Steve Pearlstein of The Washington Post writes a column praising the spill response by BP that echoes many of my thoughts from yesterday's post. It's one of the first laws of blog writing that when that happens, you link it.
But to their credit, rather than respond in ways you would expect them to, BP and its executives have generally responded in ways you'd want them to.
From the start, the company has declared that it is ultimately responsible for what happened and responsible for making things right, waiving any liability limits it might be entitled to under federal law.
That's exactly my last word on the subject. BP has a lot to answer for in regards to its long-term safety record (they blew up a plant in Texas in 2005 among other problems) and clearly they got ahead of themselves in drilling in water so deep there was no way to respond if something like this happened - but since the spill they've been spot on.
Pearlstein compares them to Tylenol, whose iconic aggressive response to a tampering episode is now a PR/management case study but that's not an apt comparison. Tylenol was a victim of sabotage and ultimately the responsibility for that act is with the saboteur. BP, through arguably lax oversight of its Transocean subcontractor, was done in by its own lack of preparation and its culpability is much higher.
That said, any argument that BP didn't try as hard as possible to fix the problem it caused is just fulminating. A lot of the coverage reads like the activists and journalists are upset that the company isn't dissembling, lying, covering up or trying to evade responsibility and that's making reporting on it less fun for them.
Kudos to Pearlstein for calling B.S. on that nonsense.
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