Coverage Turns, Cautiously, to Spill Impact

And on the 106th day — after all the top kills and top hats and junk shots — the runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico finally seemed close to being tamed. Or was it?

News organizations are grappling with the same questions that the rest of the country is, after spending months watching oil gush into the water: Is the spill really over? And how damaging will it ultimately be to the gulf’s environment and economy?

It could be “the beginning of the end,” Katie Couric told viewers Tuesday on the “CBS Evening News.” The same phrase, with an extra “perhaps” attached to it, was used over on “NBC Nightly News.” But Diane Sawyer did away with the caveats on ABC.

“Final fix,” she declared Tuesday on “World News Tonight.” “Tonight the permanent seal of the oil spill is under way.”

Newsrooms are grappling with the same questions that the rest of the country is, after spending months watching oil gush into the water: Is the oil spill really over? And how damaging will it ultimately be to the gulf’s environment and economy?

The conundrum for television, print and online journalists alike has been that no one wanted to declare “Mission Accomplished” on the gushing oil portion of the calamity prematurely. But no one wanted to be the last to report that the leak had been plugged.

Assuming the current cement plug holds, any number of dates could qualify as the end of the spill. No significant oil has leaked since the well was tightly capped in mid-July, officials said — an event “NBC Nightly News” also said “could be the beginning of the end.”

This week’s “static kill,” an effort to plug the well with mud and then cement, seems to have worked. But the final stake through the heart — the relief well being drilled to make sure the well is dead — is not expected until later this month.

Then there is the once-bitten, twice-shy phenomenon, some news executives said, citing all the false starts and overly optimistic predictions of the past three months — the initial claim that there did not appear to be a significant oil leak, the vastly underestimated early guesses of how much oil was pouring into the gulf, the overly rosy assessments of past efforts to stanch the flow.

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