There was a lot of chatter about editor Tina Brown and the "new" Newsweek, which debuted last week. None of it struck me as all that interesting--a column up front from Leslie Gelb warning about the threat of Arab democracy and an anti-Social Security harangue from Robert Samuelson made it feel very much like the "old" Newsweek.

One other piece stood out, and only more so this week--a warm profile of the executive in charge of France's nuclear power company, Areva. The subhead was "France's Most Powerful Businesswoman Believes Now Is the Time for the Next Atomic Boom." And the piece led with this:

The Middle East is in turmoil, oil prices have skyrocketed, the cost of gas is through the roof. All of which is good news--if you’re Anne Lauvergeon.

While Newsweek notes that the "world may still need convincing" about nuclear power, the magazine doesn't seem to be so conflicted:

To understand how nuclear energy has morphed in the public consciousness from apocalyptic villain to "clean, green" renewable energy, look no further than Lauvergeon.

Puff pieces about Areva aren't anything new--60 Minutes had one in 2007 that we took apart here. It's hard to beat this one for bad timing, though.

The documentary Gasland was up for an Academy Award last night. Director Josh Fox has been writing about the gas industry's campaign against the film, which is a critical look at hydraulic fracturing, or  "fracking." That controversy found its way to the Wall Street Journal on Friday, where a story by Ben Casselman was posted that included an interesting admission.

As Press Action noted:

In the original version of the article, Casselman, who has covered the energy industry at the Journal for several years, quoted Range Resources-Appalachia director of public affairs Matt Pitzarella as saying: "We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror."

Obviously, "we need to look in the mirror" is not the message the industry means to send about the film. And that might explain why the quote disappeared--to be replaced, ironically enough, by an industry spokesperson declaring that they "don't want to get drowned out... We need to be able to respond objectively and accurately." Yes, let's hope the energy industry gets a chance to be heard!

So what happened? Press Action got a response, though not one that helps explain what happened:

Press Action contacted Casselman on February 26 to find out if he knew why the Range Resources spokesman's quote was removed from his article. In an e-mail response, Casselman wrote: "As a matter of policy, the Journal doesn't discuss its editorial decisions, so I can't get into details. But stories are edited all the time between editions, for all sorts of reasons (space, clarity, etc.). So it's not unusual for the early versions of a story to look different from the final version."

Perhaps a Wall Street Journal editor could provide an answer?

The conventional wisdom among corporate pundits has long been that Democrats have to move to the right in order to win. You're likely to hear a lot of this after Tuesday, but there's already plenty of advice being offered in advance of the Democrats' likely midterm defeat.

Time's Joe Klein has his take in the new issue of the magazine (11/8/10). He writes that "with the prospect of a Congress tilted toward the right, Obama will have to figure out new ways to sell his wares, if he can sell them at all." Klein urges Obama to think big--and to think nuclear:

If Obama wants to get a major stimulus program through the next Congress, he should propose the National Defense Nuclear Power Act. And make it big: a plan to blast past the current financing and licensing quagmires and break ground on 25 new nuclear plants between now and 2015.

Klein adds:

Some environmentalists still see nuclear power as unclean, though their argument has been wilting over time as France and Japan, among others, have proved the safety and efficacy of such power and climate change has emerged as our most pressing environmental problem. There will be those who argue, correctly, that given the current abundance of natural gas, nuclear power is too expensive--but it won't be in the future, and the price can be dramatically reduced if the government provides direct, no-interest construction loans rather than loan guarantees.

It's worth recalling that Obama has already made one substantial step in the pro-nuclear direction this year, providing billions in loan guarantees for a new nuclear plant in Georgia  (a move some in the media embraced).

The objection from anti-nuclear environmentalists is not that it's merely "unclean"--though that is a serious concern.  Despite massive amounts of government assistance, the industry hasn't convinced Wall Street investors that nuclear power is a profitable business. Klein's answer seems to be more corporate welfare to prop up an industry already long dependent on substantial government support.

