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Oil booms are seen as they reach the coast south of Venice, Louisiana - Source: Reuters -
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Journalism is sometimes called the first draft of history; really, it should be called the first scrawl.
News in particular is subject to a variety of distorting factors: The proximity of a deadline, the constraints of resources (money, memory, excitability). Any story's facts are rarely immediately evident. They tend to evolve, though - and we're speaking here about news again - the word mutate might be more accurate, with its visions of ungainliness, chance and speed.
This has been some of the case with what's now being referred to as the "oil spill" that is lapping with such toxic alacrity near Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Let's backtrack. Initially we saw a tragedy, with apocalyptic pictures of a plume of black smoke, and the water on fire around the Deepwater Horizon rig. It was also a search story for the 11 workers believed to have perished in the conflagration. This passed from view, until BP, the company using the rig (which was owned by another party, Transocean) admitted there might be a leak in the oil well, about 1,000 barrels per day. This was revised upwards by a factor of five.
On Friday (NZT), the White House pronounced the spill of national importance, which is not like saying it's historic, but is suggesting that history is waiting in the antechamber, putting on its lipstick and getting ready for the close-up.
Typically, when a journalist appeals to history, it's time to reach for your revolver. Such plaints are usually a public admission, either of a paucity of story, or a paucity of imagination. If something isn't important, or can't be put in context, call it historic. The White House didn't want to use the H-word, yet given the last administration's flat-footed response to the last disaster this area went through, it didn't want to appear sluggish either.
But history can be useful for backroom discussions of what constitutes news.
In regards of the spill (a term that environmental activists are already attempting to sideline, in preference for the more unwieldy, but far more livid, "eco-disaster"); the benchmark is the Exxon Valdez spill/eco-disaster in which 41.64 million litres were deposited into the sea and coastline of Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989, America's worst ecological event. The environmental group SkyTruth, which saw through the low figures first released by BP, has estimated that perhaps by the time you are reading this, Deepwater Horizon will have replaced Exxon Valdez as a measurement of infamy.
Feeling inquisitive as this story was breaking several days ago, I called my travel agent, who informed me that flights to New Orleans' Louis Armstrong Airport (possibly the best named terminal in the US) were almost full, ditto flights to Biloxi, though there was one seat he could get ex-La Guardia to Memphis and then to New Orleans by midnight local time. As for hotel rooms around Venice, Louisiana, where the oil was expected to hit - forget it.
Such was the case when Michael Jackson died. The cost of flights to Los Angeles from New York rose by a factor of hundreds of dollars every hour as the magnitude of media interest grew.
Forget blogs, newspapers, or reports: The first draft of history is written in the airline manifests; sadly the next draft is being inscribed in the wetlands and bird havens of the Gulf Coast, which no matter how you measure it, are now drowning in oil.
Read more of Tim Wilson's blogs.
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