"Angry Analysis"

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H. Brandt Ayers: Fair and accurate

Jul 18, 2010

The monster created by careless, profit-driven BP executives has trashed the beaches and wetlands of the Deep South without fear — fearless not due to its malevolent soul, it has no soul — but due to its massive size and wealth.

But wait! A trim man in a black T-shirt steps into the monster's path with the moves and the body of a light-middleweight boxer. It is CNN's Anderson Cooper, with fists clenched and fire in his eyes.

Cooper lands a lightning right hand on the monster who grunts in pain … to the satisfaction of all who have felt helpless to stop the fouling of the Gulf. Then he hits another satisfying blow, and another, and again, and again, and again …

Stop, Anderson, that's enough! But he doesn't stop, he keeps on battering and mumbling something that sounds like, "BP won't come on my show." As the hitting goes on and on, his ratings go down, down — by 28 percent.

Was the rating decline caused by simple boredom; telling the same story the same way over and over? Probably, but beyond being boring, AC360 has been guilty of bad journalism. Where is the other side of the story?

Inviting a beleaguered executive on to take a beating live and in color is not the same thing as reporting how the other 45,999 blameless BP executives, engineers and workers, many of whom live in the Gulf area, are working their guts out to stop somebody else's mistake from doing any more damage.

Just as the technical wizardry of BP engineers lowered a steel house, bolted in place by underwater robots, that promises an end or at least a significant decrease in the flow of oil, Anderson Cooper left the Gulf for Haiti.

The earthquake that eliminated Haiti as a viable country for now and the immediate future is a pitiable, uncoordinated tangle, but I for one will be skeptical of reportage done there by Anderson Cooper.

He is a bright, energetic and passionate journalist whose intensity softens when conversation turns to his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilts. Cooper has invented a form of cable news that might be called "Angry Analysis."

It is a form of journalism that is high in entertainment and emotive power. He often has on sympathetic local officials who do not know where to turn, high officials such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal metaphorically shaking a defiant fist at the gods in Washington and at BP who won't make the sludge go away.

Angry Analysis makes a clear black-and-white division between the good guys and the bad guys; for the bad guys there is never an encouraging word. However, the program doesn't feature hard-digging investigative reporting.

Consequently, the viewer gets a distorted picture of reality, and when the full context is revealed, it leaves the public wondering what to believe. AC360 is better than most of the mindless blabbermouths of cable TV, but together they are wearing thin the bedrock of journalism, credibility.

To emphasize how honest, hard-digging reporting gives a closer version of the truth than "AA," lets examine the thunderbolts of the angry prophet Bobby Jindal and the reporting of just two reporters for The New York Times.

Now, you'd think that if you were the Louisiana governor, you'd gather in your office to look at your own oil-spill plan, get ideas from the staff and parish officials, run the ideas by the experts and push the most workable plan.

There would be an awkward gulp when the governor realized, as Times reporters found, that he had eliminated the $750,000 to fund the oil-spill office last year, there were blank pages in the plan, and for worst-case scenarios … "to be developed."

But surely the federal government can meet Jindal's request for 950 miles of protective booms. After all, that's only one-and-a-half times the total national stockpile. Apparently, the governor forgot the "check with the experts" step.

"You can ask for the moon and say you didn't get it, but I don't think that's going to add anything to the response capabilities," said Doug Lentsch, who headed response to the Exxon Valdez disaster and helped develop national pollution legislation. Lentsch said such hysterics retard effective action.

Yet, in early May, Jindal lost his cool and started cursing Washington where, to hear him tell it, bureaucratic bears are hibernating. He was still at it on the June 26 Times cover, arms outstretched; Moses parting the waters.

Finally, Jindal came up with a $30 million plan to dump 100,000 tons of rock in the Gulf to keep the oil away, but again he forgot to run it by the experts, and the Army Corps of Engineers nixed the project.

"There was very strong scientific backing for not doing this," said Denise Reed, a wetlands expert and director of the Pontchartrain Environmental Science Institute in New Orleans.

Scientists explained that narrowing the inlets with rock would put in danger the existing barrier islands, which would be breached during the region's frequent storms — possibly this hurricane season, with nightmarish effect.

Bobby Jindal's Kabuki dance on the front page of The Times and on cable "news" shows was entertaining and locally popular, but to get a truer picture of reality, nothing beats fair, accurate shoe-leather reporting.

H. Brandt Ayers is the publisher of The Star and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co.