IN REVIEW:

HOW THE ENVIRONMENTAL BEAT GOT ITS GROOVE BACK

BY JANE HALL

From January through May, the New York Times reporter Douglas Jehl wrote some sixty stories on the environment, many of them on page one. "I didn't expect this," Jehl says. "No matter how you measure it, in terms of volume of copy or prominence of play, there is a lot of environmental coverage today." In recent months, the Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times have all beefed up the beat by assigning a full-time reporter to cover it from Washington, D.C. On Capitol Hill, Sunday pundits are discussing fossil fuels, and reporters nationwide are being dispatched to cover such stories as hybrid cars and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Area in Alaska.

What is causing this resurgence of environmental reporting? "The Bush administration is putting the environment on page one," says Bill Wheatley, vice-president of NBC News. "It's become a big policy story because of the Bush initiatives."

George W. Bush came into office with a parting gift from Bill Clinton -- sweeping executive orders on the environment, such as banning road building in national forest lands. Bush -- whose campaign was heavily funded by the oil-and-gas industries and mining companies, among others -- entered the scene saying that the country faced an energy crisis and needed to rethink long-standing environmental policies. He promptly ran into controversy with his appointment of Gail Norton as Secretary of the Interior and his reversal of a campaign pledge to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions in power plants. "Bush, in taking office, pursued an agenda that in many ways was the polar opposite" of Clinton, Jehl says. "Those kinds of clear conflicts and choices make stories."

The three nightly network newscasts certainly reflect this. In 1989, the year of the Exxon Valdez oil-spill in Alaska, environmental stories (including coverage of pollution, toxic waste, air and water quality, global warming, endangered species, energy, land-use, and conservation) reached a high of 774 minutes combined on the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight, according to the Tyndall Report, an analysis of network-news minutes. The number of environmental stories generally decreased in the following years, from 482 minutes in 1991 to 174 minutes in 1996, and 195 minutes in 1998. By contrast, in the first four months of 2001, the total environmental coverage among the three major newscasts already reached 264 minutes -- and that was before President Bush announced his major new energy proposals in May. "If the trend holds, environmental reporting this year will be back to the levels of the 1980s," says Andrew Tyndall, editor of the Tyndall Report.

The decrease in environmental coverage during the Clinton administration raises the question: Does it take a Republican in the White House to rev up the environmental beat?

Some environmental stories were likely missed or underreported in the years preceding Bush, not only because fewer resources were devoted to the beat, but also because environmentalists were raising fewer issues. "Environmentalists who might have been critical of Clinton may have kept their mouths shut because they were generally happy with the administration," notes Jehl.

Another difficulty for environmental reporters has been that many issues are more intractable and complex than the current page-one shootout between two administrations. "There was a feeling on the part of some editors that we're talking about the same problems as twenty years earlier," says Bud Ward, executive director of the nonpartisan Environmental Health Center, in Washington, D.C. "Environmental problems today are more subtle than smog over Pittsburgh."

Frank Clifford, science/ medicine/environment editor at the Los Angeles Times, is critical of what he sees as a relative lack of coverage of Bush's and Al Gore's environmental records and policies during campaign 2000. "It would have been good to test Ralph Nader's assertion that there wasn't 'a dime's worth of difference between them' on environmental policies and records."

Today, the controversy over Bush's new initiatives, along with several outlets' aggressive reporting, has helped make the environment a hot-button political issue again. In recent weeks, the Los Angeles Times was one of the few outlets to check out the Bush administration's assertion that Governor Gray Davis of California might welcome a relaxation of air quality standards in light of the California energy crisis. (He might.) The Washington Post revealed that the chemical, beef, and poultry industries were campaigning to delay a long-planned EPA report linking dioxin animal-fat traces to cancer in humans. The New York Times revealed government studies contradicting Vice President Dick Cheney's dismissive remarks about the potential of energy conservation.

"The environmental beat is now one of the hottest beats going," says The Washington Post's science editor, Rob Stein. "It's far-flung and fast-paced -- and it's one of the most politicized areas of science."

Now that the environment is back, it needs to be tended. "There's a tendency on the part of some editors to say, 'Hey, we did a story about the world coming to an end yesterday -- what's new today?'" says Phil Shabecoff, a former New York Times reporter who founded the environmentalist news service Greenwire in 1991. "The environment isn't a one-shot news story -- it's something that needs to be covered in-depth, day after day." Now, in part thanks to President Bush, perhaps it will be.