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Environment Reporting
reporting focused too much on threats
to the environment. The Washington
bureau chief advised me that “New
York” felt I was writing too much about
how economic activity was harming
the environment and not enough about
how the cost of environmental regulation
was harming the economy. Funny,
when I covered the national economy,
nobody ever criticized me for not writing
about how economic activity was
harming the environment. On my previous
reporting assignments, I’d been
entrusted with some of the paper’s
most important and sensitive beats;
now my same approach to reporting
was questioned.
Leaving the Beat
I was soon taken off the environmental
beat and assigned to cover the IRS. I
quit the Times shortly thereafter (officially
I retired) to found and publish
Greenwire, an online daily digest of
environmental news. At the time, I
thought what I’d experienced as an
environmental reporter had been
unique. But at the first national SEJ
conference, several reporters assured
me it wasn’t; what happened to me had
also happened to them.
Why is environmental reporting so
troublesome to management? I still
don’t fully know. Part of the answer
might be that the subject is not “traditional
news” and media owners and
managers are uninformed about and
uncomfortable with it. Bill Kovach, who
had been a great Times Washington
bureau chief, told me that my problem
with New York was that my coverage
was “ahead of the curve.” I suspect,
too, that unhappiness among advertisers
to whom environmentalism is anathema
is communicated to media marketing
executives. Right-wing
ideologues, organizations and lobbyists
are also highly vocal in criticizing
environmental reporting—they certainly
were with mine.
Meanwhile, my immediate successor
as environmental reporter on the
Times duly began writing stories about
how some environmental threats were
exaggerated and about the alleged toll
environmental regulation was taking
on the economy. He did not last long,
however, and top management of the
paper’s newsroom soon changed. The
Times, in my opinion, is once again
doing a good job of covering the environment—one
of the few major news
organizations still doing so. ■
Philip Shabecoff covered the environment
from 1977 to 1991 for The New
York Times. He then founded
Greenwire, an online daily digest of
environmental news. He is the author
of three books on environmental
history and policy. A new edition
of his first book, “A Fierce Green
Fire,” a history of American environmentalism,
will be published by
Island Press in 2003.
shabecof@erols.com
The Beat Is a Tougher One Today
Reporting on the environment requires more and better training of those who do it.
By James Bruggers
Imagine a news beat in which you
report on religion one day and the
next you cover business and economics.
Later that week, you write a
science piece, then you do a story about
public policy and arcane government
regulations and politics. This is what
the environment beat is like today. On
some days, journalists who report on
environment issues wrestle with all of
these topics in one story. And when
they’re writing about global climate
change, they need to understand international
relations as well.
I’m not sure the environment beat
was ever an easy one to cover. But it’s
certainly not simple to handle now
during a time when issues aren’t cast in
predictable contrasts. Gone are the days
when I wrote mostly about fanciful
ideas like whether the state of Montana
should bring buffalo back big time to
its open ranges—something Ted
Turner ended up doing on his own.
That debate wasn’t very complicated to
understand or convey. Gone, too, are
the days when anyone could tell a lake
was polluted by skimming oil and other
chemicals from its surface. Now the
threats are often invisible and exist in
tiny quantities.
Journalists who cover the environment
are sometimes known in their
newsrooms as “the parts per million”
folks. And if the truth be known, they
are more likely to deal with even smaller
traces of chemicals—in parts per billion
or trillion or even quadrillion—as
they report on potential environmental
effects on health.
Changes in Environment
Reporting
Stories about such subtle but significant
threats come at a time when political
and economic interests are spinning
the environment beat like never
before. Reporters need to work harder
than ever to find the mainstream science
and economics experts who can
center a story and give it proper context.
Sometimes science lands in the
cross hairs of organizations with competing
interests pushing one agenda
or another, with journalists caught in
the crossfire.
There is too much for any individual
reporter to know. Yet good environmental
coverage isn’t merely reporting
what one scientist says and then find-
36 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002