Mission Control

On May 19, more than 100,000 gallons of oil spilled into the Pacific Ocean and coated the Refugio State Beach shoreline in Santa Barbara County, Calif.  Lara Cooper, general assignment reporter and photographer for local community news website Noozhawk (noozhawk.com), was one of the first journalists on the scene that day. As she drove to the site, Cooper said from three miles away she could smell the crude oil. When she arrived to the beach, the entire bay was covered in black oil slick. “It was really bad,” Cooper said. “A catastrophe.” But according to the Santa Barbara reporter, the initial reports from Plains All American Pipeline, the Houston-based oil company responsible for the ruptured pipeline, minimized what had transpired at the scene. The Los Angeles Times reported the company had initially estimated about 21,000 gallons were spilled, but later revised the number to five times that amount. Officials even previously reported the line had been abandoned, Cooper wrote in an article published the day of the spill. When something as disastrous as an oil spill occurs in your backyard, it’s up to Cooper and other local journalists to ask the tough questions in order to get the correct information out to the community. But reporters would soon find out about a secret media briefing proposal that not only raised questions about how Plains and government officials wanted to handle the press, it would also expose the calculating moves happening behind the scenes. The Proposal In June, an official report was leaked to Santa Barbara Independent reporter Kelsey Brugger detailing how Unified Command—a group consisting of representatives from Plains, the U.S. Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency, California Fish and Wildlife and Santa Barbara County—had proposed a media strategy that would “target” specific reporters to spread the message of its cleanup progress. The proposal can be downloaded at bit.ly/1MWv4aT. “In recent days, there have been a couple of neutral to negative local news stories about perceived lack of accessibility to UC and in-field operations,” the proposal stated. “Additionally, we are beginning to detect significant concern from the community about response efforts and a lack of understanding about why and where operations are happening.” The proposal continued, “…we may leave the public with the perception that we are abandoning some areas and not completing operations. It is important to get ahead of these incorrect concerns and not leave tarballs or questions on oil fingerpainting as the main topics currently trending in media coverage.” Six reporters, including Brugger, Cooper, Los Angeles Times reporter Javier Panzar, Santa Barbara Independent photographer Paul Wellman, and television reporters John Palminteri and Juan Carlos Gonzalez, were targeted for their “neutral to positive” reporting. Each journalist was invited to a private press conference on June 10 at Refugio Beach, where they could meet and interview representatives one-on-one. Approved and signed-off by Unified Command, the proposal highlighted each reporter’s journalism background, social media handles, reporting style and linked to selected stories they had reported about on the oil spill, along with an accompanying photo of each reporter. The entire portfolio eerily resembled a most wanted list. Brugger said she was “surprised” when she read over the proposal. To her, the outlined details showed how Unified Command had handpicked journalists like herself to turnaround and write positive cleanup effort stories. Although Brugger said the report looked “sloppy” and “thrown together” (her phone number was printed incorrectly in the proposal), she admitted, “It was a little bit creepy.” “Nothing they printed was salacious,” she said. “But the bigger picture is they tried to create the news by holding a private press conference with handpicked journalists they invited. It’s bizarre.” Brugger wasn’t able to meet on the original date, but she met with the group on June 11. “The information they gave out was very limited. A lot of the questions the public and I were asking weren’t being answered, like how far have the tarballs traveled? Unified Command personnel would not answer many questions posed by journalists and the public, citing an ongoing federal investigation.” But the entire process can be completely frustrating for reporters who need answers in order to relay it to the public. Cooper attended the private meeting June 10 with officials, and like Brugger, she felt the answers she received were “tightly controlled” as though they were reciting scripted lines. The Noozhawk reporter was invited to the conference after receiving a phone call from a public information officer from the Joint Information Center. It wasn’t until Cooper read about the leaked media proposal in the Independent that she realized her invitation had come with manipulative intentions. After reading Brugger’s story about the proposal and going through the packet herself, Cooper realized it had been a “calculated” move. Before even sitting with her, Cooper said, “(The group) already had a chosen message.” Like Brugger, the proposal made her feel “uneasy.” “You can get all that information with a quick Google search, but someone certainly did their homework,” Cooper said. Afterward, she said she was contacted by a few county officials who were shocked to hear