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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