BP Analysis

Looking from the outside, as soon as you enter the website, there are a lot of promising titles. There are many different pages and other websites offered with an abundance amount of information even covering each species affected and also efforts for the past five years. So my initial response after reading for about fifteen minutes into the “Environmental Assessment,” is that each section (coral, birds, sea turtles, marine mammals) only had positive or good things to say about each and every single one. If there weren’t any positives, then the small description underneath would look a little something like the picture shown above.

All in all the PR practitioners or whoever put together how they were going to communicate their efforts did a spectacular job of keeping the message positive, yet is that a good thing? Most Americans know the bottom line details of the infamous oil spill that happened five years ago. Everyone knows that it is one of the worst natural man-made disasters we’ve experienced in our generation. I believe the communication efforts would have been more effective if they would have compared recent environmental and economical efforts with how far they have come and actually explained the drastic negative effect it had on the environment with where they stand now.

The reoccurring theme seemed to be that if BP didn’t have any good news about the subject they would work their way around the issue with a lot of fluffy facts that don’t mean much and sneaking in somewhere that the tests were inconclusive or still underway. Many of the experts that already worked with BP plus additional members that were hired throughout the process concluded that the natural recovery was the most effective process for minimizing any further harm in the remaining areas, and places already contaminated.

Determining whether BP is telling the truth doesn’t exactly cover the issue. The problem is that although they are being very truthful, they are being very vague and one sided. Not all the information is being processed in the studies and/or they are not being held up on the website.