It goes without saying that the progressive base of the Democratic party is where you're most likely to find opposition to nuclear power--which is probably a big part of what makes calling for Obama to embrace it seem so appealing to bash-your-base pundits like Joe Klein.

Has Scientific American jumped the shark on climate change? That's the contention of Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (10/26/10), who accuses the magazine of treating human-caused global climate change as an open question.

Romm points to an article by Michael Lemonick (11/10) about Judith Curry, a climate scientist whose critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are often cited by non-climate scientists who (unlike Curry herself) deny that people are dangerously warming the Earth. The articles seems to leave the impression that the truth on climate change is somewhere in the middle:

Climate scientists feel embattled by a politically motivated witch hunt, and in that charged environment, what Curry has tried to do naturally feels like treason--especially since the skeptics have latched onto her as proof they have been right all along. But Curry and the skeptics have their own cause for grievance. They feel they have all been lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments.

So there are "worthy...arguments" against the idea that human alteration of the atmosphere is causing the planet to warm up? If so, Scientific American is sitting on the scientific scoop of the decade.

Perhaps worse, the article was accompanied by an online poll to determine, in Lemonick's words, whether Curry is "a heroic whistle-blower, speaking the truth when others can't or won't," or someone who has "gone off the scientific deep end, hurling baseless charges at a group of scientists who are doing their best to understand the complexities of Earth's climate." Among the specific questions the Web poll asks is,  "What is causing climate change?"

There's something strange about any kind of poll on questions of science, as if the laws of nature responded to public opinion. But the adjective often used alongside of Web polls--which record the opinions of a non-random selection of Web surfers--is "unscientific." So why is Scientific American using one to gauge opinion on climate questions?

Stranger still, the magazine's website also features an "Energy Poll" conducted "in association with" the Shell oil company. It's hard to say whether this is an ad disguised as content or content that is underwritten and influenced by a self-interested advertiser--but either way, Scientific American has a major ethical problem.  Simply taking money for science journalism from a company with a critical interest in denying science is inherently problematic--just as it's dubious for Nova, the closest equivalent to Scientific American on TV, to be dependent on funding from climate change deniers (FAIR Blog, 9/14/10).

Scientific American has a proud tradition, and signs that it's falling short on the most critical scientific issue of our time are distressing. I've been concerned about the magazine's take on climate since last year's article, "Another Century of Oil? Getting More From Current Reserves" (10/09), which discussed techniques for pumping ever more oil without ever mentioning climate change. It was written by oil company executive Leonardo Maugeri.

French protesters took to the streets early this month in opposition to proposed austerity measures that would, among other things, delay the legal age for receiving retirement benefits. The passage of such a bill on September 15 by  the lower house of France's legislature, the National Assembly, occasioned further protests. (The bill hasn't come before France's upper house.)

Though U.S. news outlets like to claim objectivity, the actual rules of corporate journalism allow for mockery and derision of people and ideas  that don't fit a corporate-friendly template. As FAIR has documented throughout the years, U.S. corporate media despise French workers, routinely casting them as lazy, spoiled and demanding, and in need of having austerity measures imposed upon them (e.g., here, here and here).

This helps to explain why the Associated Press found it permissible to ridicule the significance of increasing the age for French pensions from 60 to 62, reporting in the lead of its news story, "France's National Assembly voted to delay retirement until the ripe old age of 62."

It may also explain why the AP can't be bothered to get facts straight. The law passed by the French National Assembly would raise the legal age for receiving partial retirement benefits from 60 to 62 in 2018;  the French are also increasing eligibility for full a pension entitlement, from 65 to 67. Not much different than the U.S.'s Social Security system, where one can get partial retirement benefits at 63.  (Sixty-seven is considered the "normal" retirement age in the U.S., though one gets maximum benefits by delaying retirement until 70.)

A Wall Street Journal report about the proposed French changes  came with lavish graphs, including one  comparing the ages at which retirees receive pensions from country to country. The graph accurately listed the U.S. at 67 years old, the age at which a normal pension is awarded (to those born after 1960); but the age listed for  France, which should have been 65, was listed as 60.

