Though no state has been harder than Louisiana became of the gulf oil spill, how bad is the damage to the other coastal states?
Florida officials have on one hand emphasized that the Sunshine State is very much open for business, as they try their hardest to insure that tourism isn't being deleteriously affect by the spill. On the other hand, however, they cry out or complain that there has already been damage to the state and call for compensation by BP to address those whose livelihoods have been adversely curtailed.
That issue came to the fore Sunday when Mississippi Republican Governor Haley Barbour had a large megaphone to reiterate a complaint on CBS's Face the Nation that he's had for weeks - that, in his case, Mississippi is no Louisiana, and the media has hurt his state economically by reporting that the gigantic gulf spill has hit the entire gulf coast, when he says that Mississippi has not yet been that affected.
"The news coverage of this, of course, there's a lot of it. It's very sensational. It's the worst pictures that you can get. And it shows every hour on cable news and several times a day on the regular networks.
"The people of the United States have the impression the whole Gulf of Mexico is ankle-deep in oil, which is simply not the case," he said.
There is no oil on the shore of Mississippi yet, Barbour said, but the state has already lost the first third of its tourist season.
"There are a lot of people on the coast that make most of their living in three months," he said. "They have been clobbered because of the misperception that our whole coast is knee-deep in oil."
Barbour said the news media could have differentiated between the effects of the spill on Louisiana and on Mississippi, "but it chose not to."
