by Bud Ward
"Greens with press passes."
It's a term popularized by former science and environmental reporter Bob Engelmann while he was with the Scripps Howard News Service.
But it's more than a term. It's an image. An image in too many news rooms across the country, and one that self-respecting environmental journalists have tried hard to put behind them.
In the past, "environmental issues were subjected to far too little skepticism in the press," long-time environmental reporter Kevin Carmody recently quoted Wall Street Journal reporter Timothy Noah as saying. "Journalists were faddish and unthinking in their coverage of some stories."
That sentiment is shared among many of Noah's journalism peers and colleagues. But Noah, quoted in Carmody's "Environmental Journalism in an Age of Backlash" piece in the May-June 1995 Columbia Journalism Review, continued: "Now there is a faddish, unthinking knee-jerk reaction in the other direction. The truth is in neither extreme."
It is perhaps fitting, if regrettable, that environmental journalism--like their subject matter--works on the pendulum principle. As the public blows hot and cold on environmental issues, journalists (and in particular editors) do likewise.
It wasn't so long ago that serious journalists were talking about environment as "the story of the nineties," and environmental angles even interested foreign affairs and international trade reporters. One still hears that environmental issues will be the driving force in international affairs well into the next century.
Among environmental journalists, the term "backlash" gained currency--not in the context of efforts to scale back environmental and regulatory programs but rather in the context of their own colleagues' environmental coverage.
Former New York Times national correspondent Keith Schneider's March 1993 five-part front-page series of pieces challenging fundamental tenets of environmental protection was seen by some, and certainly was defended by Schneider himself, as merely the media doing their job--posing the skeptical questions, raising a dubious eyebrow, demanding more and more evidence, questioning authority, and doubting the conventional wisdom: all the things the best journalists make their reputations doing and doing well.
To many, however, Schneider's series and his subsequent reporting over the ensuing year or so suggested a reporter with a preconceived mission. Critics complained that his personal views were reflected in his reporting, that he focused on stories and anecdotes that illustrated an environmental regulatory program gone amok.
It was during that same period that a Washington Post science writer, Boyce Rensberger, also published some front-page pieces challenging what many had come to accept as revealed truth.
Rensberger's pieces dealt sequentially with the stratospheric ozone hole and with the greenhouse effect. His first piece, on the ozone hole, reported findings that the hole itself would cease getting worse, and in fact would enter a period of self-repair, around the turn of the century. To many, Rensberger's piece also appeared to minimize prevailing concerns.
Complaints about Rensberger's reporting, however, diminished when subsequent scientific findings confirmed the major elements of his original story.
They resumed when Rensberger appeared to minimize the potential significance of man-made global warming in a Post front-pager which cited, some felt without adequate identification, greenhouse scientists funded by coal and fossil-fuel interests.
Although Rensberger's reporting was commonly considered free of any doctrinaire approach, he was nevertheless linked with Schneider, and the two became the veritable Bobbsey twins of environmental "backlash journalism," perhaps more because of the clout of their newspapers as because of any community of interest. They appeared together in the fall of 1993 in a Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) backlash" panel as part of SEJ's annual conference at Duke University, presumably paired against two veteran reporters--one from The Times and one from the Boston Globe--often associated with the "green with press pass" category.
While the Times' Schneider and the Post's Rensberger involuntarily came to symbolize "backlash" journalism in the national news media, others found it a lucrative field of honoraria and royalties.
The late Warren Brookes of the Detroit News, whose staunchly conservative and anti-environmental column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate, gained a national reputation among free-market and libertarian groups with his broad attacks on environmental problems and the regulatory programs--misguided in his view--designed to attack them.
Brookes, whose views were aired on conservative editorial pages such as those of the Washington Times, Indianapolis News, and Detroit News, worked closely with Washington-based conservative think tanks, whose philosophy and ideas frequently found voice through his columns. After he died in December 1993, he was memorialized by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute with a Warren Brookes memorial journalism fellowship program.
After Brookes' death, a number of other writers moved into the niche. Ron Bailey, formerly of the television show "Technopolitics," and Michael Fumento, of Investors Business Daily, were recognized for their "backlash" efforts and rewarded for their free-market commitment as "Warren Brookes Journalism Fellows." Environmental skeptic and academic Alston Chase, also syndicated through Creators, now carries forward the Brookes tradition of environmental nay-sayer.
