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Environment Reporting
Covering the Environment From Rio to
Johannesburg and Beyond
A Brazilian journalist describes his frustration with the beat.
By Marcelo Leite
Within 10 years, the United Nations
(U.N.) sponsored two
earth conferences, in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992 and this year in
Johannesburg. Brazilian media coverage
of each was strikingly different.
In 1992, Folha de São
Paulo—one of the nation’s
leading newspapers—assigned
a team of at least 10
journalists (not including
photographers) to report on
the Rio conference. Each day
a minimum of two pages were
filled with news about environmental
issues, ranging
from stories outlining the details
of U.N. paperwork and
multilateral negotiating process
to coverage of
Greenpeace demonstrations
and shaman happenings at
Flamengo Beach some 20
miles away. Competing news
outlets based in Rio, such as
Jornal do Brasil, printed a
daily six-page special section
under an “Ecology” banner.
Ten years later, Folha sent
only three journalists (two
reporters, one photographer)
to South Africa to produce
copy for a mere threequarters
of a page each day,
about 60 percent less coverage
than 10 years before. Had
Brazilian President Fernando Henrique
Cardoso not been going, only one reporter
would have covered the entire
conference.
There is, however, for me a similarity
about both experiences: Though
the sources were very different, I
emerged from each conference with a
sense of deep frustration because of
my belief that the highly threatened
global environment needs more attention
and remedies in the form of concrete
actions by all governments. As a
journalist who covers environmental
issues and has therefore witnessed the
growing scientific consensus about the
Environmental coverage in Folha de São Paulo.
poor health of the planet, I don’t think
that this belief prevents me from doing
my job, since I regard “artificially balanced”
coverage as often promoting
anti-environmental positions.
The 1992 Rio Conference
For four years, I’d been preparing to
cover the 1992 Rio conference. Back in
1988, the Amazon rain forest had become
a story of international interest
after it was learned that about 10 percent
of the jungle had already been cut,
an area comparable in size to France
and roughly five-sixths the size of Texas.
And, paradoxically, I and most
other Brazilian journalists
learned of this issue through
reading alarming stories and
editorials about the destruction
of our country’s rain forest in
the foreign press. This awareness
led to my first two trips to
the Amazon. As I learned about
the complexities of the rain forest
ecosystem, one of my guides
was the U.S.-born ecologist
Philip Fearnside at INPA—
Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas
da Amazônia, in Manaus. After
going there, I plunged into a
long period of reading and research
about the rain forest during
a year and a half sabbatical in
Germany, on a fellowship from
the Krupp Foundation. Of
course, while I was still trying to
understand more about what
was happening, the Germans
wanted only to hear firsthand
accounts about the Amazon disaster
from a Brazilian science
journalist.
By the end of 1990, I was back
in Brazil and focused on the rain
forest and related global issues, such as
climate change and pressures poverty
places on environmental resources. My
frustration surfaced when on the eve of
the Rio Conference I was assigned to
coordinate the team instead of being
able to do the reporting for which I’d
been preparing. Too often this is what
happens in Brazil. When a journalist’s
reporting on a beat rises above aver-
80 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002