UN-embedded Journalism

Excellent piece of UN-embedded journalism by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone - worth the read!

The Spill, The Scandal and the President

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder

From the article:

Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."

Photo courtesy of al.com

Embedded... in oil... and much more

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
- the Beatles

Over the past few weeks I have embedded far more information about the Gulf ecosystem and the mismanagement of natural resources into my brain than I really care to know. "Embedded" is a word that has been troubling me for about 10 years, since it was first applied to the other Gulf war, that other oil mess, and the feeling continues to churn in my gut, like one of the parasites I once picked up in the Congo. This one just won't go away. My saying then was "better living through chemistry", this time that joke's punch line has a petrochemical stench to it.

"Embedded" was initially used in the media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The US military reacted to pressure from news media who were growing frustrated by the level of access granted by the Bush (Sr.) Administration during the 1991 Gulf War and in the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (Bush Jr). Lt. Col. Rick Long, the former head of media relations for the U.S. Marine Corps, managed the media boot camp in Quantico, Virginia, which prepared journalists for their war assignments. "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment." Embedding journalists honorably served that end, said Long. BP, and in a complicit act, the US Coast Guard, are now going to attempt to dominate the information environment". Only the environment keeps growing (see map below).

As I have struggled with the "go" vs "not go" to the Gulf issue these past couple weeks, one of the issues that weighed significant in the "not go" column has been "embedded" media. It feels a bit like my friend who was unceremoniously ushered off the Nike corporate campus because he was inadvertently wearing another companies footwear, shoes that better fit his feet and wallet. If you are at Nike you better have your feet embedded in their shoes. It's hard to imagine anyone embedded in the BP media caravan and not wearing BP sneakers.

It is possible to sneak around in other shoes, sometimes, some places, but in my own country?

Amr Al-Mounaiery, Abu Dhabi TV correspondent: "After this war [Gulf 2003], I realized that we in the media are the soldiers of politics. Not the military soldiers. I am proud that Abu Dhabi TV showed all sides, everything. You can see CNN showed only part of the war – their favorite part. They didn't show any of the anti-American rallies or the civilian casualties. They just showed crowds welcoming American soldiers and clapping hands. It is selective journalism – like Saddam did ... This was the Arabic way. Now we are switching roads and we wonder: Where is America? Where is the American dream? Freedom of expression, where is that?"
– Excerpt from "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq – an oral history" by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson

"Embedded" should never be linked to journalism, journalists, media or integrity of reporting. I have a great deal of respect for many correspondents who have worked the front lines of the painful and ugly stories, both wars of politics and environment, but I am also disheartened by our lack of Murrow-ism. Our lack of courage to demand more of the words and images we create.

"For birds, the timing could not be worse; they are breeding, nesting and especially vulnerable in many of the places where the oil could come ashore," warns Melanie Driscoll, a Louisiana-based bird conservation director with the National Audubon Society. Embedded means limiting, controlling the look and distribution of images that painfully picture pollution-soaked pelicans and other life - images that are powerful emotional arguments for getting off our oil addiction. Yes, it's still possible for a picture to say a thousand words (above), unless it's embedded, controlled and marketed, then it's only 500 words at best.

Speaking of numbers, here are a few, embedded in this environmental disaster. I'm not a numbers guy, but these are numbers basic to primary school math.

• Since the initial inky plume began spreading up and under the Gulf of Mexico, the price of oil per barrel has risen by $2.5 U.S. dollars a barrel. BP generated $4 million a day before the crisis, that figure has now risen to $10 million per day.
  
• When the accident first occurred the BP estimate was 1,000 gallons flow, then upped to 5,000 (which the US government trumpeted), then 10,000 was finally settled on after 5 weeks. Post several botched attempts to stop the spewing crude, a capture siphon was reported by BP to be collecting 11,000 gallons/day... okay, my math is starting to fail me here, but isn't that 110% ? hey why not, coaches ask that of their athletes, BP of their employees, why not their well heads? (That actually make good math, if a company can get 110% of the oil out by spilling it, that's more efficient and more profitable.) But let's continue... the cutting of the pipe was, BP reported, going to expand the output by 20%, and then they (BP) announced some success as they are capturing up to 50% of the escaping oil. So, does that mean 11,000 = 50% so there is 22,000 being released, which would be 20% increase over the original which would need to be about 18,000? Hang on, I'm almost done with this story problem.
  
