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Environment Reporting
• It incorporates the best aspects of
traditional journalism—diligent research,
precise language, and fair
reporting.
• It strives to educate people in a balanced
way about the nature and
importance of sustainable development
or the effort to achieve both
economic development and a sound
environment.
• It supports dialogue between people
in an effort to find solutions.
“Journalists, in the tradition of the
fourth estate, view themselves as in the
audience, not the movie,” Frankel says.
“But we need to move beyond that
now. We all need to be part of the
solution, journalists included, and that
calls for us to examine the extent to
which our current professional practices
correspond with how we want the
world to be.”
I agree with a lot of what Frankel
says. It also echoes the direction urged
by proponents of public or civic journalism.
If journalists follow conventional
news standards, it’s easy to justify
giving enormous coverage to
scandals, celebrities and sensational
crimes. These are deemed newsworthy
because they involve conflict and controversy
with prominent individuals.
But this overemphasis, along with the
American media’s traditional heavy focus
on local events, has squeezed out
of news columns many vitally important
global environmental problems.
This issue was examined at the Society
of Environmental Journalists’ national
conference this fall during a session
entitled “Blind spots: Unearthing
the taboos of environmental reporting.”
Panelists agreed that environmental
reporters often do a good job of
reporting about environmental symptoms,
such as air and water pollution.
But relatively few journalists analyze
the underlying forces that might be
causing these problems, such as population
growth and consumerism.
Environment Stories That
Journalists Don’t Report
“Consumerism is a story journalists
have difficulty in reporting about,” says
Ellen Ruppel Shell, codirector of the
Knight Center for Science and Medical
Journalism at Boston University. “It’s
vitally important but it turns editors
off.” Americans consume 40 percent of
the world’s gasoline and more paper,
steel, aluminum, energy, water and
meat than any other society on the
planet. Recent scientific estimates indicate
that if each of the planet’s six
billion inhabitants consumed at the
level of the average American—four
additional planets would be needed.
Similarly, many journalists are reluctant
to write about population issues.
One reason for this might be
because many Americans equate population
control with the intensely polarized
issues of abortion in the United
States or the one-child policy in China.
Another might be because most American
news media write mostly about
local issues and that population is seen
as an international topic. Former U.S.
Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder
of Earth Day in 1970, has observed that
it is also extremely difficult to write
about some aspects of the population
debate, such as immigration. “If you
raise these issues, you are described as
a racist,” he said.
Many important global environmental
problems, such as growing water
shortages, are made worse because of
the increase in world population. For
example, international water experts
estimate that by 2025 about one-third
of the world’s population will be living
in regions that have water shortages.
Because there is a finite amount of
fresh water available on the planet as
the world’s population climbs, the
stresses caused by water shortages are
expected to increase. Similarly, most
of the world’s ocean fisheries are already
being fished to capacity or are in
a state of decline. And, based upon
current population and deforestation
trends, the number of people living in
countries with critically low levels of
forest cover are expected to double to
three billion by 2025.
With all of these worrisome projections,
one might think that journalists
would be increasing their reporting
about ways to stave off such environmental
disasters. Unfortunately, this is
not the case. A survey by Michigan State
University found that reporting about
sustainable development is miniscule.
This issue ranked 16th out of 24 issues
surveyed in the amount of coverage
American environmental journalists
were devoting to it.
Practicing a New Kind of
Environmental Journalism
What kind of journalism is needed to
meet the global environmental challenges
of the 21st century? This question
has been debated at journalism
conferences held in recent years at
forums in the United States, France,
Italy, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere.
A new kind of reporting, known as
sustainable journalism, is needed.
Some of the components include:
• Increased access to environmental
information by citizens and members
of the news media through the
expansion of open records laws and
freedom of information acts.
• Expanded coverage of international
environmental issues, such as global
climate change. This coverage
should provide evidence to readers,
viewers and listeners of links among
environmental, economic and social
issues.
• New global institutions to make
multinational corporations, which
own many of the world’s newspapers,
magazines and broadcast stations,
more accountable about their
own environmental track records.
• Increased coverage of promising solutions
to complex environmental
problems.
Many experiments are underway to
create new organizations and institutions
to deal with these international
environmental problems. For example,
the Center for a New American Dream
(www.newdream.org) is a nonprofit
organization that is attempting to show
Americans that our nation’s obsession
with consumption is creating enormous
stress in people’s lives and damaging
the environment. Another example is
the Earth Charter Initiative
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 39