James Drogan

There are many arguments on both sides why blogs and their ilk will, on the one hand, trump traditional journalism and, on the other hand, why this wil not be so.

An example that makes the case in favor of journalism that has caught my eye is The Gulf War: Were There any Heroes in the BP Well Disaster from The New Yorker.

From the abstract

ABSTRACT: A REPORTER AT LARGE about the response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has become conventional wisdom that the BP-funded response to the spill was a chaotic and mismanaged affair, driven by corporate avarice, lacking in urgency, and at times willfully negligent of the problem’s scope—the idea being that any organization that had caused such a catastrophe, and that was so clearly unprepared for it, could not in good faith clean up the scene of the disaster. The evidence for this is much like the imagery of heavy oiling: vivid and convincing upon first consideration, but also fragmentary, anecdotal. At the peak of the cleanup effort, forty-seven thousand people were fighting the oil, a community equivalent in size to Annapolis, or the workforce of G.M. In just half a year, the response expended nearly sixty million man-hours, roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building. The logistical demands on the effort, which spanned the entire Gulf coast—a region of varied geography and political culture—were immense. President Obama was not exaggerating when he announced in June, “This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country.” Discusses the evolution of contingency planning for oil spills, dating back to the 1967 Torrey Canyon spill off the coast of England. Tells about the roles assumed by the Coast Guard, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other government bodies, including local responses that ran parallel to the federal effort. Describes the work overseen by the Houma Incident Command Post and the difficulties, early in the spill, in determining how much oil was leaking from the wellhead and what its chemistry was. Tells about the debate among the responders over the use of booms, berms and dispersants to fight the spill. Also discusses the way that public opinion and press coverage influenced decisions made in the response effort. Tells about the actions of Billy Nungesser, Roger Laferriere; Admiral Thad Allen, E.P.A. administrator, Lisa Jackson, President Obama, Governor Bobby Jindal, and other officials during the spill response. A team of federal scientists had estimated that the total amount of oil that came from the well was 4.9 million barrels. Writer accompanies NOAA scientists on board a ship looking for oil plumes beneath the surface of the Gulf. Research in the Gulf has in many ways been encouraging. At the shoreline, pockets of oil will certainly linger. Although certain species may be at severe risk from the remaining oil, many others, such as sea turtles, do not seem to be under great threat, and the marsh as a whole does not appear to be ecologically devastated. All told, the spill killed fifty-six hundred birds, a dismaying number, but a small fraction of the quarter million that died in the Exxon Valdez spill. Oysters have suffered gravely, though this appears to be from the change in salinity caused by allowing the Mississippi to flow more forcefully into the Gulf. Luck certainly played a role in sparing large portions of the coast—a turn in the weather could have made the impact much worse—but a strategy based on dispersing the oil offshore appears to have helped prevent a great deal of crude from hitting land.

Khatchadourian provides a comprehensive and thoughtful view that, it seems to me, is impossible to produce via blogs, and similar near-horizon and consequently shallow-thinking sources. The pace of change in the system of the word has, admittedly, shortened the SIDAL cycle and made it increasingly difficult to be as thoughtful as one might like.

Decision windows becomes increasingly smaller and action in the face of growing uncertainty must be taken. Nevertheless, from time to time thoughtfulness and thoroughness ought to reign in order that we might better learn how to improve our condition.