BP's Internal Communications Becomes Theatre of the Absurd

The following was reported by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. Just when we thought that Tony Hayward's yachting trip was the height of absurdity, BP's internal PR people go off on a tangent that can only be dubbed "what the hell were they thinking...or smoking?"
_____________________________________________________________________________________

In-house corporate magazines are supposed to make the company look good, but The Wall Street Journal is asking whether Planet BP, the oil company's organ, is smoking something:

[I]n Planet BP — a BP online, in-house magazine — a "BP reporter" dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint an even rosier picture of the disaster. "There is no reason to hate BP," one local seafood entrepreneur is quoted as saying, as the region relies on the oil industry for work.

Indeed, the April 20 spill on the Deepwater Horizon is being reinvented in Planet BP as a strike of luck.

"Much of the region's [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams," another report says. Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that "BP has always been a very great partner of ours here…We have always valued the business that BP sent us."

_______________________________________________________________________________

We know that BP has to try to maintain the internal morale of the company's employees, but this is beyond absurdity. One has to wonder whether BP has manufactured its own reality and cannot quite live in the real world that they have thrust us all into with their destructiveness.