With the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill upon us, we're seeing a torrent of "follow-up" and "one-year review" stories on the worst environmental disaster in our nation's history. I've been struck by the disparity between what I see and read in the media and what I see down here on the ground everyday in my home state of Louisiana and other parts of the Gulf Coast – sick cleanup workers and coastal residents, oil-soaked marshes, record numbers of dead dolphins and sea turtles, major beach re-oilings, out-of-work commercial fishermen and charter boat fishing captains, and the list goes on and on. The "year after" mainstream media coverage overwhelmingly toes the "official" BP-government line that the damage wasn't as bad as expected – that the nightmare predictions didn't materialize. I can assure you that nobody living in the coastal communities of the Gulf would agree with that rosy, uninformed assessment. As I've noted many times before, it's amazing what kind of coverage you can "buy" with a couple hundred million in advertising dollars. Remember that BP tripled its ad budget during the spill – shelling out $5 million a week between April and July 2010. That money greased a lot of ...
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