Earth Day 1990 marked the height of amateur hour in environmental reporting. Responding to America's rekindled concern about the Earth, newspapers churned out special sections and broadcasters produced countless segments marking the event's twentieth anniversary. In many cases, journalists unfamiliar with the complex underlying issues were drafted to help crank out copy, and in the rush to extol the wonders of recycling and call attention to planetary health, journalistic skepticism and scientific accuracy were too frequently sidelined.

Now the pendulum is swinging fast toward the opposite extreme; as Earth Day 1995 (April 22) approached, upbeat articles in The Economist and The New Yorker took pokes at those environmentalists, as The Economist put it, whose "efforts to scare the world over global warming seem not to have worked." The New Yorker piece, by the veteran Newsweek writer Gregg Easterbrook, embraced conservation measures, but other journalists are trumpeting the views of a loose network of anti-environmentalist "citizens" groups. While attracting people who genuinely believe American life is over-regulated, many of them are fronts for industrial polluters or have ties to radical-right organizations, including the John Birch Society and antigovernment militias. In Washington, part of Newt Gingrich's "contract with America" is a series of bills that would virtually halt federal action to protect the environment. It is becoming trendy to ask whether environmental laws, not polluters, are the real public enemy. In newsrooms throughout the country, the hot story is the "high cost of environmental regulation," not the people or resources harmed when that regulation fails.

"Five years ago, environmental issues were subjected to far too little skepticism in the press," says Timothy Noah, who reports from Washington for The Wall Street
 Journal. "Journalists were faddish and unthinking in their coverage of some stories. Now there is a faddish, unthinking knee-jerk reaction in the other direction. The truth is in neither extreme."

And indeed there are scores of veteran journalists, most at daily newspapers, who have covered the environment for years without embracing the extremes and continue to do so. Most vulnerable to the shifting winds are national news organizations, whose approach tends to be broad-brush coverage by nonspecialist reporters, and general-assignment reporters elsewhere. It was the same segment of the media -- often sequestered inside the Washington Beltway or assigned to cover the latest trendy issue -- that most enthusiastically churned out environmental puff pieces in the months leading up to Earth Day 1990.

 By 1994, the Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and the Chicago Sun-Times, among others, were taking the iconoclastic position that Americans were being unnecessarily frightened about everything from street crime to pollution by the media themselves. The angle was that journalists had scared average Americans about "minor risks," like pesticide residues on foods, while often under-reporting major health factors like diet and alcohol consumption. ABC's John Stossel, a longtime consumer and environment reporter who has become a high-profile media revisionist on the environment, delivered a special report entitled "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?" that attracted more than 16 million viewers last spring. The Los Angeles Times devoted seven full pages on September 12, 13, and 14 to the media critic David Shaw's "Living Scared: Why Do the Media Make Life Seem so Risky?" which asked, among other things, how Americans could be so frightened about dying prematurely when we are living longer.

Stossel has gone on to advocate the elimination of some government regulatory agencies, saying in speeches to industry groups that the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others make life more dangerous "because they interfere with the market." That approach has endeared him to free-market conservatives and made him a star on the lecture circuit, able to command speaking fees of $20,000 or more.

Stossel says that during his years as a consumer reporter he sounded plenty of alarms about environmental hazards he now thinks were bogus. Thus he feels that contrarian stories like the ones he's now doing are long overdue and are necessary to help Americans put life back into perspective.

As for Shaw, parts of his series offer some lessons on the pitfalls of reporting an unfamiliar issue. In support of one of the series' central tenets -- that environmental pollutants aren't the health problem they are popularly believed to be -- Shaw cited data from the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency that sometimes co-sponsors research with private corporations, showing that the age-adjusted mortality rate for all cancers except lung cancer has been declining since 1950 for Americans younger than eighty-five. That is an accurate statistic, so far as it goes, and is often cited by industry scientists and others who think environmental concerns are exaggerated. But it does not take into account that the number of people who get cancer and the number of people who die from cancer are two different matters. The increasing effectiveness of treatments for some types of cancer might lower the overall mortality rate, while at the same time a greater percentage of people get the disease. And that is in fact the case for non-lung cancers, according to a number of published studies. Mentioning only mortality data tells only half the story. Another frequently cited statistic is the steady increase in U.S. life expectancy. Much of that increase is due to a dramatic drop in infant mortality, not health improvements in the adult population, as the author David Steinman noted in a critique of Shaw's series published in the weekly L.A. Village View.

