By this point, President Bush’s announcement that he wants the oil shale development moratorium repealed, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off-shore drilling opened up for oil and gas drilling should be well known. But is it well known for the correct reasons? Is the media focused on the true aspects of this issue or are they caught up once again in ridiculous tiff reporting?
Allow me to provide a short answer to the second question: the media has reported on the “he-said, she-said” side of the issue more than the details of it. No one should be surprised. After all, the AP seems to be more worried about how much quoting of one of their articles by blogs constitutes fair-use, even though it’s not in their purview to decide such things. Perhaps if they spent more time on actually reporting, bloggers wouldn’t have to quote the one or two salient facts they actually managed to write down and then do the hard work of providing the context the corporate media decided wasn’t sexy enough to include in the first place.
A longer answer to the questions raised above can be found below the fold.