Accountability « shoqvalue.com

On July 14th, on an MSNBC Countdown segment about the pending well bore pressure tests of the Macondo well, an oil industry MBA named Bob Cavnar was "confused," saying this was the first he'd heard of an "integrity test," then suggesting that something was "not making any sense," as if some other agenda might be in play. He went on to imply that the entire operation might be some new ruse to somehow help BP to mitigate their liability by distorting that data which might come from the well conditions.

This segment disturbed me greatly, and sure enough, already this morning, I am seeing people tweet about it, implying there *must* be some nefarious doings afoot. I have no love of BP, nor any wish to defend them, but that doesn't mean I want to see such suggestions made without hard information, and especially not when it's said in concert with something said that was just blatantly inaccurate.

I don't know where Cavnar had been vacationing without Internet access, but there was nothing surprising, unusual, nor unmentioned about either the test or the entire operation, which had been in progress for many weeks.

Pressure testing the bore wasn't news to the oil industry, nor anyone following the issue closely. While the words "integrity test" may not have been used verbatim everywhere, the concept of testing the bore casing for deformation, failure, or pressure intolerances has been referred to again and again in Congress, the professional literature, and even by Incident Commander Thad Allen himself in his briefing on July 2 (two weeks ago) where he explained that the tests would help decide whether the well could be "shut in" (oil industry-speak for closed-off completely):

Excerpt:
Katie Howell: It was and one quick follow-up. Is there a chance that you can actually shut in the well with this cap? I think someone from BP had mentioned that as an option.

Adm. Thad Allen: There is a chance. It depends on what those pressure readings are if we can get the right pressure reading by – assuming the decision is made, the cap is put on and the pressure readings are taken. If the pressure readings indicate that there is no damage to the well bore we don’t have any leakage at that point you have pretty much contained the outflow of oil.

Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/02/96968/transcript-of-thad-allens-briefing.html#ixzz0tkoFXwO7

Also, while now called a stacking cap, or "sealing cap" or "hard cap," these novel terms are simply new and more public relations-friendly descriptions for a second blowout preventer of a marginally different design. BOPs have a bad name of late, and "caps" seem more understandable to lay people. BOPs of any type are always pressure tested after being landed on a wellhead.

http://www.saverigtime.com/
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6667#more

Why do I care?

Because cases like this are instructive, and as our media choices get smaller and smaller, I think we all need to be vigilant about what we see and hear. The Gulf oil crisis is generating a lot of bad information, and often a lot of outright hysteria is being spun from it. It's vital that we all try to address the inaccuracies and fallacies when and where they appear.

I have great respect for Keith Olbermann and his MSNBC producers. There is no way they can possibly vet or fact check everything said by their guests in real-time, and it isn't reasonable to suggest that they should. This was just one of many similar examples of such misinformation incidents I've seen over the course of this and other crises, and I think all media and their viewers should be more sensitive toward them.

Whether it's Fran Townsend distorting national security facts, or some Heritage flack distorting economic data for partisan advantage, these self-proclaimed experts can be consistently wrong, or needlessly hyperbolic, often without offering a shred of evidence to support their assertions or analysis. In many cases, this never seems to prevent their being invited back again to offer up more of the same.

It all serves to illustrate for me that our Sunday talk shows are not the only things that could benefit from real-time fact checking. Television hosts and producers cannot be expected to know everything about an issue, which is why they use "experts" in the first place. I think it is incumbent on we, "the crowd," (as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen would call us), to keep them as accurate, candid, and honest as we can. Too much is riding on good information to let the bad information gush out without notice or comment.

"Tadeusz Patzek, a professor who is the chairman of the department of petroleum and geosystems engineering at the University of Texas, argues that the well bore integrity discussion has been hijacked by people who don't know what they're talking about."

"There is a lot of fast talk, which has little relation sometimes to reality," Patzek said. "And there is jumping to conclusions by the people who have no right to jump to any conclusions because they don't know."

Source: Washington Post

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Everyone would profit from reading Prof. Patzek's testimony to Congress. It articulates a whole host of issues we must deal with as we go forward with the very risky business of deep sea oil exploration. It can be done safely, but it requires a lot of people with pretty poor science and technical backgrounds to bone up on a lot of things.

"More study of offshore drilling needed to prevent tragedy"

The death of American accountability – John McQuaid

But it’s increasingly clear that our “systems” are simultaneously both too complex and not sophisticated enough to deal with the problems at hand. The disappearance of clear-cut mechanisms of accountability is just the most obvious sign.

I have been railing about the collapse of accountability for years. This article sniffs around the edges of the problem, and makes some important points, but it completely misses the role that right wing think tanks like Heritage, Media Research Center, and of course, Fox News and the broader corporate media have played in the deliberate deconstruction of accountability and social responsibility.

When the public is convinced that there are no empirical facts, and that one version of events is as valid as any other, they become desensitized to the reality of most crimes and their consequences, and are far more compliant and forgiving of those accused of abusing a trust, principle, law, company, office, nation, and population.