upward from corruption

The contrarian phenomenon may have its roots in the Reagan years, when bureaucrats such as Interior Secretary James Watt and EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford were assigned to dismantle their own programs. It was a time when Dow Chemical lobbyists were allowed by political appointees to help write EPA news releases, recalls Keith Schneider of The New York Times (who has himself come under fire as a "contrarian" reporter). It was also a time of greed and corruption -- more than twenty EPA political appointees eventually resigned in disgrace and assistant administrator Rita Lavelle was sentenced to six months in prison for lying to Congress. The understandable reaction built to the point that in 1988 George Bush pledged to be the "environmental president." And it prompted the resurrection of Earth Day in time for its twentieth anniversary in 1990, with its attendant journalistic excesses.

the current revisionist reporting trend began as a few disparate voices, including a number of serious environmental journalists, asking tough questions about the effectiveness of the nation's environmental laws. Among them, Schneider of the Times reported in August 1991 on the debate about the dangers of dioxin -- the toxic, chlorine-based chemical that prompted the 1982 evacuation of Times Beach, Missouri -- and suggested that dioxin wasn't so dangerous after all. Schneider was also the primary reporter on a five-part series in March 1993 entitled "What Price Cleanup?" which explored whether the nation's mechanism for regulating environmental health threats like dioxin had gone awry. Schneider's coverage touched off a professional argument in which he was generally praised for asking important questions, but criticized for proffering a number of unsupported conclusions, especially the notion that the bulk of regulations on toxic chemicals are an unnecessary drain on the nation's productivity. An article by Vicki Monks in the American Journalism Review in June 1993, examining dioxin coverage, declared that "Schneider's conclusions about dioxin's risks have a major flaw: they're wrong." Soon thereafter, Robert Boyle, a writer on the outdoors and environment issues for Sports Illustrated, also took Schneider to task, noting several errors in his series. For example, Schneider said at one point that "there is no acid rain in South Carolina." But there is, as the Times later acknowledged in a correction.

Boyle also noted "questionable reporting" by Boyce Rensberger of The Washington Post. In an April 15, 1993, article, Rensberger seemed to suggest that ozone depletion was no longer something to worry about. The American Chemical Society promptly issued a news release challenging Rensberger's conclusions, and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rebutted him publicly. A few months later, Boyle wrote, a Rensberger article about global warming "both misrepresented the views of James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and gave prominence to the views of Patrick Michaels, an associate professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, without identifying Michaels as editor of World Climate, a quarterly funded by the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal interests."

At a conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists in the fall of 1993, Schneider defended his work by saying journalists have given environmental groups a free ride for too long, so he was practicing a more advanced, skeptical form of environmental journalism. At the same forum, Rensberger insisted that as a science writer he belonged to a more mature, skeptical branch of the profession than mere environmental reporting. The environment beat, he said, had a "tradition" of giving "an unquestioning alarmist spin to the story."

wrangling over dioxin

One reason Schneider's reports in particular seem to have roiled so many colleagues is that The New York Times has so much influence over public policy and with the nation's opinion leaders, including the rest of the media. The Schneider articles published from 1991 through 1993 were mostly accurate, judged fact by fact, but they led readers to conclusions that were, in truth, highly debatable. A notable example, repeated in the media far and wide, was the incorrect impression that dioxin would soon be pronounced innocent by the EPA. Newspaper editorials bemoaned the money "wasted" on dioxin cleanups. News reports plagiarized (and exaggerated) Schneider's conclusions. Things that started as the opinions of a few sources became widely accepted as fact.

 To name one: Exposure to dioxin, Schneider wrote in August 1991, "is now considered by some experts to be no more risky than spending a week sunbathing." That analogy was widely re-reported elsewhere, almost always as evidence that dioxin wasn't very dangerous. (It was also commonly described as a consensus of government scientists, but Schneider says it was primarily the opinion of one source, the late Vernon Houk of the Centers for Disease Control, who later repudiated it as misleading. Schneider says that he doesn't know why Houk changed his mind, and that he can't be responsible for what other news outlets did with the axiom about sunbathing.)

Then, last September, the EPA released its draft reassessment of dioxin. Far from clearing the chemical as a health threat, it affirmed that dioxin is a probable human carcinogen and that it also shows troubling reproductive effects. Schneider reported the EPA's conclusions for the Times. Afterward, he said he remained comfortable with the sunbathing analogy. "Sunbathing is not a trivial source of cancer," he said, pointing to statistics for skin cancer, including the fact that "it was the second-fastest growing type of cancer in whites in the early eighties." As for his overall coverage of dioxin, he says it was "right on the mark," because the EPA concluded that dioxin was neither as dangerous nor as harmless as extreme positions would have it.

'wise use' on the march

As public debate about the environment has lurched to the right in the last eighteen months, the spotlight for environment reporters has shifted far from Schneider and Rensberger; their most provocative pieces seem tame compared to the pronouncements and goals of Newt Gingrich and his followers, and to some current reporting full of flawed anecdotes about supposed environmental overkill (see sidebar, page 44). Revisionist wisdom has gained broad ascendancy. It holds that environmentalists had their way in Congress too long, hence the perceived regulatory excesses. It is true that environmentalists enjoyed legislative victories in Congress during the late 1980s and early 1990s, partly as a reaction against the abuses and corruption of the Reagan era. But the revival didn't last; during 1994, all but one of eleven environmental bills, including reform measures that would have eased regulations, died in Congress. "Republican obstructionism" got much of the blame in the mainstream press, not all of it deserved. e anti-environmentalist movement was more than willing to take credit.

