I touched on this topic yesterday in a post about the news media and the unfortunate narratives that take hold and distort our reality. This writer in Time Magazine was apparently thinking along the same lines.
What's ironic, or maybe not, is that if you watched some of the prime-time shows on MSNBC last night, you would have seen ...
an exclusive interview with a "whistle-blower" from the EPA saying the government is covering up the damage done in the Gulf with only scant mention of all the other scientists who are saying what was concluded in the Time piece, as well as articles in the New York Times and Washington Post -- it is too early to determine with any certainty the long-term impact of what happened in the Gulf, but the early evidence suggests that the predicted damage is a lot less widespread and harmful that the media's coverage suggested. (Notice how the broken pipe at the bottom of the ocean is getting a whole lot less air play now that it has been capped? When it was gushing oil and gas non-stop, it had an ever-present spot on TV news.) That's unfortunate.
Some will likely call this evidence of a liberal media bias, but I believe the same thing happened here that happened in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks when the media helped sell the Iraq war by not scrutinizing claims of weapons of mass destruction and all but ignoring anti-war protesters, as well as Scott Ridder, the former head of the UN Weapons inspection team who flatly said there were no stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq. And remember this: The over-reaction in the 9/11 aftermath helped a Republican president's approval ratings shoot up to 90 percent. The over-reaction in the BP oil spill aftermath helped push a Democratic president's approval ratings down into the mid-40s.
Popular, emotional narratives are hard to resist, even for seasoned journalists -- too often especially for seasoned journalists.