Most visible of all "backlash" commentators is ABC's 20/20 correspondent John Stossel, whose one-hour special, "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?" answered the question decidedly in the affirmative.
Stossel's credibility in questioning environmental issues, however, appeared compromised to many by his having routinely accepted five-figure honorarium speeches before such groups as the American Industrial Health Conference, a chemical industry group, the American Council on Capital Formation, and the Heartland Foundation. At an AIHC session in December 1994, Stossel called for elimination of the Food and Drug Administration.
Among more traditional environmental reporters, debate is intense on "backlash" journalism, but many agree that reporters for too long gave undue credence to public interest" sources while too quickly dismissing arguments from the other perspective. (Environmental journalists wouldn't be the first to become the captive of their sources, in this case, public-interest environmental groups.)
However important the so-called "backlash journalism" has been in shaping reporters' and editors' attitudes toward environmental coverage, even more profound has been the demonstrable fall-off in coverage of environmental issues among many of the nation's mainstream print and broadcast news outlets.
Returning recently from the October 1995 national conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts--a conference which attracted hundreds of accredited reporters and nearly 700 registrants overall--Dallas News environmental writer Randy Lee Loftis acknowledged that the overall mood was "a little bit gloomy based in part on the market and in part on the number of reporters who are under-employed."
Loftis, a member of the SEJ board of directors, saw an overall "dumbing down" of the mass media, not limited to environmental coverage. He lamented "a backing away from covering complex issues, not just environmental issues, but anything that is challenging intellectually."
Environmental stories, Loftis said, often must deal not only with complex technical considerations, but also with arcane political nuances.
"A science writer dealing with continental drift has to ferret out a lot of complex technical issues, but maybe not a whole bunch of opposing political perspectives," he says. As a result, environmental issues may be "among the first to suffer" when editors tend toward simpler and less demanding articles.
As for television, "local broadcast has fallen by the wayside in recent years on these issues," he said. "What passes for environmental coverage on local TV is nearly always recycling stories or something just sensational."
Is there a prescription for what ails mainstream environmental journalism? One antidote may involve moving away from the traditional notion of "balance" in favor of a greater commitment to accuracy.
Accuracy is a far more elusive goal in reporting on environmental issues, and environmental journalism may be particularly vulnerable to the simplistic notion that the reader has been "objectively" informed by quoting two glib sound bites from opposing camps.
Accuracy in environmental reporting--the kind in which the reporter actually knows the difference, for example, between trichloroethane and trichloroethylene, between "good" ozone and "bad" ozone, between sulfates and sulfites--may require precisely the kind of study and understanding that dollar-driven and short-staffed news rooms seem increasingly unwilling to support.
Even more challenging is the prescription of University of Maryland reporting and editing professor Carl Sessions Stepp in an April 1993 article in American Journalism Review. Stepp wrote, "More and more, journalists will be seen as information experts," suggesting that newspapers should offer increased commentary and context."
"While it would be foolish to turn every article into a personal opinion essay, it will probably become necessary to abandon the view that journalists are dispassionate automatons simply dispensing information and letting readers reach their own conclusions....What sense can it possibly make for journalists to research subjects with increasing thoroughness and expertise and then hold back their conclusion, depriving readers of what may be the most trustworthy, studied assessments available anywhere?
"This is as frightening a change as journalists are likely to encounter, and it will require better trained reporters and, especially, editors to manage the distinction between professional assessment and personal prejudice....More explanatory journalism and less raw data journalism can do as much as anything to bring audiences back to newspapers as a prime source of coping with an unnerving world."
Environmental journalism has barely achieved respectability in the news room. Only recently did a critical mass develop to initiate and sustain the 1,100-member Society of Environmental Journalists. SEJ has made notable strides, but even its members must appreciate the distance still to go before achieving its vision of "an informed society through excellence in environmental journalism."
For the time being, environmental reporters may have enough on their minds just holding onto their jobs, let alone keeping their house in order.
(Bud Ward, for 20 years an environmental reporter and writer in Washington, DC, publishes the monthly newsletter Environment Writer as part of his responsibilities as Executive Director of the National Safety Council's Environmental Health Center, in Washington, DC.)