The AP and the Wall Street Journal were not the only outlets botching the reporting. U.S. outlets that failed to stipulate that the 60 to 62 age change was only for partial benefits included the New York Times,  Washington Post and CNN. In fact, reporting that accurately explained that that the French plan was to  increase the age for full retirement benefits from 65 to 67 was the exception.

But reporting the story factually would diminish its French worker-bashing value and, besides, no one important got hurt.

"Aren't there things Obama & Co. could have done differently?" Howard Fineman writes in the current issue of Newsweek (9/20/10).  "Election Day is still seven weeks away--but it's not too early for a 'pre-mortem.'"

No, never too early--especially since Fineman's column offers the same advice corporate media pundits have been giving to Democratic politicians  for at least the past 30 years: Move to the right. "Obama's 2008 victory was a personal one," Fineman quotes Bill Clinton adviser Bill Galston. "It wasn’t a vote for a more expansive view of the role and reach of government." You may have thought that enacting healthcare reform was a central promise of the Obama campaign, but no--apparently we just voted for him to hang out with us.

Instead, writes Fineman, "Obama--an overachiever, the guy who fills up a second blue book on the extra credit question--tried to do it all." For example, he foolishly tried to address the global catastrophe of climate change, pushing the House to vote for a cap-and-trade bill: "With this one early vote, the president exhausted his chits with Blue Dog, swing-state moderates and the coal-staters, who were then reluctant to help him on other matters." If only he had saved those chits!

If this doesn't make much sense to you, then you may suffer from another malady Fineman diagnoses in Obama: He hasn't "seemed all that curious about what makes Democratic insiders tick." That's certainly not Fineman's problem.

PBS ombud Michael Getler has thankfully expanded on his "I trust Nova" response to concerns that public TV's leading science program might be influenced by its climate change-denying funders (FAIR Blog, 9/8/10). In a more extensive response to those who thought they detected the fingerprints of oil tycoon David Koch (and industry giant ExxonMobil) in a Nova broadcast, Getler (9/13/10) suggests that those critics might have reason to be suspicious.

Getler points to the interconnection of Koch's gifts to Nova and to the Smithsonian museum, which has a David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins that portrays climate change as a driving force behind our species' evolution. The curator of this exhibit, Rick Potts, appears in Nova's "Becoming Human" program (rerun 8/31/10), making a similar case. As Getler notes:

The segment did leave you with both a subtle message and the feeling that climate change may not be so bad, or bad at all. Of course, it may be very bad and there is nothing about that in the episode.

I’m not judging the science here, or even the program itself. But the three-way link between Potts, the Smithsonian and David Koch are not explained in the program or online and, somehow, they should have been, even though this was a re-broadcast. Failure to do so adds to the question of whether any red flags went up inside Nova last year or this year or whether they just didn’t want to call attention to those connections.

Nova remains unapologetic and indeed seems indignant that anyone would question the integrity of their science reporting. In a statement to Getler, the program responds to Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm, who had criticized the "Becoming Human" series:

By taking the final few minutes of Nova's show out of context, as if the episode were intended to be a major exploration of humanity’s future rather than its past, Dr. Romm has distorted Nova's efforts to engage in much-needed, responsible, popularization of a scientific field that is constantly under siege from doubters of evolution.

The reference to "doubters of evolution" makes one wonder: What would people say if the top few of Nova's most generous supporters included the two most prominent funding sources for "intelligent design" advocacy? Surely the mere fact that a science program was bankrolled by proponents of pseudo-science would raise eyebrows. And if there creationist shibboleths found their way into Nova's programming, however subtly, there would be howls of protest.

Koch's denial of climate change is no less a pseudo-science than creationism. The big difference is that evolution, unlike global warming, is not a catastrophe that requires urgent action, so its skeptics are much less dangerous--and have pockets not nearly so deep as those who benefit from not taking action against global warming.

