Читать книгу American Energy - Walter A. Rosenbaum - Страница 12

The omnipresent national media powerfully influenced the public’s interpretation of the disaster and shaped profoundly much of the political repercussions. Once the national media had swiftly converged on the accident, they captured an enormous national audience for weeks while fashioning a narrative persuasively interpreting Deepwater’s significance and shaping a public verdict concerning the responsibility for the disaster.

The Pew Research Center called Deepwater “a different kind of disaster” and observed that the spill “was a slow-motion disaster that exceeded the usual media attention span, commanding substantial media coverage week after week. From April 20 through July 28, the Gulf spill overwhelmed every other story in the mainstream media.”⁷ And the public was remarkably attentive. During three months following the explosion, an average of more than 54 percent on a major national poll reported that they were watching news of the catastrophe “very closely.”⁸ Media coverage, deliberately or not, also left most Americans convinced that BP was largely responsible for the tragedy— entirely responsible, according to many polls at the time.⁹