BP Sinks Adverse Posts On Media and Google Search

http://bit.ly/7XwAG

There has been a lot of rumors of late that BP has been managing the media especially in the US by pumping in millions of dollars of advertisements in lieu of soft coverage of its activities. This had been in the past done by Financial services companies and banks in a large scale after the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis, especially when public resistance was building up during the release of $1 trillion TARP funds to the Big Banks.It was repeated during the passage of the health bill not so long ago. BP just took the scale of media manipulation a shade further.



It hired dozens of free-lance reporters to report on the disaster and give a different version of the story of the oil spill, the marine life destruction and the bird and wild life damage. They were simply told to report the positives of the salvage operations and not the negatives of the disaster. These stories including interviews were lavishly produced and were fed into the media, as news. After initial resistance they were slowly accepted because the cash hungry print media was also being given hugely profitable advertisements issued by BP that it was in no position to refuse. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News was reportedly roped in as the principle media voice that went pro-BP even as other media houses played progressively as moderates on the BP stories.

The digital teams of BP then started embedding key words such as Oil Spill , Deep water Horizon, Gulf Of Mexico, into these news stories and releasing them and also started buying up the keywords from Google for these terms. Soon the Google page search for these terms started to look different and yielded completely different results than what it had shown a month ago. Today there is only one news of BP share prices going up when you type "Oil Spill" from the big and established media.

None of the established large media houses of U.S. has a story in the front page of Google search if you search for the words "Oil Spill." Instead feeds of old stories from Chicago Tribune, msnbc etc. appear in the first page search along with BP' corporate feeds on the Gulf crisis.
What happened to the hundreds of posts of New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times,Business Week, Bloomberg, Reuters and AP that were all hogging the Google first page limelight against these key words only a few weeks before? The truth behind this murky manipulations are probably only known to a handful of BP employees besides Google.