  Now, as of June 16, nearly 2 months after this started the Government scientists today increased the estimate of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico to be upwards of 60,000 barrels per day. That translates into 2.5 million gallons per day; an amount equal to the Exxon Valdez spill could be gushing from the well about every four days.
• Okay, so is the BP capture 50% = 11,000 or is it 50% = 60,000/2 = 30,000? which = 50% of 600% more than they said? At what point do the numbers, or men behind them, lie?
• A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration video, shot as officials coordinated response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, shows that federal officials almost immediately worried that the oil well could leak up to 110,000 barrels per day, or 4.6 million gallons.
• $20 billion vs $27.7 billion cash - the first is amount the US Gov. pressed BP to set in escrow for partial clean up ($1 billion spent currently) - the second BP's cash generation in 2009.
  
  A couple more bullet points -
  
• New polling suggests 76 percent of Americans support some government limitations on greenhouse-gas emissions - yet, 53% believe off-shore drilling should go forward. (The Senate recently rejected a backward-looking resolution to discredit the EPA from Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski. “It shows that senators are now scared of being tied to fossil-fuel interests,” says Michael Levi, a climate expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. No numbers yet on percentage of those senators currently vs previously embedded in the pockets of major oil companies.)
• 2 cents - A tripling of the federal government’s expenditures on energy technology R.D. & D. could be financed with a increase of about 2 cents per gallon in the federal tax on gasoline. (more on this)
  

I'm a picture person - I've embedded a little map to bring this ugly mess closer to home - your home - just click on the tabs at the top of the map and move it to your home - or any other place you love.

James Carville, a Clinton campaign veteran who has criticized the administration's response to the spill, said, “We don’t need legislation, we need to utterly reject the philosophy that companies and markets are able to regulate themselves,” continuing, “Until you have that you’re going to have banking crises and environmental catastrophes.” Along with that I would also "utterly reject" the philosophy that as long as journalists (photogs included) are embedded in their subjects we will never hear and see what is and isn't being regulated and by whom.

So, "embedded", what has it come to mean? It feels a lot like a lie, or worse yet a partial truth. The kind that confuses our confidence and erodes our integrity. We have now for a decade embedded those few among us charged and challenged with reporting the facts, unbiasedly, in war and disaster - at the same time we have now been engaged in the longest war in American history and the country's largest environmental disaster. Something, maybe that "feeling continues to churn in my gut" sensation, tells me the two are embedded in one another.

other thoughts: Pros and Cons of Embedded Journalism

Photo above: A laughing gull mired in oil from the Deepwater Horizon on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

A Moment of Silence Please...

Oil Spills, Korean crisis, Jamaican death toll rises, Blast near NATO base in Kandahar, more after this pause to catch your breath.

And in other news.... The BBC reported today that, "The Alaotra grebe is extinct" ...going on to say, "The last known sighting of the bird was in 1985 and experts have now confirmed its demise, killed off by a combination of poaching and predatory fish."

You probably didn't know the lovely little bird, lived just around the corner, quiet fellow, so nice to the local kids, never really bothered anyone. Gosh, kinda wish we had gotten to know him before he died.

Painting of the Alaotra grebe by Chris Rose via the BBConline

Thinking about the cost of oil

"Today we know the price of everything, the value of nothing."
- Oscar Wilde

"better than anything I have ever seen. It will haunt you. trust me."

Everybody creates a world - shopping, working, eating, love, friends, experiences, passions, etc - it is something that we expose, like an image in a darkroom, over the passage of time, occasionally moments, brief and puctuating, more more often over months and years and seasons. Sometimes we are active participants in that creation and more often than not we are passengers, it just happens. I hate when it just happens. I have always want some say in the deal. Maybe that's the creative bit in me. The bit I keep chasing--like I just said to a friend in an email--like a firefly, on-off, on-off, it goes. And I keep chasing, sometimes where it's been, sometimes where I think it's going, and even sometimes where I hope it will go.

