Polls indicate that more than half of Americans now believe that a prohibition on drilling for oil off the nation’s coasts is at least partly responsible for high fuel prices. The fact that this assumption is totally false is a testament to both the persistence of Republican efforts to use collective angst over the burdensome price of gas as a political wedge issue and the media’s failure to adequately inform the public of the truth.
A new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research suggests that rather than being a critical voice in its coverage of the energy debate the media has served as little more than an echo chamber for the McCain camp’s highly exaggerated claims about the benefits of offshore drilling.
Much to the benefit of drilling proponents, the mass media appears to have fallen lockstep into the Republican frame of the drilling issue, choosing to report on the debate itself instead of the rationale behind it. And so in its coverage of the drilling spectacle the press has missed the most vital component of the story – the fact that drilling would do little if anything to improve the energy situation of the United States.
Even the Administration’s own numbers show this to be the case. According the a 2007 assessment by the Energy Information Administration: “The projections in the OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030,” after which…. “any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.”
Miraculously the GOP has somehow managed to make a non-issue – one that will make absolutely no difference in the price of gas -- a decisive factor in the dialog of the 2008 presidential campaign.
It’s a task they could not have pulled off without press complicity.
To be fair, the CEPR study only looked at the broadcast media, but a cursory examination of the print stories on an upcoming congressional vote on drilling show the papers aren’t doing much better.
As for the CEPR study, an analysis of 267 broadcasts between June 16 and August 9 found only one – a single broadcast – mentioned the EIA data.
"There really isn't any excuse for the media to ignore the official data on this issue," said CEPR co-director and co-author of the paper, Mark Weisbrot. "It's like reporting on the economy and ignoring the official data on GDP growth, unemployment, or inflation. No wonder the public is confused."
Yet s a result of this oversight not only has a large portion of the public been “confused,” but the Democrats have been forced respond and join in the illusion, which only lends it more credence.
Recent public opinion polls show 69 percent of respondents favored expanded drilling, and 51 percent said that they believed that "federal laws that prohibit increased drilling for oil offshore or in wilderness areas" were a "major cause of the recent increase in gasoline prices."
I’m not arguing against a dialog on offshore drilling, I’m simply saying that the decision to open the OCS to expanded petroleum exploration should be made based on fact, not fiction.
