this spill has affected US jobs or vacation plans. US Company Occidental had a far higher death toll (167) when their rig "Piper Alpha" exploded in British waters, but no one was screaming for their heads.

Chevron / Texaco has ongoing cases in Ecuador and Nigeria that make the Gulf coast spill look like the proverbial "drop in the ocean", and those spills have decimated the environment and lively hoods as well as actually making the drinking water unsafe. None of the US administrations have said anything about those disasters, but all of a sudden, an oil spill is considered "an attack on the American people".

The cable news people will have to find something else to fixate on. Did you notice how all the footage of tar balls and oiled grass is shot as a narrow close up shot. The producers don't want to show that most of the water /sand/ marsh is clear. I flew helicopters in the Gulf for many years and know all these areas very well. The marsh is only oiled by a narrow band that will be eroded any way, just like it has done every year. That is a problem in its self. The marsh was dead and black for two years after Katrina but recovered. Some environmentalists have pointed out that the grass is actually holding up very well and self cleaning. This oil is a natural substance (unlike refined products that spill). The chemical dispersant, who knows what that will do, but we can’t scream for the oil to be dispersed and then scream about the use of dispersants.

I find it hard to have much empathy for shrimpers who use the most destructive and wasteful (but efficient)method of fishing for shrimp. I used to see the scars on the sea bed from the air, where they have scraped everything down to the sand, and thrown 80% of the catch back into the water. Dead of course.

Yes everybody needs to calm down, the oil problem will sort itself out sometime in the future, but the need of oil by all countries and the drilling will just go on and on. The earth is being ravaged in so many ways, it is more likely to effect the enviroment in more ways than one, accordingly we experience different disasters from week to week. Are we forgetting there have been several civilisations before ours, all of which are now extinct. Untill and unless we agree on a common purpose for the safety of the earth we live in and realise most of everthing we do is detrimental to our very existance, there will be further disasters to come, just like the ones we are experiencing today.

By the way, this supposed looking for a "foreign scapegoat" from Americans is also very off base, for the simple reason that the vast majority of Americans most likely had no idea that the B in BP stands for "British." This is nothing but business as usual, where many people delight in making corporations that "bad guy," in the US, despite the fact that it is only corporations that have turned the US into the world power it is.

I think Linda is quite wrong on this topic.

Has anyone considered that the earth, a living organism needs oil just as the body needs blood? We must all take responsibility for the disaster that happened in the Gulf. We are all depended on oil to some degree. The fact that there is so much media coverage because of the disaster is good, Maybe people will wake up to the fact that oil and water do not mix. The oceans should not belong to anyone except the sea life. "Hurt not the trees nor the seas" St John book of Revelation

Does it really matter?

The notion that the 'hype' associated with an incident like this is pertinent to the impact seems rather counter-intuitive. The facts of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico are rather clear. The fact that the visible, floating oil is largely gone is a good thing, but must be tempered by the knowledge that the invisible, absorbed into the sands, fish, and plant-life oil remains and may have considerable ongoing impact.

As well, that politics overtook sensibility is also a fact. That clumsy, nay loutish commentary from the former CEO of BP made matters worse instead of better is also both factual and frankly mind-boggling all at once.
Who hyped? The media hyped. The politicians hyped. However what was hyped? The spill certainly. The volumes of oil, which seeped one day and gushed the next. Did BP hype? A little, but mostly they did what was expected of them. They fixed the leak - albeit after several attempts. Was the oversight hyped, the erstwhile support of the ex-Coastguard Admiral and the pile of 'experts' and watching politicians? Most certainly the 'oversight' was hyped. Was the 20 billion in escrow hyped - assuredly. It seems hard to take credit for getting BP to do something they already committed to do. In short, there's a lot of 'hype' to go around. Now, we can all wait for the blame - which I suspect will be as equally distributed as the 'hype'.

Kind regards,

The media is over-hyping the concept of "over-hyping". The oil isn't "gone", some of it has been burned and spewed into our air, some was combined with toxic dispersants producing new compounds of undetermined toxicity and effect. Without what is being called "over-hyping" we wouldn't have had even the lame response that was mounted; more than three months and many makeshift attempts to stop the gusher. We aren't even close to understanding the long-term effects of the disaster yet some of us are eager to revise it into non-news and continue with our profligate waste of resources at any displaced cost to the environment and society.

The other day I heard a BBC journalist speaking on a NPR program about the BP oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico. He made sweeping statements that caused me to view him as an actor and propagandist spreading disinformation while now questioning the validity of the BBC and NPR. This same practice has been recognized during various programs by NPR hosts.

The BBC reporter made a big to do over eating an oyster that he found delicious. Having tested oysters while employed by a quasi government laboratory before my later employment with the FBI, then becoming a whistleblower, is that you cannot taste to poisons periodically found in same.

The alleged BBC reporter never mentioned that the persons living in the area have increasingly developed illnesses from consuming fish and oysters that have been contaminated from BP's dispersants chemicals. The medical doctors are not even sure how to treat these illnesses. Many of the chemicals cause cancer.

Small ingested dosages of these toxins can genetically trigger cancer cells to form at the DNA level. That single oyster eaten in arrogance by the BBC reporter, could potentially become the ignition point of a future illness.

Most egregious is the BBC's deliberate failure to provide the truth concerning the remaining oil plume hovering on the bottom while emitting life threatening toxins across the interfaces of the marine and human environments.

On his radio program, attorney Norman Goldman of LA, California released a story several weeks ago, which stated that oceanographers have taken deep-sea submersibles to the bottom and discovered that BP's dispersants had massed an oil plume one mile down. The oil plume that BP and apparently the BBC wished to conceal, measures 27 miles long, 650 feet high, and 7 miles wide.

For alleged journalists to conceal this information is a crime against humanity that perpetuates another layer of genocide within the U.S. virtual death camp environment.

I am still waiting to hear what happened!!! One thing for sure here in the UK the environmental impact was definitely under played, we saw very little of the impact on wildlife. This helps...........
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/bp-gulf-oil-spill-map-0517

I do think that it was over-politicized -- all the Tea Party Nut-jobs were getting their panties in a bunch because President Obama "wasn't doing anything," Mr. Barton of Texas thought he should apologize to BP on behalf of the United States, and the U.K. was complaining that President Obama had "his boot on BP's neck." If all this isn't an example of over-politicization, then there is no such thing as being over-politicized.