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rulemylife -> BP Magazine Discovers Bright Side to Oil Spill (6/24/2010 3:08:50 PM)
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Talk about a public relations spin.
BP Magazine Discovers Bright Side to Oil Spill
Retaining an upbeat tone, in an email to staff last Friday, Hayward again pledged to “get [BP] through the immediate
crisis as a stronger and safer company.”
That was after a week that saw a congressional grilling, credit downgrades to just above junk status, a pledge to pay $20 billion into a cleanup and compensation fund and a freeze in dividend payouts for the rest of 2010.
But in Planet BP — a BP online, in-house magazine — a “BP reporter” dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint an even rosier picture of the disaster. “There is no reason to hate BP,” one local seafood entrepreneur is quoted as saying, as the region relies on the oil industry for work.
Indeed, the April 20 spill on the Deepwater Horizon is being reinvented in Planet BP as a strike of luck.
“Much of the region’s [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams,” another report says.
Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that “BP has always been a very great partner of ours here…We have always valued the business that BP sent us.”
Fortunately the articles — on which BP declined to comment — don’t go as far as praising that new treat: seasonal shrimps in (crude) oil.
Another little gem from the article for those that think the $20 billion fund was going to bankrupt BP:
The company’s average production of 2.5 million barrels a day in liquids, would make it third in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries if it were a government. Its sales and other operating revenues stood at $239.3 billion in 2009 — larger that the gross domestic product of Nigeria. And BP only has 80,000 mouths to feed.
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