Champion Interviewed

.
ABC’s Sam Champion On Drilling: “You Should Have To Prove To The American People That It’s Safe”

by Steve Krakauer | 4:18 pm, June 7th, 2010



ABC anchor Sam Champion was the first journalist in the Gulf region to report from the oil-filled water itself.

But he’s been in the region for weeks, now in Florida, for Good Morning America. Today we talked to Champion about the underwater report, if there have been any improvements in the past couple weeks (there hasn’t) and the BP PR machine.

You can hear the full BlogTalkRadio interview below, which took place this morning. It is part of our ongoing series, “Live From The Spill” – we’ll have more coming later this week.

Here are a couple key exchanges, with the full interview after:

(3:07) Mediaite: One of the really unique reports we’ve seen during all this coverage has been your underwater reporting with Philippe Cousteau in the actual oil-filled water in Louisiana. What was that like?

Champion: It was the hardest thing actually physically I’ve ever done. A couple weeks before we got together with Philippe and had done a manatee story, and when we were talking about these plumes and dispersed plumes of oil and people were saying they didn’t exist. And we believed that they did. We had reports of people who had come in from the gulf saying no no I’ve seen this its under the water its not on top of the water…We couldn’t get any answers. We had this conversation, and were like, ‘why don’t we find a group of commercial divers and do a Hazmat dive?’

(6:04) Mediaite: One of the things that people do in almost any situation is looking for someone to blame. Some key targets have been BP and the Obama administration. From what you’ve seen on the ground, do you think that these would be legitimate outlets for people to focus on?

Champion: It’s tough for me because I don’t know it’s my proper role to tell people who to blame. I think I just show the pictures and talk about the facts. If I step back from it and look at it, to me there’s only one direction to point to how and why this happened. If you or I said we were going to build a house on the beach somebody would say you can’t do that until you know the house is going to be safe, that people can live there that you’re not going to disturb anything. There are guidelines that tell you what you can and cannot do. To tell us, you and me, what we can’t do. And if we want to go around the guidelines there is an exhaustive process for us to prove that what we’re doing is okay. Well okay, why isn’t that the case here? I’m tired of hearing everyone say this is the first, or this is new, or this is an experiment. A crazy amount of money had been spent to drill in deep waters in the Gulf, and if that much money wasn’t spent to make sure there wouldn’t be a problem, or to prove that it was safe, then to me, that’s wrong. It’s very, very wrong.

Here’s the full interview (also, we introduced Champion to the @BPGlobalPR Twitter feed – which everyone should check out):