World Conference of Science
Journalists
San Jose dos Campos, Brazil
Nov. 25, 2002
A New Kind of Environmental Reporting Is Needed
Blending objectivity with advocacy for increased international environmental reportage to arrive at sustainable journalism.
By Jim Detjen
It is an honor to be here in Brazil to participate in the third World Conference of Science Journalists. I thank the organizers for inviting me. We are discussing issues here that I believe are vitally important to increased public understanding of science and the environment. One of these issues is the role that journalists should play in reporting about the global environment and sustainable development.
This is a subject that is frequently debated by students and journalists at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University in the United States. The Knight Center provides education in science and environmental journalism on the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels. Our students come from around the world – China, Japan, India, Croatia, Mexico, Nigeria – and many other countries.
The Knight Center publishes a magazine and handbooks, conducts research on science and environmental journalism and has run training workshops for journalists in Russia, China, Mexico, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa and many other nations.
If you bring a group of environmental journalists together for a long enough time and it is likely a debate about objectivity and advocacy will erupt.
“Journalists should be objective,” argues one group. “Journalists are stewards of the truth for their readers and viewers. They should report all sides and be as scrupulous as possible in writing a balanced piece, expressing all points of view.”
“Objectivity is impossible,” argues another group. “Environmental journalists should be advocates for changes to improve the quality of the planet. They should educate people about the serious problems that exist and use the power of the news media to bring about changes to improve the quality of the Earth – air, water, wildlife and natural resources.”
Which side of this debate journalists are on is based often upon the media they work for and the country they work in. If they are employed by a mainstream newspaper, news magazine or broadcast station, they are likely to be in the camp of objectivity. If they work in developed parts of the globe, such as the United States, Western Europe or Japan, they probably also support this view. But if they work for an environmental magazine, the alternative press or are a freelancer, they might side with the advocacy school. If they live in developing regions of the globe, such as Africa, South America and parts of Asia, they might also favor this view.
Sustainable Journalism
Is it possible to support both schools of thought? Carl Frankel, the author of a book, In Earth’s Company: Business, Environment and the Challenge of Sustainability, argues that it is. “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I do not experience these two identities as incompatible,” he says. “Yes, there is a tension between the two, but I find myself able to resolve the tension.” Frankel has called for a new kind of environmental journalism, which he terms “sustainable journalism.” He says that sustainable journalism embraces the following three components:
1. It incorporates the best aspects of traditional journalism – diligent research, precise language and fair reporting.
2. 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.
3. 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,” he 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. Such coverage is deemed newsworthy because its involves conflict and controversy involving prominent individuals. But an overemphasis on these dramatic events, along with the 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 U.S. Society of Environmental Journalists’ national conference in Baltimore, Maryland in October 2002 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.
A survey of 496 environmental journalists in the United States that I conducted with my colleagues, Fred Fico and Xigen Li, at Michigan State University found that population issues ranked 22nd out of 24 subject areas in news coverage. This study, published in Newspaper Research Journal in the summer of 2000, found that just six percent of the environmental reporters said that population issues were among the top five issues they had reported about the previous year. Reporting about problems caused by consumerism and over consumption fared even worse. Fewer than one percent said it was among the top five issues they had reported about the previous year. Yet, many environmental scientists would rank these as among the most important issues that need to be discussed and dealt with in the 21st century.
Environmental Stories that Journalists Don’t Report
“Consumerism is a story journalists have difficulty in reporting about,” says Ellen Ruppel Shell, co-director 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. The 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
Journalism is not a static field. Many conventions, such as objective news coverage, did not become widely accepted until the end of the 19th century in the United States. And in many parts of the world they still do not exist. The news media have evolved and adapted to the needs and conditions of various eras. During the progressive era of the early 20th century, muckraking blossomed. During World War II the news media accepted limitations on publishing in the name of national security.
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, South America and elsewhere.
I believe that a new kind or reporting known as “sustainable journalism,” is needed. Some of the components are:
· 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 multi-national 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.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am NOT advocating that journalists should write about issues from the sole perspective of environmental activiists’ groups or that they should ignore the viewpoints of business leaders or people who are skeptical of environmentalists. On the contrary, they should continue to maintain a healthy skepticism of all individuals and organizations they report about and they should continue to ask probing questions in order to to try to determine the truth..
What I am advocating is that the news media give increased and sustained coverage to many national and global environmental issues, such as global climate change, population issues, consumption patterns, trans-boundary pollution issues, overfishing, water shortages and other international topics. Many of these vitally important issues receive little or only episodic coverage.
In snort, I am advocating heightened and sustained coverage of these environmental issues and of the many solutions that are being experimented with worldwide.
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 (www.earthcharter.org), a global effort to educate people about the need for a just, democratic, peaceful and sustainable society. This effort, which is an outgrowth of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero, Brazil in 1992, has received surprisingly little media coverage in the United States and other countries..
I also think there also needs to be experiments to create new international news media that can report and write about these issues. Perhaps, the new World Federation of Science Journalists can create some of these new media. Perhaps, some NGOs can experiment and create new types of news media that fully report and comment on these issues. A number of experiments have been tried – such as “Earth Times,” a weekly newspaper about global environmental issues that was published in the United States and Europe. “Earth Times” is no longer being published. But it is the kind of experiment that should be launched and tried. I suspect, however, that these kinds of experiments will be more likely started by NGOs than the commercial news media.
The news media need to give much greater coverage to these and many other grass roots initiatives blossoming around the globe. They need to develop and practice a new kind of reportage – sustainable journalism – if they are to help society grapple with many daunting environmental challenges in the years ahead.##
Jim Detjen is the holder of the Knight Chair and Director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. Before joining the MSU faculty in 1995, he spent 21 years reporting about environmental issues for the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers. He is the founding president of the Society of Environmental Journalists and served as the president of the International Federation for Environmental Journalists from 1994 to 2000.
E-mail: detjen@msu.edu
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