Media Helping BP 'Whitewash' Damage

Mac McClelland is a little tired of all the stories in the mainstream media about how the oil from the BP spill is pretty much gone. (Here's one that set him off.) He texts reporter friends and quickly turns up stories of "gobs of oil" on beaches untouched by cleanup crews. "It's BP's job to whitewash this story and make it easier to indulge the desire to forget about the scope of the devastation," he writes at Mother Jones. "Not the media's."

It's a matter of looking beneath the surface, literally. "I can't even count the number of correspondents down here who've pointed out that digging a finger under the surface of supposedly clean sand turns up crude, or the number of cleanup workers who've said cleanup efforts are strictly cosmetic, or that no matter what they do the contamination just keeps bubbling up." (More Gulf oil spill stories.)