Newspapers manage to get everything right and wrong in the same stories. Today’s front-page example from The Paper of Record comes under the headline: Inspector Finds Broad Failures in Oil Program

The Interior Department’s program to collect billions of dollars annually from oil companies that drill on federal lands is plagued by… ethical lapses and fears of retaliation against whistle blowers. Four auditors at the agency said that senior administration officials had blocked recovery of money from oil companies. [...] The special auditor’s report offered a sharp description of failures at the Minerals Management Service, the agency within the Interior Department responsible for collecting about 10 billion a year in royalties on oil and gas.

The right part is that we’re being robbed again (of billions!) by the oil and gas companies, which just don’t make enough money.

The wrong part has to do with the word “failure.” There are no “failures” in the system if senior administration is blocking recovery of the money, if whistle blowers are being intimidated, if the oil companies are allowed to do what they have done in the past and aim to keep doing— make billions off the tax payers and pollute our precious federal lands in the process. In sum everything is stacked against us collecting that money. It would be a failure if somehow the oil and gas companies were actually made to pay: it would be a failure of their army of lobbyists, a failure of their relationships with “senior administration officials,” a failure of the power of shit loads of cash, a failure of the ability of administration appointees to intimidate career bureaucrats, etc etc.

A true “failure,” one that would ensure the oil and gas companies pay the money, would be worthy of a Hollywood movie, where one spunky woman or stubborn man stands up against it all and despite the absurd odds brings the corruption to light and sees the process through until money was transferred from the big bank accounts to the government coffers. You’d be sitting in your seat in the theater saying Only in fucking Hollywood. Yet that exact story might well be unfolding! That’s the exciting “failure” the New York Times is reporting today, even if its writers and editors got it a little backwards.

Tags: federal lands, interior department, minerals management service, oil