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Environment Reporting tions,” said Time’s former environmental editor Charles Alexander in that issue [see his article on page 45]. Some contrarian journalism is on the rise. The Sacramento Bee’s Tom Knudson, winner of a 1992 Pulitzer for “The Sierra in Peril,” last year wrote a blistering series entitled “Environment Inc.,” which looked critically at the fundraising and scientific underpinnings of the environmental movement. Other writers are exploring how technology and corporations might improve environmental problems. As the beat matures, reporters and editors, sensitive that they not be considered stenographers for environmental groups, have changed their titles from “environmental writer” to “environment writer” or “natural resources writer.” They’ve peeled bumper stickers off their cars and in many cases tried to cover the environment beat as they would police, courts or politics— with skeptical questions for all sides. “If people walk away saying ‘Are they green or are they brown?’ that is a good day for us,” says Len Reed, science and environment editor at The Oregonian. “We can’t have a reporter walk into the office of a CEO of a timber company or the CEO of a nonprofit advocacy group and be automatically perceived as representing a persuasion. Half of environmental journalism is having the story, half is having credibility.” Frank Allen, former environment editor at The Wall Street Journal, says that communities, particularly in the changing West, cannot make thoughtful decisions about their futures without a long-term commitment from the media to explain difficult issues. A commitment from editors is key, he says. So is more training and encouragement for reporters. But Wall Street-driven bottom lines are not helping the craft. “Dozens of newspapers deserve praise and encouragement. But we have 1,500 daily newspapers in this country,” says Allen, now executive director of the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources [IJNR], based in Missoula, Montana. “From my perspective, not nearly enough of them work at this as often or as hard as they should. They have let their capacities atrophy. They have bought out or let go some of their most experienced and knowledgeable people who have reservoirs of historical perspective and historical knowledge on this beat. Mostly it was to save money.” Despite the challenges, cutbacks and pressures, many practitioners of environmental journalism remain inspired and plan to stick it out for the long haul. “It takes a lot of knowledge to cover these stories,” says Jane Kay, environment writer at the San Francisco Chronicle and a 23-year veteran of the beat. “Once you learn it, you want to use it. Once you learn about solvents and arsenic and spotted owls and Navy sonar you want to return to those stories. And these are fascinating stories,” she says. “You can be at a redwood sawmill one week and in the Channel Islands the next week and watching the release of a condor the next week, and getting paid for it. Who wouldn’t love this beat?” ■ Paul Rogers is the natural resources and environment writer at the San Jose Mercury News. Rogers, who has worked at the newspaper since 1989, also works as a Hewlett Teaching Fellow in environmental journalism at the University of California- Berkeley, and as a lecturer in the science communication program at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He was part of the Mercury News team that won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake and in 2002 was awarded the Sierra Club’s top national award for environmental journalism, the David R. Brower Award. progers@sjmercury.com The Environment Beat’s Rocky Terrain Editors often don’t see these stories as ‘traditional news,’ and reporters tread on sensitive ground inside the newsroom. By Philip Shabecoff The environment was very much a hot topic when I was reassigned to the Washington bureau of The New York Times in 1970, after spending most of the 1960’s abroad as a correspondent in Europe and Asia. Earth Day had been celebrated—if “celebrated” is the right word to describe the deep unease of the millions of demonstrators over the deterioration of their habitat—only a few months before. Insults to the environment such as a chemical-laden river bursting into flame, killer smogs, contaminated drinking water, beaches fouled by raw sewage, rusting drums of toxic liquids leaking into the countryside, and litter, litter everywhere, were regularly in the news. President Nixon had just created the Environmental Protection Agency by executive order and Congress, in an astonishing burst of legislative energy, was beginning to churn out a series of landmark laws to 34 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002
Environment Reporting safeguard the air, water, land and human health. I’d long had a strong if uninformed interest in open space and pollution issues. When I arrived in Washington I asked to be assigned to cover the environment. The bureau chief said, “No.” Gladwin Hill was already writing about the environment from the Times’ Los Angeles bureau, he pointed out. Besides, he said, the subject was not important enough to warrant the fulltime attention of a Washington reporter. Never mind that Washington was now the epicenter of the national and, indeed, global effort to protect the environment. In the early 1970’s, the environment was still not an established beat. Publishers and senior editors were not familiar with the subject and were uncomfortable with it. Only a few news organizations had assigned reporters to give much of their time to these issues. John Oakes, who later became editor of the Times’ editorial page, had started writing a column on environmental issues for the Times in the 1950’s—in the Sunday travel section, of all places! Only a handful of journalists were writing regularly on this topic, among them Robert Cahn of The Christian Science Monitor, Tom Harris of The Sacramento Bee, Casey Bukro of the Chicago Tribune, Paul MacClennan