When former FAIR staffer Sam Husseini found out that Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa'ud would be speaking at the National Press Club, he thought it might be a good chance to ask a tough question. The National Press Club apparently didn't like that idea.

Husseini writes:

Before the end of the day, I'd received a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club "due to your conduct at a news conference." The letter, signed by the executive director of the Club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting "boisterous and unseemly conduct or language."

Want to know what the National Press Club thinks is unseemly conduct? Watch for yourself:

For the record, the National Press Club has been taken other actions distinctly at odds with a free and aggressive press. In 2001, Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman wrote about how the Press Club seemed to want to protect Henry Kissinger from critical questions. The moderator explained that if questions about war crimes were asked, it "would take so much time to explain all of the context."

In 2005, Mokhiber attempted to go to a U.S. News & World Report event at the Press Club celebrating "America's Best Leaders." The sponsor? Oil giant BP.

Mokhiber was blocked from entering the event--which, for the record, was being held in the First Amendment Lounge. Why? Probably because Mokihber had attended another U.S. News event at the Press Club earlier that month that was sponsored by tobacco giant Altria. That time Mokhiber asked a question:

Senator Hagel said transparency is critical. What's the deal exactly between U.S. News & World Report and Altria? What are the details of the sponsorship? Members of the social responsibility community refuse to invest in tobacco companies. Did you find it a little odd that a panel on corporate responsibility is being sponsored by a tobacco company?

You can see why the Press Club might not want to have these people in the room. They ask the wrong kinds of questions.

New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera is being promoted to the Times' op-ed page, where he'll appear twice weekly. Regular FAIR Blog readers may recall Nocera as the star of this item (7/1/10):

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?

I've found that this is a good rule of thumb: If a fact truly astonishes you, double check it, because your astonishment might be a sign that you're getting it wrong.

Nocera was earlier responsible for a similarly embarrassing correction--one that came with an extra helping of hubris (Extra! Update, 12/05):

In a New York Times business column (11/5/05), Joseph Nocera took to task the documentary Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Cost for not including Wal-Mart's point of view--even though, as Nocera noted, Wal-Mart refused to be interviewed for the film. When filmmaker Robert Greenwald suggested that "a corporation with $10 billion in profits" could probably speak for itself, Nocera quipped, "The actual 2004 profits were $9.1 billion, but who's counting?" Not Nocera, apparently: The Times published a correction (11/8/05) noting that his column "included an outdated reference to the company's profit. It was $10.3 billion for the 2005 fiscal year, which ended January 31; the $9.1 billion cited was for fiscal 2004."

Some people learn from their mistakes, and some people don't seem to be able to. Let's hope Nocera is in the former category.

The L.A. Times has an interesting piece (10/22/10) about KCET, the local PBS affiliate that is bolting from PBS because it says it can't afford to pay the fees PBS wants to charge them. What happened is that KCET, for a little while at least, was very good at raising corporate money; the PBS fee formula required them to pay more as a result, even though that corporate underwriting was supposed to be used for producing programming.

Who did the money come from? Oil giant BP. So much money that, as the Times noted, "in gratitude KCET bosses renamed their historic Sunset Boulevard soundstage BP Studios." But that funding dried up (BP has other, bigger problems to deal with), and the station is stuck with a rather unfortunate association with a reviled multinational corporation:

Meanwhile, the BP Studios sign became an embarrassment on the KCET lot. "Several of our TV show guests began to ask about that sign and it was becoming a real problem for us from a PR standpoint," said Neal Kendall, executive producer of Tavis Smiley, the talkshow taped on the KCET lot that airs on 200 PBS stations nationwide.

Earlier this year, KCET officials discreetly covered up the sign. Station management says the move is only temporary.

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.

President Barack Obama does not like leaks coming out of his White House. Luckily, most of what is passed to reporters is not so damaging. Take this passage from the Washington Post (5/26/10):

Although senior administration officials have voiced growing disapproval of BP, the company operating the rig and responsible for the cleanup, the mission of the Friday trip is not to declare war on the firm, said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

Instead, the official said, the trip will demonstrate that Obama is "on top of it."

Anonymous White House officials are willing to speak candidly about the boss being "on top" of the BP disaster. Thank goodness the Post could grant anonymity to that brave soul, who risked his/her neck to deliver such valuable insight. Hopefully there are more scoops to come!

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.

When FAIR released a study of the PBS's NewsHour (then known as the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour) in 1989, one finding stood out:

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was the major environmental story of the period. MacNeil/Lehrer had seven segments on the spill; not one included an environmental representative. Several discussions were limited to Exxon officials and friendly officials: The March 30, 1989 program, for example, featured Exxon's chairman and Alaska's governor ("The chairman of the board of Exxon, I think, has been to heavy on his own company").

And the summary of a segment from last night's broadcast of the NewsHour (4/29/10):

Costs Climb as BP Struggles to Contain Oil Spill
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening sensitive coastline and commercial fisheries, following last week's explosion at an offshore oil rig. Jeffrey Brown talks to a BP spokeswoman about the implications of the spill for the company and for offshore drilling.

Let's hope the company wasn't too hard on itself.