I spent years working offshore in the oil patch. Any truly thorough explanation of the possible causes and potential solutions to the current spill could easily fill out a four-hour PBS documentary, so I completely expected the extreme oversimplification of the media's explanations—there's just no other way to convey such a complex operation in a short time. What I didn't expect is how horrifically imprecise they are concerning absolutely critical details of the kickback and explosion in general, and of the cause of and response to the spill. Imagine a reporter tying to relate a story about a computer with a dead hard drive. Now imagine the reporter speculating that your monitor caused the disk to crash, or suggesting that installing a second hard drive will make the first one work again. And worse are the call-in shows, with people asking if painting the computer a new color might help, or demanding to know why a hard drive was being used to begin with when it was known all along that it might fail. That's about how accurate—and useful—the reporting looks to be so far. Rant over; I gotta say that this Al Jazeera reporter provides a better explanation than any similar summary I've seen from American media.