PBS's Nova is taking money from one of the biggest bankrollers of climate change denial--and,  surprise surprise, the resulting programming tells viewers not to worry about climate change.  But PBS's ombud doesn't see this as a conflict of interest--because Nova is a "consistently first-rate program," and he trusts it.

Nova's conflict of interest was highlighted out by Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (9/7/10), who had previously caught the Smithsonian promoting strange climate science after getting a grant from oil billionaire David Koch (Climate Progress, 4/1/10). Koch, who's a major funder of propaganda rejecting the science of climate change, is also one of the main underwriters of the popular PBS science program Nova--which is in itself a case of strange bedfellows.  (Another major sponsor of Nova is ExxonMobil, the other top funder of science-denial in support of  oil industry profits.)

With the New Yorker's Jane Mayer (8/30/10) calling attention to the Koch family's political donations--and mentioning the fear that David Koch's contributions are affecting the Smithsonian's exhibits--people naturally paid more attention to the donor credit for David Koch on a recent Nova rerun (8/31/10) called "Becoming Human." What raised more than a few eyebrows was the program's enthusiasm for climate change as a  driver of human evolution--with a not-so-subtle suggestion that we should bear this in mind in our current era of rapidly shifting weather:

Narrator: It is a simple but revolutionary idea: Human evolution is nature's experiment with versatility. We're not adapted to any one environment or climate, but to many; we are creatures of climate change.

Geographer Mark Maslin: I think we should actually look to our proud ancestry and how we evolved in East Africa and say: "That's how we survived that. We can survive the future, because we are that creature, because we are that smart."

Note that Maslin is not actually a climate-change denier--he's really a strong advocate for immediate action to restrict carbon emissions--but Nova quotes him as though he takes the don't-worry-be-happy stance adopted by...well, people like David Koch. Why is that?

As usual, PBS insiders take the position that where you get your money from is absolutely irrelevant, once again rejecting the entire rationale for public broadcasting: "Nova, like all WGBH programs, maintains complete, independent editorial control of its content," Nova executive producer Paula Apsell told PBS ombud Michael Getler. Getler, for his part, declares that "one rarely knows when or how, if at all, influence works its way," and that "as a viewer of what strikes me and a lot of others as a consistently first-rate program, I trust Nova"--a hands-off stance that would seem to reject the entire rationale for having an ombud.

PBS's position echoes the Smithsonian's--David Koch is "very interested in the content, but completely hands off," museum director Cristián Samper told the New Yorker. And that's Koch's position as well; asked by Archeology magazine (2/17/09) if he was involved in the editorial content of Nova's evolutionary programming, he replied:  "No, I am not. I've been following the Nova series ever since it first came on the air. I'm a great admirer."

In that same interview, though, Koch describes a visit to Olduvai Gorge to inspect the Leakey digs, which he also bankrolls: "When I got there they had discovered a Hominin's bones. They left them in the earth, waiting for me to arrive. And then when I arrived, they let me pull them out of the ground, which was kind of fun."

Presumably the Leakeys let him extract those bones not because of his paleontological expertise, but because they knew it would make a major donor happy. Nova also knows that downplaying the dangers of climate change would make its major donors happy--and it aired a program that presented climate change as a positive force for good. If you want to believe that that's a coincidence--well, all you have to do is trust Nova.

You'd think after the paper's recent whopper on the magnitude of the BP oil spill, folks at the New York Times would be extra careful.

Apparently not.

Back in May the paper suggested the BP spill wasn't nearly as bad as Iraq's 36 billion gallon spill at the end of the Gulf War. That number was way off; the actual tally was somewhere between 250 and 350 million gallons, as the paper eventually noted (blaming the error on someone else).

