News Cycle Turns in BP’s Favor

BP has received one of the biggest maulings in corporate history over the past three months as it struggled to contain the oil gushing from its well in the Gulf of Mexico. Newspapers, TV anchors, senators and even the U.S. President lined up to red kick the company’s butt and vilify its boss, Tony Hayward.

Now, just a couple of days after Hayward threw in the towel and resigned for the good of his company, the news cycle appears to have turned in BP’s favor.

Just a month ago it would have been borderline heresy to suggest that BP wasn’t entirely culpable for the disaster that triggered the oil leak; or to consider whether the spill wasn’t in fact the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history; or to suggest that the brave souls who worked aboard the doomed rig or rushed to its aid may have made things worse. But that is what is happening now.

In the past seven days, some media outlets have acknowledged that–shock–perhaps it isn’t quite as bad as the headlines suggested in the heat of the moment.

We have seen that since the well was capped less than two weeks ago, most of the oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico have vanished; we have learned that workers for Transocean, which owned the doomed drilling rig, disabled a critical alarm system before the blast; scientists studying the Gulf have said that warnings of an ecological calamity are overblown; and the Coast Guard has admitted that a it may have been the poorly managed response to red the rig fire, rather than the explosion itself, that caused the Deepwater Horizon to sink so quickly and foul the Gulf with oil.