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Not only was this the 20th straight weekday on which the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster was Story of the Day; it was the fourth straight weekday on which this single story occupied more than half of the three-network newshole (51%--29 min out of 58) That follows totals of 36 min, 31 and 41 for the final three days of last week. CBS and ABC led with the public relations pounding suffered by BP. NBC started with a sensurround show-&-tell of how terrible the congealed crude is along the coastline--that after a sneak peak of Today's q-&-a with Barack Obama, in which Matt Lauer managed to persuade the President to use the undignified phrase "asses to kick."

CBS' Mark Strassmann introduced us to Robert Dudley, "BP point man in this clean-up," as he inspected the beach at Grand Isle. "Incredibly Bob Dudley had never been this close to Louisiana's oily disaster." His response: "Emotional--I have a very emotional reaction to it." ABC's David Muir monitored BP's posts on Twitter, quoting the corporation's claim that "more than 2,600 vessels are now involved" and offering the correction that "only 115 of those boats are actually skimmers." Muir crouched down on the Grand Isle shore and gazed southwards: "Look off on the horizon. If you scan it, there is not a skimmer in sight."

NBC's Anne Thompson turned her attention to the seabed gusher itself. Following last month's unsuccessful attempt to plug the wellhead with the so-called Top Kill, a containment cap is now siphoning off 11K barrels of crude each day. No one knows what percentage of the overall flow that represents. "There still is no good number," noted Thompson. Yet she quoted Dr Ira Leifer, one of the marine scientists advising the government. Leifer claimed that if he had known how heavy the flow was earlier, he would never have signed off on the Top Kill attempt, which he now believes made matters worse.

Andrew Tyndall 6/11/10 7:08:39 pm

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