BP Sends Fake Journalist to Cover the Gulf Spill

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Posted by Brian Merchant at 9:36 am
June 26, 2010

BP Sends Fake Journalist to Cover the Gulf Spill


Cross-posted from Treehugger.

Is there no end to BP’s hypocrisies and ludicrous actions? Evidently not. Here’s the latest, in a long line of curious blunders and aggravating insensitivities: after being publicly chastised time and again for denying access to journalists, BP has evidently loosed its own “journalists” on the scene to really get to the meat of the story . . .

The Wall Street Journal got access to Planet BP, the company’s in-house magazine, and discovered that it had evidently sent out a PR agent thinly disguised as a “BP journalist” to cover the spill and its consequences in Louisiana.

Here’s the WSJ on the sort of stories its fake journalist are reporting back to BP employees:

in Planet BP … a “BP reporter” dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint an even rosier picture of the disaster. “There is no reason to hate BP,” one local seafood entrepreneur is quoted as saying, as the region relies on the oil industry for work.Indeed, the April 20 spill on the Deepwater Horizon is being reinvented in Planet BP as a strike of luck.

“Much of the region’s businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams,” another report says. Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that “BP has always been a very great partner of ours here…We have always valued the business that BP sent us.”

The “report” is full of highly dubious nuggets like this.

This is really more hilarious than anything — the fact that BP sent out a “reporter” (one that calls himself a “BP journalist” no less) to report on how great BP is, and why everybody still loves it, despite the spill, is simply ludicrous. Obviously, little harm is being done by a hack reporter that’s only sending his scoops back to an audience composed almost exclusively of other BP employees. But it still seems like an idiotic thing to do — the WSJ author aptly likens the “BP journalist’s” not-so-noble endeavor to the scene at the end of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”: where the crucified sing about looking on the bright side of life.


http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/26/bp-sends-fake-journalist-to-cover-the-gulf-spill/

[BrklynLiberal]

1. BP obviously has some VERY STUPID people in decision making positions..

[JackRiddler]

3. Those who win a rigged game, get stupid.

However, they're still rigging it and getting away with it.

[merh]

2. The BP journalist's "report" reads like what Barbour has been

saying and what the GOP wants us to believe. Are you sure he doesn't work for FOX?

[sad sally]

4. BP's new guy's tv ad (can't remember his name - the one who

claims to be "local") that keeps saying BP will clean up "every drop" makes me yell even louder than the one with Tony Heyward saying he was sorry. Why or how can BP say this? Have they even looked at the seabed? It's not drops sticking there or on the beach. Lies, lies and more lies...