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Reporting on Environmentalists: No Objectivity Here
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19981 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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8 / 1992 |
2,046 Words |
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Tim Graham
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research
Center, a press-watch institute based in Alexandria, Virginia. |
When it comes to covering the environment, perhaps more than any other issue, the media feels it easiest to abandon its promise of objectivity. Reporters and editors have declared that there aren't two acceptable sides: You're either for the planet, or against. At a 1990 Utne Reader conference, Charles Alexander, science editor of Time, summarily declared: "On the matter of the planet earth, we do support its survival."
Alexander theorized: "It would be undesirable and probably impossible to write perfectly balanced articles . . . We don't have to keep our conclusions out of our writing. We probably couldn't if we tried . . . A lot of our stories adopt points of view . . . Is this improper for a news magazine? I say no. After all, what is the mission of a newsmagazine or a newspaper? Merely to report events and what other people say about those events? Are we simply stenography services? Of course not." Alexander even suggested Time's readers wouldn't be able to figure out the news without reporter-inserted opinion: "Our readers depend on us to bring some expertise to our reporting, and to provide analysis and interpretation. If we don't, we will merely leave our readers confused."
At the same conference, Dianne Dumanoski, an environmental reporter for the Boston Globe, fondly recalled retired Globe editor Thomas Winship, who "would stop by my desk and say 'What's that Watt guy up to now?' I'd sort of launch into a very long involved answer about Watt's latest foolishness . . . and then he'd say 'Okay, give him hell, give him hell.'" But she complained about the lack of reader outrage over her most radical pieces, including an Earth Day story on how the "global market economy" is causing the "slow chronic death" of the planet. She received only supportive mail, like "a card from somebody at Greenpeace saying 'I'm constantly amazed about all the subversive ideas that you can get in the mainstream oppress with no balancing idiotic other side.'"
In the fall of 1990, PBS aired a 10-hour series called Race to Save the Planet. In 600 minutes of airtime, not one alternative viewpoint was aired, despite the fact that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is mandated by law to ensure balance in all "programs of a controversial nature." In fact, CPB not only approved the imbalance, they funded it, promoted it, and sent it out to schools as an educational tool. Why was there no balance? Series producer Linda Harrar told me: "There are ways of confusing the public in putting ping-pong matches onto television which we did not particularly think was useful . . . I'm not sure it's useful to include every single point of view
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