Report: Barton’s BP apology took media heat off White House

Rep. Joe Barton’s (R-Texas) infamous June 17 apology to BP helped reduce coverage of the White House oil-spill response and made it tougher for administration critics to gain media traction, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“A close look at the coverage shows that after Barton’s attack, the narrative focusing on the Obama Administration’s performance declined substantially, never exceeding more than 13% of the overall Gulf coverage in any week from that point forward,” Pew reported in its analysis of oil-spill press coverage.

“Certainly other factors played a role in the diminishing attention given to the government. But it’s also likely the controversial apology made it more difficult for Obama’s political opponents to lay out the kind of concerted attack on his performance that would have gained more traction in the media,” Pew said.

Barton — the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee — apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward during a hearing on Capitol Hill, calling a $20 billion fund for oil-spill victims a “shakedown.” The apology, which Barton quickly retracted under pressure from GOP leaders, was a political gift to Democrats, giving President Obama and his party an opening to claim Republicans are cozy with “big oil.”

Overall, the press did a good job covering the oil spill, despite many unique challenges, Pew concluded.

“News organizations displayed real staying power as events continued to unfold. They spent considerable time reporting from the Gulf and humanizing the crisis. They largely avoided the temptation to turn the disaster into a full-blown political-finger-pointing story. And in many cases they used their websites’ interactive features to illuminate aspects of the story that would have been harder to digest in print or broadcast formats,” Pew found.

“In short, a news industry coping with depleted staffing, decreasing revenues and shrinking ambition was tested by the oil spill and seemed to pass,” Pew notes.

The story was tough to cover, Pew said, because it involved a U.K.-based company, the Obama administration response and the events unfolding on the ground in the Gulf Coast. The story was also often technical when it turned to issues like estimating the extent of the environmental and economic damage, Pew noted.

The event was also heavily covered, peaking in mid-June when the story consumed more than 40 percent of the aggregate media newshole, Pew concluded.

“The oil spill was by far the dominant story in the mainstream news media in the 100-day period after the explosion, accounting for 22% of the newshole — almost double the next biggest story. In the 14 full weeks included in this study, the disaster finished among the top three weekly stories 14 times. And it registered as the No. 1 story in nine of those weeks,” Pew finds.

Another tidbit:

“The Gulf saga was first and foremost a television story. It generated the most coverage in cable news (31% of the airtime studied), with CNN devoting considerably more attention (42% of its airtime) than cable rivals MSNBC and Fox News. The spill also accounted for 29% of the coverage on network news as the three big commercial broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — spent virtually the same amount of time on the story,” Pew found.