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Environment Reporting
acute and therefore obvious in the everyday
experience of the public. By
that time, science can already tell us,
the damage will be irreversible.
Giving Environment News
Prominence
Let me pick on The New York Times for
a minute because I’m a subscriber and
spend more time with that newspaper
than with any other media product. It
intelligently covers every major environmental
story and runs many strong
pro-environment editorials. My files
are full of environmental articles
clipped from the Times. But the coverage
has little prominence in the paper.
There is no environment section, and
the stories are scattered all over. They
rarely sport big headlines. The paper
recently ran an excellent story on the
illegal destruction of forests in Indonesia,
but how many people stopped to
read it, buried as it was in the middle of
the international section? Recent exceptions
to the low profile were a superb
series on water shortages called
“Running Dry,” which included several
front-page articles and the Science
Times’ comprehensive walk-up to the
U.N. environmental summit in
Johannesburg, South Africa. The Times
should do more of this.
The Times and other media giants
have many dedicated environmental
reporters, but these writers don’t have
the institutional power to give stories
the prominence they deserve. Environment
will be covered in a big way only
when news organizations’ top decision-makers
present coverage of these
issues and policies in ways that force
readers to pay attention, whether they
want to or not.
This happened at Time in late1988.
I was the magazine’s business editor
and pretty much in the dark about
environmental problems, even though
I had been a high-school science
teacher. Henry Muller, the managing
editor, called me into his office and
told me I was becoming science and
environment editor. Here was the
kicker: For the first issue of 1989, instead
of Time’s usual Man or Woman of
the Year, there would be a Planet of the
Year issue containing a raft of stories
about all the environmental problems
endangering the earth.
After that package of stories appeared—and
garnered a great deal of
attention—Muller didn’t let up. During
the next few years, we did many
environmental cover stories—the burning
Amazon, ozone depletion, besieged
tigers, spotted owls vs. loggers, ivory
smuggling, the Rio Earth Summit. I got
a lot of credit for this coverage, but it
was really Muller egging me on, often
supplying the ideas himself.
After Muller became editorial director
of Time Inc. in 1993 and left Time
magazine, his successors showed much
less interest in the environment. Cover
stories started to dry up, even if the
issues weren’t going away. That was
partly my fault because I asked to become
an international editor to broaden
my horizons. Soon I was spending more
time on Iraq than on the environment.
Things picked up again when Jim
Kelly became managing editor in 2001.
He and his wife had adopted a child,
and he told me that being a father had
given him a new perspective on the
importance of environmental issues.
Kelly soon devoted a 15-page cover
package to global warming, a courageous
move since he knew the story
wouldn’t sell particularly well on the
newsstands. But even now, environmental
coverage in Time is not as frequent
and prominent as it should be.
During the past five years, the magazine
has done three special environment
reports (48 to 64 pages each),
including one in August, published just
before the Johannesburg summit. But
this issue was done, in part, because
the business side found advertisers that
wanted to be associated with an environmental
message. When that special
support goes, environmental coverage
will fight for limited space with the new
crop of one-name newsmakers—
Osama, Saddam—and business leaders
whose greed is grist for headlines.
Moving Coverage Beyond
Partisan Sniping
Unfortunately, in this country, the environment
has become a partisan, ideological
issue pitting environmentalists
against a Republican administration. It
was not always that way. The first great
conservationist President, Theodore
Roosevelt, was a Republican. And under
President Richard Nixon, Congress
rose above partisanship and passed
our most important environmental
laws, including the Clean Air Act and
the Endangered Species Act.
Now, environmentalists are considered
liberals and attacking them is part
of the conservative mantra. Conservative
pundits dismiss concerns like global
warming in a knee-jerk fashion without
exhibiting any knowledge of the
issues. Listening to what these pundits
say about climate change makes no
more sense than asking them whether
gene therapy will cure cancer. They are
ideologues, not experts. Nevertheless,
their opinions have an impact on the
kind of coverage this topic receives.
Since the environment has become a
partisan issue, some editors and news
directors feel constrained to cover it in
a “fair and balanced” manner, even if
the weight of scientific evidence tilts
heavily toward the environmentalists’
side.
One of journalism’s darkest hours
recently was the undeserved attention
given to Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistics
professor whose book, “The
Skeptical Environmentalist,” dismisses
most environmental concerns as overblown.
Even The New York Times
sowed confusion in its readers’ minds
by giving Lomborg a largely uncritical
review. But if you read Lomborg’s 352-
page book thoroughly, as I did, you’ll
see that his main point is that the human
race is still growing and prospering.
Yes, that’s exactly right—growing
and prospering at the expense of other
species and the environment. But using
up resources and despoiling our
environment will eventually backfire
on humanity. Lomborg doesn’t even
begin to prove that we can stay on this
unsustainable path of unbridled consumerism
for another century.
There are legitimate debates for journalists
to explore about how we can
best tackle environmental problems.
But no longer should there be any
question that the problems are real.
46 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002