On March 29th, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), also referred to as the ‘congressional watchdog’, released a much-anticipated report called Crude Oil:Uncertainty about future oil supply makes it important to develop a strategy for addressing a peak and decline in oil production.
This report was initiated by a request, just over a year ago, from Congressman Roscoe Bartlet, a very vocal proponent of the peak oil theory in the US Congress.
The significance of this report cannot be under-stated. For the first time in North America, an independent and nonpartisan agency that works for Congress and the American people has gone on record stating that peak oil is a real and pressing concern that the government should be preparing for.
On the day the report was released, Alan Zibel, a journalist with the Associated Press, wrote a short piece titled “Report: Gov’t needs plan for oil peak” His piece was published on AP’s financial news wire, a news service that is subscribed to by thousands of media companies globally. A number of those companies picked up the story and included it in their own publications, including MSN, Houston Chronicle, Forbes and Business Week, to name but a few.
On March 30th, I noticed that both CBC and CP (Canadian Press, which is Canada’s own version of the Associated Press), were not running stories about the GAO report. I emailed both organizations asking why they were missing out on one of the biggest stories of the year. CBC still has yet to respond. On the other hand, CP got back to me on April 4th, when John Valorzi, replied, writing,
“Dan, thanks for your note on the GAO report. CP did not have this story because it was not covered by the Associated Press, the service we would rely on for coverage of developments in Congress. I have mentioned this to the AP business desk and asked that these types of stories that impact continental energy policy should be covered and relayed to us for distribution in Canada. Rgds.”
His response didn’t make sense to me because AP did cover the story. So I emailed David Wilkison, the Chief Bureau of the Washington (DC) desk for AP asking why I could not find Alan Zibel’s article on the AP web site and why CP thinks that AP did not cover this issue. His response:
“Dan, The story was not removed, it [was] just moved on [to] a select financial wire of the AP, which CP apparently does not see.”
Isn’t that interesting. Canadians missed out on some extremely important news because our national news agency, the CP, apparently does not have access to one of AP’s select news wires. What other news are we as a country missing out on because of this access issue? And why does so much of Canada’s media depend on CP? Where are the journalists chasing down stories that matter to Canadians? Are they sitting at desks waiting to see what CP puts out on the wire?
As a anecdote to this story about access, for months now, the general public could access CP’s Premium Member web site by using the following URL:
www.cp.org/premium/ONLINE/member/
Last week, I guess CP finally realized this over-sight and finally turned on the access controls, requiring a user to login with their account credentials. Is this another indication of how CP conducts its business, and how many other over-sights exist within Canada’s news agency?
If you were someone like myself wondering why there was a media black-out in Canada concerning this GAO report, then I encourage you to take five minutes and write to your media outlets explaining how disappointed you are with their lack of coverage. As you’ve read here, you might just be surprised with the response you receive!
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