When should “fire” + “oil” = news?

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A small fire on a petroleum platform owned by Mariner Energy Inc. has been put out with a water hose and a hand-held fire extinguisher.

Thursday’s fire was the second reported in a week aboard a Mariner platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

Patrick Cassidy, spokesman for Houston-based Mariner, said the fire occurred while a maintenance crew was using a sawing device. He said the crew extinguished the fire and returned to work. There were no injuries.

Cassidy said the platform, 109 miles south of Lafayette, has been out of production since about 2006.

On Sept. 2, a fire raged on another Mariner platform off the Louisiana coast. No one was injured in that fire, and the cause remains under investigation.

A year ago, would this kind of incident — what sounds like a tiny fire — been noticed? My guess is it’s unlikely.

It reminds me how we — the media that covers the energy business — reacted to any refinery related items in the year or so after the BP Texas City refinery explosion. Small “upsets” of a unit that normally were only noted by the trade publications were showing up in everyone’s coverage.

But by earlier this year a refinery blaze in Pasadena that had the police scanner in the newsroom buzzing for a few hours ended up as just a small brief the next day. A new reporter was surprised the big hubbub one day was nothing the next, but there were no fatalities and the impact seemed minor.

There are usually more than 100 fires every year in the offshore Gulf of Mexico, most of them small, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy. The agency reported 133 fires or explosions in the region in 2009. Some 130 of those were deemed “incidental,” each accounting for, at most, $25,000 in damages; three were classified as “minor,” causing damages of between $25,000 and $1 million.

US Govt: Flash Fire Aboard GOM Oil Platform
http://rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=98636

These reports are newsworthy because it is necessary to explain to fools that THE EMPEROR’S DECREE of shutting down oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is wise and proper.

It was proven decades ago that the majority of the sheeple will believe anything the American media tells them. The rest who do not believe are racists, bigots, Islamaphobics, birthers and other extremists.

Obama does have a birth certificate so shut up.

When should “fire” + “oil” = news?

When does news become news and not info-tainment to garner ratings? It's capitalism at work, but it still is the best system since it is market driven.

. . . with the caveat that, since
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
there is actually very limited competition among the various elements of the Associated Press. No more than there is, off the playing field, between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Both are in the business of promoting interest in the games they play, hiring umpires, and splitting the take from TV rights and such.
Members of news services are homogenized by the need to make those services valuable - which means promoting the credence given to news service reports. And that means promoting the fatuous conceit that "all journalists are objective" - when in fact none of them are. Since belief in one's own objectivity is the essence of subjectivity, claims of objectivity coupled with attacks on the objectivity of people who actually make a serious effort toward the discipline of objectivity (which requires that one first declare one's own interest as it may bear on the topic at hand) mark the journalist as heavily biased.

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