Journalists are among the most frequent violators (or victims, depending upon one's point of view) of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
A case in point is our article updating the controversy over Occidental Petroleum Corp.'s Samor
Unintended consequences
Here's where the unintended consequences come in. Soon after the article appeared, a friend forwarded an item swabbed from an internet newsletter, Drillbits & Tailings, by Project Underground, self-described as providing "support to communities fighting on the front lines of mining and oil operations worldwide."
The item read: "In an editorial, the Oil & Gas Journal, the industry's main weekly publication, compared the stand-off with the U'wa to the public relations disasters suffered by the industry over the Exxon Valdez and Shell's Brent spar incident."
It claimed our article was proof that the oil industry is "finally" taking the U'wa threats seriously and followed that with excerpts from the article. Trouble is, the article was not an editorial and the excerpts were highly selective-like those review blurbs for movie ads where, say, the reviewer's comment is quoted as "a comedyellipselaughellipseriot" and the reviewer actually wrote, "This poor excuse for a comedy is so devoid of even a single laugh that I thought the audience would riot." (Aren't ellipses magical?) Sigh.
Oxy's objections
Next came an e-mail letter from Oxy's point man on Colombia, Larry Meriage, who took issue with some aspects of the article. Again, while the points Larry raised did not relate to the intent of the article, nor did they dissuade us from its central thesis, he raised some good points and added some valuable information to the debate. That's why we adapted his letter as a Comment this week, intentionally positioning it (p. 29) near an article on Colombia that leads off our special report, Operating in High-Risk Areas (p. 32)
Punctuating these editorial decisions were two news stories last week: President Clinton asking the US Congress for $1.6 billion to help Colombia fight the drug war there; and a newswire report out of Bogota that Oxy was lining up a rig to drill Gibraltar 1 soon, further inflaming U'wa militance.
Here's hoping intentions and consequences line up a little better this time.