Scary sells more newspapers than does reassurance, but in welcome defiance of that dictum the San Jose Mercury News let readers know, in a recent piece by its environmental writer Paul Rogers, that the giant-headline-dead-birds-ohmigod story of November on a gashed freighter’s oil spill near the Bay Bridge is over. The local media’s five-alarm reaction, as The Tracker has tiresomely mentioned a few times, seemed hardly merited. If one uses up the biggest typeface for fairly ordinary news, how will readers know when something truly important comes along?

Rogers doesn’t pooh-pooh the accident’s seriousness or usefulness as a warning to public agencies to be ready for worse. But he also calmly tells readers that no oil can be found on the bottom of the bay but still doing insidious damage. None is floating on the water. Nobody has seen an oiled bird lately. Only two brief stretches of beach need further cleaning. Ecosystem losses — up to 20,000 birds in some estimates — were serious, not catastrophic. One enviro group rep tells him “The wildlife impacts were moderate compared to what could have been.” Nice job.

-CP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.