CNN: Top Kill explained. By Bill Nye the science guy? Is that what you got, CNN???

I like Bill Nye just fine, he’s entertaining and provides himself a good living and the public a good service by making science easily comprehensible. He’s a serious man at heart, I’d wager. But really, really?,  is he the best that a major media outlet can do when it comes to explaining something as simple as buoyancy and density and how a “top kill” uses heavy mud to change the density of the column in that pipe from the oil zone deep in the Gulf to the  busted top so that it’s so heavy it doesn’t bubble out any more?

Here, courtesy of New York Magazine, is CNN‘s John King’s broadcast where he calls on Nye. It’s clear enough, no knock on Nye who gets into hysteresis and has some good show-and-tell props. But again – this huge network, struggling to keep up with the opinionating talkers on MSNBC and Fox by operating a more or less objective news shop,  has nobody on staff able to handle routine, if technical, reporting of this sort? How in blazes did that happen?

Oh yeah, I just remembered. Well that’s a lie, I wrote this because I remembered it first and then wrote the post. Either way – how wise does it look now, CNN suits, to have given the boot to the likes of Miles O’Brien and other reporters who didn’t run gibbering in baffled panic from a few technical and scientific concepts?

In the meantime, the biggest story lately in environmental disasters is the Gulf Spill (that is, biggest story one can nail down to a single place, mood, and comes with a specific perpetrator. The collapse of world fisheries, the warming of the world, the drought in N. Africa, the perma-defrosting Arctic, and others are bigger – just more diffuse and deniable). The focus now is on Top Kill. Maybe by Monday we’ll learn if it is working and we’ll  have some news to round up about it – and the ongoing devastation on shore and in the water column. I particularly want to look into the quality of reporting on these huge undersea plumes of oiled and dispersant-befouled water. Have a good weekend everybody.

– Charlie Petit