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BP's preparations to try to plug the seabed leak that is poisoning the Gulf of Mexico made the crude oil leak the Story of the Day yet again. That makes eleven straight weekdays on which it was been the most heavily covered single story on the network nightly newscasts. ABC and NBC both led their newscasts from Louisiana. CBS featured the results of its own in-house opinion poll, conducted with The New York Times, before switching to the Gulf disaster.

ABC's Ryan Owens walked us through the so-called Top Kill procedure, under which BP would force slurry into the flow of oil to slow it sufficiently to set concrete in order to seal it. Owens noted that BP's executives are "chronically optimistic." Their best case scenario, he reported, would halt the gusher by Wednesday night. And the worst case? "Shooting all of that mud and concrete could further damage the blowout preventer and that could cause an even larger leak." NBC's Anne Thompson had the same worry: "The leak could become worse and this disaster could stretch long into the summer."

NBC anchor Brian Williams invited John Hofmeister into the studio. Hofmeister is a former president of Shell Oil. He reassured us that BP is making every effort to seal the leak: "I have every confidence that the best minds in the world are working on this." Hofmeister's criticism focused on the failure to clean the oil that had already leaked. He reminded us of an even larger spill in the Arabian Gulf in the early '90s that was handled by a fleet of supertankers, using their massive pumps to take on board a mixture of oil and water--"a million barrels per copy"--so that the mixture could be unloaded, filtered, separated, cleaned and then returned to the Gulf. He reckoned up to five supertankers could save the wetlands.

Andrew Tyndall 5/27/10 5:19:18 pm

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