Dominic Lawson, The Independent
Barack Obama's media advisers were quite distressed when the President travelled down to the Louisiana coastline last week to make his first on-the-spot statement about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Their distress was caused by what they didn't discover, rather than what they did. Despite their frantic requests, no photogenic dying oil-covered birds could be found to form a backdrop for the Presidential tirade as he weighed into BP.
The same fact – the oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon rig has not (yet) hit the coastline itself – presumably explains why the incident has not been big on the television news, for all the alarm and even hysteria that has been expressed. On a visual medium there is little enduring interest to be had in footage of oil floating on water – even if it is a lot of oil on a lot of water. |