These past months I have spent increasingly engaged in creating my own new world; it has become a very active persuit, mentally, spiritually and physically. Part of that creative perambulation has been trying to experience the world not just through my own eyes, ears, and touch, but as well, the thoughts and writings and expressions of others. Today I was catching up on "others" and read Paul Melcher's "Thoughts of a Bohemian" blog, which is linked in the upper right of this blog. He has posted his thoughts and links to war photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson's NYTimes Magazine piece The Shrine Down the Hall - here are Melcher's words about the images:

"These images by Ashley Gilbertson are the most powerful images of war I have ever seen. They are dramatic by what they do not show: The fallen boys. Instead we see the remains of Life brutally interrupted, the trophies, posters, gadgets that once made them happy and proud. Suddenly, their absence within these personal space become unbearable. And death, the death of a US soldier takes a new dimension. It is no longer a soldier from within many, an anonymous face under a helmet, but a person, an individual, a life that is missing."

Even more powerful perhaps are a photographer's words in this amazing interview with VII The Magazine: The Consequences of War. Set your world aside for a few minutes and watch this. War is one of the most hideous acts we humans do, there is no reason for it, only excuses. I couldn't agree with Melcher more, this is, "better than anything I have ever seen. It will haunt you. trust me." Ashley you have my greatest respect for what you have created and are saying in words, pictures and actions.

Never there until you get there

Back from Europe and managed to scoot through a window. Planes, trains, security alerts, volcanic ash, mix with two quarts Perrier and you have it, a royal travel mess. Ah, international travel, how I've missed you so.

I started reflecting (while serpentining my way in a [in]security line) how things have changed since I started my traveling career. In the beginning it was simple, buy a ticket, get on a plane, land somewhere, travel around taking pictures and scribbling your impressions of the place, come back and do a story. Now it's wake up, pop the computer on, check seismic reports, read financial forecasts, survey the upper atmospheric wind patterns, check latest State Dept terrorist reports, load the iPhone with key destination apps, gather the dozen different chargers to keep my digital existence powered up, THEN, think about hitting the road and going to work.

But then I started thinking, hasn't that's always been the challenge for gypsies, staying fleet-a-foot and one step ahead of the obstacles. Just after the first of the year the word proprioception entered my weekly vocabulary. Up until now it was uttered as I gasped for air and dripped with sweat between sets of one exercise or another dished out by my fitness coach Phil. That proprioception directly connected to my spine and lower back, and their general inability to communicate with the rest of me. Proprioception popped up today as I juggled BBC volcanic ash reports, flight schedules and substituting TGV reservations for a hire car; in this case my brain communicating with the flexibility of my travel intentions.

'Travel proprioception' is something I got very good at long ago, but it came in other names and descriptions: A cameraman friend from LA use to describe it like this - our ability to eat most anything and not get sick, get toss around in a helicopter and not turn green and sleep not just anywhere, but everywhere. Another person put it "leaving your baggage behind." For the most part that's baggage filled with preconceived notions of what a people, place or thing should be - even what traveling there should be like. And as a wise, and oh so salty woman once said to me, "Want to be a good writer in this place [Africa], follow your nose, but keep your nose pointed down, out of the way."

Phil, loves to say, "sometimes ya gotta go slow to go fast" - I think it applies to travel proprioception as well. I have a bit of the Energizer bunny hopping about inside me - and it's taken 50 years to learn how to slow the little hopper down - and I still can't always catch the little hare. I once arrived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea and was still flying around in some artificially sped up world of my own; my metronome pulsing to beat of a world consumed by devices--computers, cell phones, deadlines, downloads, 24-hour news--and an elder I was suppose to meet with was not available; I was going nut. Two days later he said we could meet now, when I found him in his garden, leaning on his handmade hoe, mande tene wig slightly askew, but happily adorned with bright saffron-colored everlasting daisies, he said, "you are finally in time." I had no idea I wasn't until that moment. From that trip onwards I always took two days off before coming to the village - that's about what it took to reset my clock.