On Saturday (6/26/10), Times business columnist Joe Nocera argued against a proposed moratorium on deepwater drilling. One of his main points was that deepwater drilling--except for, you know, that current problem in the Gulf of Mexico--is remarkably clean, and that other drilling methods were worse:

Which also leads to a great irony: importing more oil via tankers will actually create more risk, not less. Between 1964 and the Deepwater Horizon accident, a grand total of 1,800 barrels of oil were lost from rig accidents--an average of 45 barrels a year. That is an astonishing record. Ken Arnold, an expert who consulted with the Interior Department right after the BP spill--and a big critic of the moratorium--told me that much more oil is spilled in tanker accidents annually than from drilling rig accidents.

A mere 45 barrels a year is indeed astonishing. It's also way, way off the mark, as a Times correction today admits (emphasis added):

The Talking Business column on Saturday, about the effect of a moratorium on deepwater drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, misstated the record of oil spills in the Outer Continental Shelf. From 1964 to 2009, 532,000 barrels of oil were lost as a result of spills, not 1,800 barrels. (The lower figure refers to oil lost as a result of blowouts from 1971 to 2009, not to the overall amount of oil lost in accidents.)

One thousand, five hundred thousand--the point's still valid, right?

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman argued yesterday (6/13/10) that,  when it comes down to it, we're all  to blame for the BP disaster. And that's not all we're to blame for:

We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. We--both parties--created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people's lives. We--both parties--created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn't have the means to sustain them. And we--both parties--sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you're drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)

So apparently "we" are all in "both parties," and "we" participated in some sort of referendum that endorsed certain Wall Street practices and/or encouraged offshore drilling without meaningful oversight.

It's also telling that this far into the crisis Tom Friedman still believes that the housing bubble was mainly a problem of selling houses to poor people.

But let's not sugarcoat things.  After all,  maybe "we" decided to give him a newspaper column, too.

The front page of USA Today tells us (6/8/10)::

Oil Spills Escalated in This Decade

Experts: Red flag wasn't heeded

By Alan Levin
USA TODAY

The number of spills from offshore oil rigs and pipelines in U.S. waters more than quadrupled this decade, according to government data. The trend could have served as a warning for the massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico, safety experts say.

This would have come in handy when the White House was announcing plans to encourage more offshore drilling. Instead we got assurances like this from USA Today's editorial page:

Some of the most ironic objections come from those who say offshore exploration will destroy beaches and coastlines, citing the devastating 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska as an example. The last serious spill from a drilling accident in U.S. waters was in 1969, off Santa Barbara, California.
--USA Today editorial (4/2/10)

Newsweek's "environmental issue" has an article (5/28/10) by correspondent Stefan Theil declaring climate change to be "Uncertain Science."  Giving the Reader's Digest condensed version of the denialist case, Theil refers to "e-mails and documents suggesting that researchers cherry-picked data and suppressed rival studies to play up global warming"--without mentioning that after sensationalistic media stories suggested a scientific conspiracy, subsequent academic investigations cleared the researchers of wrongdoing (Extra!, 2/10 ;  FAIR Blog, 4/19/10).

He talks about a U.S. scientist "under investigation for allegedly using exaggerated climate data to obtain public funds"--without mentioning that the scientist, Michael Mann, is being investigated by Virginia's Tea Party-aligned Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, whom the Washington Post has described as having "declared war on reality" (Climate Progress, 5/7/10).  Theil claims that there is a real scientific debate "over the extent and time frame" of CO2's greenhouse effect--and glosses over the fact that the actual debate in climate science circles is over whether the consensus predictions have underestimated how much the Earth will warm as a result of the burning of fossil fuels (Climate Progress, 5/31/10).

I suppose none of this should be surprising coming from a reporter who attacked Germany's "green technophobia" as a "sinister" and "disturbing" relic of the country's "powerful back-to-nature movements" and its "extreme desire for stability" (Newsweek, 7/18/09; Extra!, 2/10).

David Brooks (New York Times, 5/28/10) informs us that the idea that "government should have more control over industry" is one of the "predictably partisan and often puerile" reactions to the oil spill.  The lesson that smart people derive from the spill, Brooks says, is "that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand."

