Originally posted here.

BP, with a huge assist from the popular Beltway-insider website Politico, stirred up the muddy waters of the Deepwater Horizon spill aftermath this week when it published a corporate-love-letter-disguised-as-news entitled, "No, BP Didn't Ruin the Gulf." Anyone expecting humility from a firm whose court-certified wanton negligence killed 11 people and seriously polluted America's most precious natural resource clearly hasn't followed the story lately.

The story hit the Internet Wednesday morning and caused an immediate stir -- but mostly on the topic of journalism ethics. For one thing, the story initially had the trappings of a news article, without the large label of "Opinion" that such an op-ed is expected to carry (that changed after the outcry); readers got to the bottom of the piece before learning it was written by BP's in-house spin-doctor-in-chief, corporate spokesman Geoff Morrell. What's more, enterprising reporters noted that BP has been a long-time major advertiser with Politico, raising eyebrows whether the favorable treatment was an ethically dubious quid-pro-quo.

All of that troubled me, to be sure. Anyone who cares about open and fair public discourse should be worried about the state of modern journalism. But the ethics controversy wasn't what troubled me the most. What bothered me about the piece -- and should bother all readers -- is that the claims by Morrell are sometimes dubious, sometimes misleading, and much of the time just an old-fashioned lie. Those of us who've followed the story for the last four years can feel pretty confident in saying this:

Yes, BP actually did ruin the Gulf.

Let's look at some of the key points in Morrell's argument:

-- Remarkably, Morrell peddles a bogus storyline about the 2010 oil spill -- that in his words, "most of the environmental impact was of short duration and in a limited geographic area." In reality,the widely respected National Wildlife Federation reported just this year that devastating impacts on marine life, on tourism, and on animals as well as humans, remain. I'd like to see Morrell sell his "short duration" line to the Gulf's sea turtles -- who are stranded, in distress, at five times the rate before the 2010 disaster, or to dolphins still struggling with disease and miscarriages four years after the spill.