The cynical and professional manipulation of the public by the right wing can be seen in this one short video, where @CNN's Alex Castellanos, a professional PR professional presented as a pundit, is dispatched to proclaim Obama as "divisive" for trying to reform wall street, and that the "rehabilitation of George Bush is well underway."

The Media—and especially @CNN—have been pimping these faux memes relentlessly for years, as our national dysfunction deepens more and more each week. But their preoccupation with quarterly profits has so deadened their sense of ethics and journalistic responsibility, that such propaganda hawking is done with almost no apology whatever. They've been so conditioned by institutionalized imperatives, and their own self interest, that they—with a perfectly straight face—represent such predatory propaganda as "balance."

How can anyone or anything be held accountable in this maelstrom of self interest which our Fourth Estate has become?

And we're all to blame for it. Even the big names on the progressive publishing team, largely wring their hands about the lack of accountability or ethics. They waste barrels of liquid and digital ink with the busy work of bullshit that now characterizes the vast emptiness that most American journalism has become.

Even the most well intentioned of reporters have become more focused on surviving next week's staff cuts, or being invited to the next big Twitterized event, than consistently digging for and exposing truths. There are no Pentagon Papers, or Watergate level exposés anymore, because no one is paying for them, and without that, few journalists have the financial freedom to pursue them even if they wanted to.

For years, many have felt that a new and smaller scale, less bottom-line oriented media might change this situation. Sadly, too much of that so-called alternative media is rapidly turning into the same old mainstream media party with a few new faces on the buffet line.

Most of the big blue blogs and publications go from one outrage to another, with almost no follow-up about anything, encouraging and facilitating a kind of national Attention Deficit Disorder about the most important foundational issues of our culture, like war, civil liberties, torture, health/campaign/finance/media reform, etc..

Ever so stylish, and in steep competition in this new "link economy," they will publish thoughtful, well-researched articles about the latest outrage, milk the Technorati and Twitter streams for traffic, and then get right on with chasing the next outrage before the other guy does. There is plenty of high-minded rhetoric and posturing about a higher purpose, but no demonstrable interest in investing in any longer term strategy of truth telling about any big issue at all.

Avenues of change will surely not be opened up by the right wing media. And until publishers on the left start opening a few, working toward fostering a more consistent climate for accountability, I am not sure anything is going to change this situation—or save us from ourselves.

If we cannot count on the press itself to make demanding accountability fashionable, there's not a lot we can count on. But if anything might serve as a baby step toward salvation, it could be some kind of meaningful campaign finance reform. Removed from the shackles of special interest money, politicians can rise above some of our daily socio-emotional frays, and serve as role models for when and how to stand up and scream, "WTF?" When citizens and their children start seeing people again addressing real issues without the taint of incentive or special interest, it might nurture a national realignment of priorities and perspectives that foster a kind of second Renaissance. In such a new context of enlightenment, science, ideas, philosophy, facts, and empirical truths might once again be respected just enough that we again start to care about holding those who denigrate them accountable for it.

It's not nearly enough, but at least it's a start toward reforming America. And without a start, there's only an end.

Of all the great ideas Jay Rosen has had, I never really understood what made this one anything but self-evident. Fact-checking the news in real, or-near real-time, has been an obvious need for over 20 years, and the technology to do it was old school even before blogging, Twitter and Facebook. It's just that no one did it.

But sometimes it takes a famous journalism professor and social media geek to make the MSM see the obvious thing. And actually making them DO the obvious thing is a remarkable achievement; especially in this era of entrenched mediocrity in almost everything. With assists from people like me on Twitter, Jay Rosen hammered this idea home with Meet The Press, ABC, and just about anyone else that would listen. Jake Tapper finally did.

But in fact the whole Sunday format has to be re-thought, or junked so the news divisions can start over with a new premise. Of course the problem is that the people who would have to make that decision are the same people whose entire knowledge base and skill set lies in producing the "old" style of political television. That is what they know, so that is what they continue to do. I guess it's not hard to understand complacency of this kind. But do they really think we don't notice the growing absurdity of bringing to a common table people who agree on nothing?

Bags of kudos to Rosen for putting it on paper in his typically cogent way, and to Jake Tapper for having the good sense to nibble at his master's reigns and try something different.

This entire project is near and dear to my own work, so I have a vested interest in seeing ABC do this for more than a week. But even if I didn't, it would still be a big interest of mine.

There are clues to our future in projects like this, on many levels. So I will tune in to this on Sunday, and see if I can help it gain a little traction.

Please Retweet this post below using green button below. This "experiment" deserves everyone's support.

Background

About Politifact.com — a project in which its reporters and editors "fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups"

About Jay Rosen — Jay Rosen is a press critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University. He is a strong supporter of citizen journalism, encouraging the press to take a more active interest in citizenship, improving public debate, and enhancing life. His book about the subject, What Are Journalists For? was published in 1999. Rosen is often described in the media as an intellectual leader of the movement of public journalism

shoqvalue.com

I believe in the semantic web. I just don't know what that means.

Category Archives: Accountability

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