Big Oil Spill, Tiny Coverage

The North Slope of Alaska is suffering from a terrible oil spill that has gotten hardly any media attention. The Seattle Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its Exxon Valdez coverage, has run only a couple of wire stories. Granted conditions are harsh, but one also has the sense that oil spills are among the many incremental environmental holes in the dike that get covered like a single little leak when their combined effect is a fire hose.

The easiest way to find out about the spill, in fact, is to do a blog search on Google. MichaelMoore.com, MySpace, The drama of containing the spill in minus 44 degree weather would make a great blog-by-blog account, in fact. Although it would probably require the blogger to get out of his/her pajamas.

Why is this oil spill particularly newsworthy, you ask? Because, in one of those nightmarish coincidences that seem to be piling onto the Bush administration as Nature's reminder that you don't mess with God, the Senate is trying once again to sneak through an amendment to start drilling in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge. Now what's that about how there'd be no risk of a spill from an ANWR pipeline? To say nothing of the "global suicide bomb" that continued reliance on oil means for our planet's, our children's and their children's future.

NoCrony.com has the awful truth.

— Paul Andrews, GreenForGood

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