New York Times minimizes Gulf oil spill

With the calamity resulting from the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon growing worse by the day, the New York Times, the leading publication of US liberalism and self-styled “newspaper of record,” declares in a Tuesday “news analysis” that the spill is really not so serious after all. The column, “Gulf Oil Spill Is Bad, but How Bad?” is a thoroughly dishonest piece whose clear aim is to chloroform mounting public anger against BP and the Obama administration.

BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, according to Broder and Zeller, “could flow for years and still not begin to approach the 36 billion gallons of oil spilled by retreating Iraqi forces when they left Kuwait in 1991” (emphasis added). This statistic is an out-and-out fabrication based on claims made during the first Gulf War that Iraqi soldiers—who US missiles killed by the thousands as they retreated from Kuwait—had first sabotaged Kuwaiti oil wells.

Questioned by the World Socialist Web Site, Broder said the statistic is located on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) web site. A search of the site reveals a 1991 report from the National Oceanic Service claiming that the Iraqi military had dumped 900,000,000 barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf. Both the story and the statistic have since been discredited as Broder, who refused further comment, is no doubt aware. According to a 1993 study, commissioned by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at UNESCO and several Persian Gulf nations, about 330 million gallons spilled, resulting in “few unequivocal oil pollution effects attributable solely to the 1991 oil spills.” Later estimates put the figure between 40 million and 63 million gallons, about 1 percent of the Times’ claim.

After minimizing the spill, the Times concludes on an incongruous note, arguing that the Gulf of Mexico is already polluted—so really, why worry about a few million more gallons of oil.

“The gulf is not a pristine environment and has survived both chronic and acute pollution problems before,” Broder and Zeller write. “Thousands of gallons of oil flow into the gulf from natural undersea well seeps every day, engineers say, and the scores of refineries and chemical plants that line the shore from Mexico to Mississippi pour untold volumes of pollutants into the water.” By the same logic, one might argue that because people produce carbon dioxide when they breathe, there is no point in worrying about atmospheric pollution!

The newspaper’s first aim is to defend the Obama administration, whose indifference to the explosion and spill has generated widespread anger—and many comparisons to the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Behind this is a more fundamental concern. The BP oil spill is bringing millions of people face to face with the essence of capitalism—the subordination of everything, including the very survival of the planet—to the destructive profit drive of the corporate and financial elite. The New York Times, a long-serving organ of this elite, seeks to forestall this dawning awareness.