about the proposal. “They reached out and said how sorry it happened.” The Los Angeles Times declined to comment, but Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote about an incident with Santa Barbara County Supervisor Janet Wolf and her chief of staff. When they drove to the county’s emergency operations center to offer support after the spill, they were stopped at the gate by someone who worked for Plains. “I was appalled,” Wolf said in Lopez’s column. “…I said this is wholly inappropriate, to have our polluter telling me and anyone else that they can’t come into the building.” Wolf told Independent columnist Barney Brantingham that the county had pulled out of the Unified Command’s Joint Information Center and “called for the county to divorce itself of the tainted Unified Command group that (was) in charge of the spill cleanup.” She told Brantingham that she found the secret selection scheme “horrible” and “degrading to reporters.” Brantingham’s column “Big Oil, Big Brother” (bit.ly/1g0V9un) featured Wolf’s side of the story, and when I spoke with the writer, he said, “I was stunned and shocked that they thought they could manipulate the news. I wonder if this is how they operate all the time for favorable coverage.” And the fact that this proposal was leaked to his newspaper told him, “It was not meant for our eyes.” “Someone thought better to give it to Kelsey,” he said. “They knew she had a role to inform the public.” The Bigger Picture According to Brugger, when she asked the Joint Information Center about the report and how the journalists were selected, she was told “authorities chose reporters based on who requested the most information and then turned that material into news stories.” When I spoke with Alexia Retallack, Office Spill Prevention and Response spokesperson for the State Department Fish and Wildlife, she explained that several media outlets were looked at from newspapers, radio, and television. There were originally eight to nine slots open, but since Unified Command had very limited time to meet with reporters one-on-one, not everyone could participate. “We had one radio station and one Hispanic station tell us they weren’t interested,” she said. For the six reporters who made the final cut, Retallack said it wasn’t about them individually, but more about the specific topics and issues they covered. When I asked if having a media proposal targeting journalists was normal, Retallack said every oil spill and market was different, but she did admit it was a poor word choice to use “target” in the proposal. It wasn’t about targeting these reporters, she said, it was about engaging with them. “Providing the best access to the paper and station,” she explained. When asked about the talking points provided in the proposal, Retallack said they were to help officials be more prepared with responses instead of saying, “I don’t know” to reporters.  “It’s all about preparation,” she said. The private press conference was about a “conversation,” Retallack said, from there it was up to the reporters to keep digging and go further into their news reporting. Retallack said so far, journalists who were not invited to the private press conference in June have not questioned their procedure. And Noozhawk’s Cooper said if her organization had not been on the list, she would have been more concerned. I asked our Business of News columnist Tim Gallagher to shed some light on the situation. Gallagher is a former editor and publisher, who is now president of The 2020 Network, a communications firm specializing in media and community relations and crisis management. “I think (Plains’) PR company was dealing with a crisis and a client who was not viewed sympathetically by the community or media,” he said. “But I am not sure you should ever commit to a client that a reporter will be neutral or positive. You can commit that you will provide the journalist with information and your point of view, and then expect the reporter to be fair.” When “journalists live in a fish bowl, it is a price (they) pay,” Gallagher said. “I know some reporters who use social media very well. They tweet about what they are covering. They refer to their coverage and the coverage of other media outlets. They might engage in dialogue and answer questions from readers. That’s great. But your personal life and personal views must be considered public when you live out loud.” Refugio State Beach reopened to the public July 17, two months after the oil spill.  At that point, cleanup efforts were still ongoing, and the cost to clean up almost 100 miles of beaches had reached about $92 million, reported the Los Angeles Times. As the investigation continues, so does the story, but tactics must change. In his column, Lopez wrote, “A strategy to handpick reporters and try to control the news is unethical enough. But having Plains in on the deal makes it all the more imperative for the media to keep asking what they don't want us to know.” It’s no wonder there’s big mistrust between oil companies and the public when something as terrible as an oil spill occurs, especially when they learn oil executives are pulling the strings behind the curtain. No matter how friendly or resourceful officials may seem, reporters must stay vigilant in their duties to report the facts. Instead of being spoon-fed answers at private press conferences, they must investigate further into the truth.