BUSINESS — BP CALL CENTERS ARE JUST A ‘DIVERSION’: Having caused the greatest environmental disaster in American history, BP is now scrambling to defend its public image by running expensive TV ads, buying space on Google search results, and hiring former Bush and Cheney aides as public relations officials. While BP has boasted of its call centers in an attempt to demonstrate that it’s responsibly taking care of the oil spill and listening to public complaints, this effort’s credibility is now seriously questioned. One of BP’s contracted phone operators just came forward to KHOU in Houston, revealing how she and the other 100 operators at her site are merely PR props. Although they are supposed to be collecting and passing along ideas for clean-up and requests for spill-related aid, she says BP is not interested in doing anything with the information the operators receive. “We take all your information and then we have nothing to give them, nothing to give them,” she says. The calls are “non-stop,” but the contracted operators are just “a diversion to stop [calls] from really getting to the corporate office, to the big people.” Some operators “don’t bother” taking notes during their calls. The anonymous tipster laments how “it’s so frustrating when these people live right there and nothing is being done to help them.” BP officials acknowledge that this call center has received over 200,000 phone messages, yet they “can’t say just what percentage of calls is returned.” The Center for American Progress’ (CAP) Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy and the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson have argued in a recent report that “[f]ederal agencies, not BP, should handle spill response hotlines for volunteers, technology ideas, affected wildlife, and others. Full call records need to be logged with incident reports and technology ideas presented publicly on dynamic websites.”