of The Buffalo News, and Ed Flattau, a syndicated columnist. Luther Carter addressed the issues in the journal Science and, in 1961, Gershon Fishbein had founded the Environmental Health Newsletter. I was assigned instead to cover labor and the national economy and then the White House during the last few months of Richard Nixon’s presidency and throughout Gerald Ford’s administration. When I finished that fascinating assignment, the bureau chief, a new one, asked me what I would like to do next. “Cover the environment,” I told him. Okay, he said, but that wouldn’t require all my time. Why don’t I also write about other domestic issues including labor, consumer affairs, and health policy at the same time? It was not until Ronald Reagan became President and turned the environment into a major political story by seeking to roll back environmental laws and regulations and turn public lands and resources over to commercial interests that I was finally given permission to devote myself exclusively to this coverage. Learning the Environment Beat I spent 14 years reporting on the environment for the Times, a period I found to be the richest and most rewarding of my 32 years with the paper. Being a foreign correspondent and covering the White House, especially during the endgame of the Watergate fiasco, had been exciting and a lot of fun. But nothing was as intellectually engaging as learning, reporting and writing about the broad panoply of subjects and issues that comprise the environmental beat. There was a lot to learn. If covered properly, the environment encompasses an astonishing range of subjects. I had to give myself crash courses in environmental science and environmental law and get to know the workings of the government departments and agencies that administered the laws. I had to become acquainted with the nongovernmental environmental groups and how they functioned and with the lobbying groups that spoke for business and industry in the often bitter and prolonged battles over environmental policy. Only after I plunged into the job did I begin to understand how much policy was intertwined with politics and economics and with ideology and broad social issues such as race and poverty. I knew virtually nothing about the history of environmentalism, and there was little in the literature to teach me—which was one of the reasons I undertook to write “A Fierce Green Fire,” a book on the history of American environmentalism. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, the environment gradually became recognized as a legitimate subject for media coverage, both at the Times and in the industry generally. By the end of the 1990’s, the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), a group created at the beginning of that decade to promote higher standards for and visibility of environmental reporting, had more than 1,000 members. For a time, at least, most major news organizations, including the television networks, had at least one full-time environmental reporter. Occasionally, as during the heat wave of 1988 when global warming emerged as a (forgive me) hot button issue, or during the Earth Summit on environment and development in Rio, environmental stories could dominate several news cycles. Experiencing the Beat Media managers were and, I think, still are ambivalent about environmental stories and their claim on the news hole. Unlike the assiduity with which every twist and turn of news about politics, economics, business, sports and the arts is given space or air in the media, environmental stories have to make a special claim of significance to be given consideration for inclusion in the report of many news outlets, then including the Times. Even when they do run, such stories are often treated negligently. When in 1979 I wrote my first story describing scientific findings about the imminence of global warming, the piece was held for several weeks and, when it finally did appear, it was on page 48 in the Saturday paper, about as deeply as a Times’ story can be buried. The prevailing response to environmental stories among some of my editors was “What, another story about the end of the world, Shabecoff? We carried a story about the end of the world a month ago.” In time I found, to my sorrow, that the misplaced suspicion some editors have of environmental stories hung over their views about environmental reporters as well. Toward the end of the 1980’s, I began to hear complaints about my coverage from editors, most of it from the national news editor, whose experience before her promotion to that job had chiefly been in business journalism. I was told I had grown too close to my sources in the environmental movement and that my Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 35
Page 1 and 2: NIEMAN REPORTS THE NIEMAN FOUNDATIO
Page 3 and 4: Vol. 56 No. 4 Winter 2002 NIEMAN RE
Page 5 and 6: Creating a New Web of Connections T
Page 7 and 8: Investigating What Happens to Refug
Page 9 and 10: INS Coverage ‘Freedom of the Pres
Page 11 and 12: The People’s Right to Know vs. Go
Page 13 and 14: INS Coverage An immigration attorne
Page 15 and 16: Why Reporters Should Want to Cover
Page 17 and 18: INS Coverage tion that lit up the p
Page 19 and 20: INS Coverage foreign-born populatio
Page 21 and 22: INS Coverage gone to school here, a
Page 23 and 24: INS Coverage Phoutone Chanthabouala
Page 25 and 26: INS Coverage Juan Belalcazar, a 23-
Page 27 and 28: INS Coverage be interviewed. (Permi
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Words & Reflections The Consequence
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Words & Reflections A War Correspon
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The Worthiness of Bollinger’s Cha
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Journalism Education require the Ph
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Journalism’s Road to Becoming a P
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Nieman Notes Nieman Notes Compiled
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