NY Times Propoganda Depicts Oil-Spill Containment Efforts as a Success

In its latest endorsement of corporate mania and reckless greed, the front page of yesterday's NY Times (2010, May 17) featured an "article" that blatantly depicts BP's efforts to contain the oil spill that resulted from its exploded rig in the Gulf of Mexico as a success. This interpretation of events follows the same rhetorical trope that shapes popular media discourse about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that are also successes no matter the loss of life, widespread destruction, and all of the many other things that obviously go wrong (like the failure to protect American lives on September 11, 2001, for example). The word "success" is featured in the title of the article and again on page A15 in the title of the article's continued section. The word "success" or close variations of it, e.g. "successful" appear seven times in the 23 paragraph article. But the word "failure" only appears twice and does not appear until the 19th paragraph--even though there wouldn't be anything to report in the first place were it not for the fact that everything about the operation has been a total, abject failure. And the first time an event related to containing the spill is described as a failure it is immediately re-interpreted as a "success" because of what the damage-control people figured out as a result. BP spokesman Tom Mueller is quoted in the article as saying that the oil spill itself and the time it's taken to mitigate its rate of flow into the ecosystem are "not a problem" and spins the environmental tragedy and BP's tortoise-esque urgency at stopping the fucking oil from filling the entire Gulf of Mexico as an educational opportunity: ". . . it's what I'd call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again." Funny how when these virtues are mentioned in support of investment in education and teachers salaries, they are ridiculed as a welfare-state appeal on behalf of people who don't want to be held accountable. Of course, if you're BP, Halliburton, or the U.S. military, you don't have to worry about being held accountable, because major media outlets like the NY Times will fuel the feedback loop whereby Americans tell themselves over and over that those organizations never fail, even when they fuck up colossally.