I use to have a saying when travel was my only way of life, "You're never there until you get there." People would ask me are you excited about going to this place or that, my reply, "after I get there, then I'll think about getting excited." Because the flip side of excited is total downer. It becomes a yo-yo ride that can spin out of control. On the other hand, if you are truly a journey-person not a destination-person then "there" may turn out to be a whole different place, and the place you really were destined to be. Not always an easy reality to wrap your mind, body and soul collectively around.

The one thing I have gotten smarter at is creating fertile fields for the "there" of which I had no reckoning. Heading for Belgium and France I was excited, mainly because my travel proprioception feels totally turned on, lit from within. When I first began traveling I intentionally cast my plans away from Europe, towards lands untamed, maps that still claimed "Here be dragons", places that struggled to be pronounced (like Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano - I mean, c'mon, that's a scrabble goldmine!). Europe is now a journey - I'm am excited - because I have no idea where it will eventually lead.

Writing - it will come

Look at that mess. Supposedly there is a book there, about the Lanterne Rouges of the Tour de France, yet unwritten, blank pages wanting for words, experiences waiting to bloom, questions unanswered, friendships renewed, some to begin.

I'm entering into that fun/chaotic/question-my-sanity phase of writing a book, and this one doesn't have a photo outline to guide the vision - only historical confetti... after the parade... I'm knee deep in it. I feel like a street sweeper, pushing a broom about the last 108 years of French cycling history trying to clean up this mess. Scary part, it's only about to begin, I know it. Somewhere in my dimly lit memory I did this sort of thing before. Maybe it's that, that memory, and know I must be alive to have it, that makes this possible. Almost a weird creative mantra; "yes, I wrote a book before. I found the words. I survived the editors. I met the deadlines. I am alive to tell about it."

The odd part - part deux - after assembling over 120 pages of writing on this book - I'm now about to start. It feels like 120 page Prologue - luckily I wasn't up against Fabian Cancellara (see my bike blog for what that means).

Next week I leave for Paris and Liege (why Liege? more about that in a minute) and I feel like the photo above will not change - it will look like that for 10 hours on the flight to Charles De Gaul (sans food stains I hope - the wine will be another issue), on the TGV heading to Belgium, in my hotel rooms in Liege and Paris, and probably, out of having a brain ready to burst with facts, anecdotes and trivia, look like that on the flight back to Portland.

Am I prepared - god no.

My French lessons have fallen into a crevasse somewhere between a lung infection and procrastination. I know some of it has permeated my memory, but beyond pleasantries and a few basic directional aids the vocabulary is pretty pathetic - I'll need my agent Joel to shadow me through every interview and negotiation for access. Ya know, it was easier working in the Congo.

Jenn came home from work the other evening and said my blog entry over on Gerry's Daily Ride totally lost her. After trying to read it for the third time she raised the white flag and pedaled home. Ya, my brain had too many facts, it was doing a defrag looking for more hard-drive space.

Writing a book is like that, different than a magazine piece. Every once in a while I think, I do anyway, need to download all that stuff I have been storing. For example, I now have read and re-read how le Tour de France got started to the point I'm beginning to feel like I AM founder Henri Desgrange (I wish I could at least speak and write French as well). My first book we hired a writer skilled at the abbreviated format of a magazine, it and he never crossed over. One chapter and several months later we went searching for another author.

So why Liege? Liege is the kinda sidetrack that writing books take you on. Required rambling. On your first book or two you don't trust it, it costs money and you favor your wallet not your intuition. Now I go only knowing partially why and over time realize, with patience and outstretched antennae, that it will come, it will come. In Liege I'm trying to lock down an interview with a few cyclists, done deal, and the two icons of cycling broadcasting Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin, not done. It hasn't happen yet, but the race Liège-Bastogne-Liège is there, they will be broadcasting, and I'm buying the beers, it will come.

And finally, look at that mess again - notice anything? No camera. Ya, I plan to take them, actually plan to use them, as a diversion - never thought of them, photography, that way, but I think a daily walk with Jenn on the streets of Paris with camera in hand may help write this book. It will come.