During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies—almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.

At what point are some in the media going to admit they Judy Millered the impact of the oil disaster?

The Washington Post: Scientists report undersea oil plume stretching 21 miles from BP spill site

Academic scientists are challenging the Obama administration’s assertion that most of BP’s oil is either gone or rapidly disappearing — citing, among other evidence, the discovery of an undersea “plume” of oil stretching more than 21 miles from the well site.

The New York Times: Gulf Oil Plume Is Not Breaking Down Fast, Research Says

“I expect the hydrocarbon imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable in the marine environment for the rest of my life,” Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University, told Congress in prepared testimony on Thursday. “The oil is not gone and is not going away anytime soon.”

The Wall Street Journal: Study Says Gulf Oil Spill Caused Manhattan-Size Plume

At the height of the Deepwater Horizon spill, oil escaping from the damaged well was trapped underwater in a drifting plume of hydrocarbons the size of Manhattan and helped turn the Gulf of Mexico into a test-tube of experimental petroleum chemistry, scientists who probed the submerged spill region said Thursday. …

By confirming the existence of this submerged plume, the new data also challenge government estimates that the vast majority of the 4.9 million barrels of spilled oil is already gone from the Gulf or being rapidly broken down by bacteria, several marine experts said.

Instead, some of that oil may persist deep underwater and in seafloor sediments—at levels thousands of times higher than those caused by the natural oil seeps that dot the Gulf sea floor—where it can elude conventional detection and clean-up efforts, scientists said.

Meanwhile, here’s ABC News’ front page at this moment. It contains news about Jennifer Aniston, the “Mystery of Beer Goggles Revealed,” the new girlfriend of cable star Jesse James, and something about blind waiters serving people in the dark … but not word one about the reappearing oil, much less the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico:

It was Michael Grunwald’s July 29 story in Time — “The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?” that set off a cascade of disingenous national media stories asking “Where is the oil?” And there’s nothing more disingenuous than the use of the question mark in that headline, which allows for all kinds of wiggle room and crawfishing when people sit down and consider the obvious: that an oil disaster several times worse than the Exxon Valdez spill does not just “vanish.” Grunwald may have been careful to make it clear that the long-term effects were unknowable, but that didn’t stop other media outlets from running with that horrible, misleading, crawfishing headline as the takeaway, and so we had things like this:

So today I’m wondering if this report by actual marine scientists — not BP officials, not BP-paid experts, and not cable-news blowhards — will get the same splashy treatment:

A report released today by the Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia concludes that up to 79 percent of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem.

The report, authored by five prominent marine scientists, strongly contradicts media reports that suggest that only 25 percent of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill remains.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” said Charles Hopkinson, director of Georgia Sea Grant and professor of marine sciences in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

Download the UGA scientists’ report here … and then keep an eye out to see if it gets the same sort of screaming headlines that Grunwald’s story did.

Remember all those faux-credulous national media reports last week claiming the oil in the Gulf of Mexico had somehow vanished or couldn’t be found? While it’s certainly true that many scientists say the ecological damage hasn’t been as bad as expected so far, and that the surface of the Gulf is indeed cleaner in many places (due to evaporation and more than 1.8 million gallons of Corexit dispersant carpet-bombed across the slicks), it does not mean all the oil itself has vanished. So let’s knock off the headlines and the TV captions like this one, OK?

Today’s New York Times quotes both The Times-Picayune and the Blog of New Orleans on the subject, saying “Recent reports that much of the oil seemed to have disappeared from the surface of the gulf prompted fierce reactions in the region.”

We may be fierce because of reports like this one from the Aug. 5 National Geographic online: “Much Gulf Oil Remains, Deeply Hidden and Under Beaches: New U.S. Gulf oil spill report called ‘ludicrous.’”

We may also be fierce because of this photo from Alaska’s Prince William Sound taken in February, where they have no trouble finding the oil, 20 years after the Valdez spill.

And we may be fierce because of photo sets like this one from photographer Julie Dermansky, who had no problem finding the oil that seems to elude so much of the national media (as well as Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen).

And we may be really fierce because the broad-brush reporting of the U.S. media leads, inevitably, to stories like this in the UK’s The First Post:

A “disaster that never materialised.” An “over-hyped catastrophe.”

Whatever, fellows; I’ll bet you the oil is still here in a few months when you’ve packed up and moved on, and instead of asking “Where is the oii?,” we’ll be asking “Where are the media?”

CNN will air Soledad O’Brien’s documentary New Orleans Rising at 7 p.m. Aug. 21. O’Brien is in New Orleans to attend a preview screening at 6:30 p.m. tonight at SUNO (in the gymnasium at 6400 Press Drive). It chronicles efforts to rebuild Pontchartrain Park, and it focuses on actor Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Treme), who assumed leadership of the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation (PPCDC).

O’Brien and CNN deserve credit for continuing to report on the rebuilding of New Orleans. But this show has both its merits and its awkward moments. Some comparisons with the BP disaster seem forced — perhaps motivated by an attempt to make the show seem more timely. But more odd is the treatment of race as an underlying issue. After questioning why neighborhood residents were left to their own devices to recover (could it be racism?), O’Brien gets an interview with former mayor Ray Nagin and asks him about the race issue, but she doesn’t ask him about his administration’s position or efforts regarding Pontchartrain Park. It seems like a grand omission.

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Reporter Jeffrey Kofman’s ABC News report from Buras, La., on July 26 asked “Where did all the crude go?” Agence France-Presse (AFP) followed on July 27, asking “Where is all the oil?” An Associated Press headline that day asked “Gulf Flow Has Stopped, But Where Is the Oil?” By July 29, Time’s Michael Grunwald went even further, penning a story headlined “The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?,” in which he wrote, “But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage.”

The media stampede ignored a few salient facts. Coastal parishes last week all reported oil on shore or close to shore, or both. On July 28, the National Resources Defense Council issued a report showing 2,000 beach closings, advisories and notices had been issued in the Gulf region so far this year — compared with 237 in all of 2009. Oil is also blowing through boom, landing along islands off the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts. More ominously, oil is billowing under the water’s surface in large patches — some stretching for miles and sinking rapidly, thanks to BP-applied dispersants. The controversial dispersants break oil apart and send it to the ocean’s floor or into plumes and currents, which can carry the oil thousands of miles from its source.

AFP reported “the real difficulty now is finding any oil to clean up.” National Incident Commander Thad Allen adds, “What we’re trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it.”

If the U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies can’t find it, perhaps they don’t know where to look.

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