What follows is, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out (5/28/10), largely cribbed from a 1996 New Yorker essay by Malcolm Gladwell (1/22/96) that argued that "accidents are not easily preventable" because of various psychological pitfalls that humans are prone to--e.g., in Brooks' paraphrase, "people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters," and "people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices."

In other words, it's all very complicated, and what we need to do is work on "helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity" so we can "improve the choice architecture."

But is the story really all that complicated?  The New York Times had a story in yesterday's paper (5/27/10), headlined "BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Well Before Blast," about how the oil company chose to use a cheaper casing for the well, even though this could lead to a buildup of explosive gasses--as it seems did happen, leading to the catastrophic spillage in the Gulf.  Did BP make this decision because as human beings they have trouble understanding complexity?  Or did they make that choice because they are trying to pump oil as cheaply as possible so they can maximize their profits?

Of course, telling the story that way makes it sound like maybe you need to have some outside authority watching over companies engaged in dangerous activities to make sure their corner-cutting doesn't lead to disaster. And that would be partisan, and probably puerile.

A troubling article from Newsweek (5/26/10) reports on efforts by both BP and government officials to limit media access to the aftermath of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials--working with BP--who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

Last week, a CBS TV crew was threatened with arrest when attempting to film an oil-covered beach. On Monday, Mother Jones published this firsthand account of one reporter’s repeated attempts to gain access to clean-up operations on oil-soaked beaches, and the telling response of local law enforcement. The latest instance of denied press access comes from Belle Chasse, La.-based Southern Seaplane Inc., which was scheduled to take a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer for a flyover on Tuesday afternoon, and says it was denied permission once BP officials learned that a member of the press would be on board.

It sounds like the crisis managers have learned the lessons of Gulf War and Iraq War media control only too well:

The problem, as many members of the press see it, is that even when access is granted, it’s done so under the strict oversight of BP and Coast Guard personnel. Reporters and photographers are escorted by BP officials on BP-contracted boats and aircraft. So the company is able to determine what reporters see and when they see it....

[AP photographer Gerald] Herbert accompanied local officials from Plaquemines Parish in a police boat on a trip to Breton Island, a national wildlife refuge off the barrier islands of Louisiana. With them was Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of Jacques, who wanted to study the impact of the oil below the surface of the water. Upon approaching the island, a Coast Guard boat stopped them. "The first question was, 'Is there any press with you?'" says Herbert. They answered yes, and the Coast Guard said they couldn’t be there. "I had to bite my tongue. That should have no bearing."

UPDATE: Date of article corrected.

The New York Times ran a story on May 4 that advanced a rather unusual argument:  BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill was probably bad, but not that bad. Helping the paper flesh out that line was a group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times dubbed  "a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Texas. " As we pointed out, ProPublica blogger Marian Wang did some digging, and found that "at least half of the 19 members of the group's board of directors have direct ties to the offshore drilling industry." The Times published an Editor's Note admitting that they should have hinted at this to readers.

But another point the Times made in that piece struck us as rather far-fetched:

The ruptured well, currently pouring an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the gulf, could flow for years and still not begin to approach the 36 billion gallons of oil spilled by retreating Iraqi forces when they left Kuwait in 1991.

36 BILLION gallons? This estimate sounded wildly inflated (as Richard Ward pointed out at CounterPunch). And it turns out that it was roughly a hundredfold exaggeration, as the New York Times explained in a correction today:

A news analysis article on May 4 about the severity of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, using information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, misstated the amount of oil that was spilled in 1991 into the Persian Gulf by Iraqi forces in Kuwait. The agency now puts the figure at 252 million to 336 million gallons--not 36 billion gallons, as it initially estimated.)

The paper's admitting its error, but blaming it on NOAA? According to the Energy Information Administration, the entire Persian Gulf produced 14 million barrels of crude a day in 1991, the equivalent of 588 million gallons--so a spill the size the Times was claiming would amount to the entire Gulf's output for two months. This should have sounded improbable to anyone writing or editing the story. But since the point of the piece was to downplay the severity of the BP/Deepwater disaster, one can see why that didn't happen.