"Everything You Know Is Wrong"

As the Gulf oil spill crisis winds down, or at least sinks slowly beneath the waves of media attention, a recent Aol News article may shed light, not only on the media's coverage of that made-for-TV event—towering plumes of smoke! salty downhome politicians getting bleeped!—but on the media's coverage of many, if not most—and, I'm guessing, maybe all—events.

Not that I'm going to bash the media—much. No, Erasmus' "In Praise of Folly" has me thinking I've been a bit hard on the talking heads and summer interns who explain the great big world to us. The old Dutchman has me half-convinced that we owe a lot to folly, and you'll find plenty of it in the media, that unofficial monument to human nature that does for modern man what myth and legend did for the ancients. Except that when the ancient Greeks heard Homer, I'll bet they knew they were getting a heapin' helping of allegory along with their historical facts and ratcheted down their credulity accordingly. I wonder if we're that hip.

And not that I look to Aol News for my information. The only reason I saw the article is because my HP laptop sends me to an Aol page once I'm on the 'net, a mild embarrassment I've never gotten around to correcting, easy as that is to do. Maybe Aol reminds me pleasantly of the mindless fluff that greeted me every time my old Dell laptop sent me to Yahoo's news page—now there was a goldmine of wrong-headed real estate articles that almost wrote their own sarcastic responses.

Skeptic that I am, the title of the Aol News article, "Oil Spill Experts: Everything You Know Is Wrong", demanded my attention, probably because years of muddled real estate coverage have made me receptive to the idea that the 6:00 News is a great source of misinformation on just about anything you'd care to be misinformed about, up to, including, and even exceeding, oil spills. And after weeks of watching earnest reporters recount the latest instance of alleged BP malfeasance and government befuddlement with as much objectivity as a Bible Belt preacher critiquing Satan, and watching the media turn its zillion-candlepower spotlight on local and state politicians who just might have their own agendas and just might sense the media's ability to turn a small-time pol into a big-time legend, it crossed my mind that I wasn't getting much more from this than the usual circus thrills.

Not that I own BP stock, at least not directly, nor do I have any libertarian ideas about the government having its "heel on the neck of BP". On the contrary: BP's CEO gave us a great example of how not to handle a career-ending crisis. And like seemingly everyone connected with BP's clean-up efforts, I grew up convenient to, if not directly on, the Gulf Coast, and if it's Nature's Wonderland now, it was even more Nature's Wonderland forty years ago before beachfront development did more damage than almost any oil spill could. So I don't feel particularly compromised by the fact that the rebuttal to the media's overheated coverage comes from three oil spill experts currently employed by BP. Because who would know more about oil spills than "a field supervisor with over 40 years experience in controlled burning, skimming and other types of mechanical cleanup", or "a U.K.-based consultant...considered a leading authority on oil spill dispersants", or a "coastal geologist with 40 years of (sic) experience working at the site of oil spills", even if they are drawing BP paychecks these days?

Because I'm willing to believe that, like real estate's complexities, the only people able to explain the complexities of oil spills are people who have worked and are working in the bowels of industry, insiders who, because they are industry insiders, automatically have less credibility with the public than outsiders like buff reporters covering their first oil spill and local pols appeasing panicky constituents with knee-jerk solutions (speaking of the Home Valuation Code of Conduct). No, friends, if the real estate coverage has taught me anything, it isn't that industry dollars necessarily corrupt, but that the dollars-driven need to spin a good yarn on a tight deadline, while appearing authoritative with not enough facts and even less understanding, corrupts the coverage absolutely.

I won't repeat the ten oil spill truths, hammered into us by daily coverage, that these industry experts dispute as myths and half-truths, because like 99 percent of us, I don't know who's right. What I do know is that there are at least two sides to any complicated story, and that, like real estate, the Gulf oil spill is a very complicated story, and that, like real estate, the complicated parts tend to get overlooked or left out of the coverage.

Besides, I just like the idea that everything we know is wrong. Because so often that's right.