During the Bush Administration we were routinely subjected to issues of phony reporters and reporting. There was Jeff Gannon, Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus to name a few. And who could forget those phony video news releases designed to look like local television news segments?

Now it looks like BP is taking a page from the Bush years. Andrew Revkin writes on the New York Times' Dot Earth blog:

A Facebook friend, Kristin Aldred Cheek, pointed me to a pretty wild bit of faux journalism recently concocted by BP as part of its public relations efforts related to the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. On his blog, a BP “reporter,” Tom Seslar, describes a two-hour helicopter flight over the gulf with a team charting oil patches.

He somehow finds space in his post to describe the scope and vital importance of the oil industry and the beauty of the coastal marshes. He fits in a plug for the Louisiana Shrimp & Petroleum Festival scheduled for early September in Morgan City, La.,* and includes the festival's promotional line describing “the unique way in which these two seemingly different industries work hand-in-hand culturally and environmentally” — with no hint of the deep irony, of course.

But he doesn't include a single line describing the spreading gulf slicks that the flight is supposed to chart.