 Known alternatively as the Wise Use or property-rights movement, the loosely organized network of groups purports to be a populist uprising that defends the interests of the little guys against the evil government eco-bureaucracy out to steal their land or their jobs under the guise of saving some bug or swamp. In reality, such organizations in the East are most likely to be financed by land developers and industry trade groups, and they sometimes adopt green-sounding names such as the National Wetlands Coalition. That one is made up mainly of oil drillers, developers, and natural gas companies that want federal wetlands policy rewritten to favor their industries. In the West, most support tends to come from mining, timber, and cattle interests seeking to protect their low-cost use of public lands, and the groups are usually fairly open about those goals. Real people with legitimate grievances do belong to such groups, but close examination of their records has shown that the membership rolls are often domined by employees of regulated industries, antigovernment ideologues in search of a cause, even people recruited by public relations firms that, according to an article in last May's Consumer Reports, "earn as much as $500 for every citizen they mobilize for a corporate client's cause."

Conservative think tanks and talk radio help disseminate the message. But Ron Arnold and his boss Alan Gottlieb, based in Bellevue, Washington, have given Wise Use its identity and direction. Gottlieb, a direct-mail expert who claims credit for identifying "Reagan Democrats," raised tens of millions of dollars for Republican presidential campaigns. He also runs the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and two pro-gun organizations, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and the Second Amendment Foundation. Arnold, whom the New Right strategist Paul Weyrich hired to write a subsidized biography of James Watt, hooked up with Gottlieb in 1984 when each was trying to identify a new conservative cause to promote. Arnold suggested targeting "runaway environmentalism," according to David Helvarg, author of the recent book The War Against the Greens. And as Gottlieb told Helvarg: "I've never seen anything pay out so quickly as this whole Wise Use thing has done. What's really good about it is it touches the same kind of anger as the gun stuff, and not only generates a higher rate of return, but also a higher average dollar donation" -- $18 versus $40. They got plenty of help painting the Greens as closet Reds. The John Birch Society, with ties to sometimes violent anti-environmentalist organizations in the Adirondacks, pronounced Earth Day a veiled attempt to celebrate Lenin's birthday. Even George Will described environmentalism as "a green tree with red roots."

The most radical of the western anti-environmentalists have threatened armed confrontations with federal officials, such as forest rangers, who attempt to enforce environmental laws on private or public land. Some of the armed militias that are sprouting throughout the country, with encouragement from Gottlieb's gun groups, have shown anti-environmentalist leanings. Endangered species, including seals and owls, are being intentionally hunted down by those who oppose the law protecting them.

dirty tricks on the media

Increasingly, news events and news organizations are likely to be targets of anti-environmentalist manipulation. The Wise Use group People for the West, which is financed in large part by the mining industry, launched an attack on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even before the broadcast of the network's Frontline report "Public Lands, Private Profits." The report exposed environmental abuses by gold mining companies, including one that left taxpayers with a $100 million cleanup bill. The "Fax Alert" from People for the West charged that the documentary was "outrageously one-sided," tried to pressure PBS stations into carrying a pro-mining response, and asked members to contact talk radio programs, newspaper editors, and legislators and ask "if they think it's appropriate to spend federal tax dollars on yellow journalism." No station refused to show the documentary. Some, mainly in Alaska, broadcast rebuttals from Wise Use advocates.

Ten nationally prominent public relations firms earned a total of more than $75 million from their corporate clients in 1993 for lobbying and public relations work on environmental issues. (Of the ten largest environmental groups, only the Sierra Club annually spends more than $1 million on lobbying.) In New York City in 1990, the public relations firm Henry J. Kaufman and Associates, acting on behalf of the National Dairy Board and the makers of bovine growth hormone, arranged for phony "housewives" to infiltrate a conference of dairy farmers opposed to the controversial drug. Attempting to "spin" news coverage of the event, the "housewives" declared their support for injecting cows with the hormone. The ruse was uncovered and publicized by John Stauber, editor of PR Watch in Madison, Wisconsin.

When Michael Hansen, the author of a report on the hormone for Consumers Union, got a request for a preview of his findings from a woman claiming to be a scheduler for ABC's Nightline, he told a friend at ABC, who checked further. The caller was a phony and the fax number she provided was traced to the offices of the public-relations giant Burson-Marsteller, according to PR Watch. In 1992, repeated sabotage forced the activist-author Jeremy Rifkin to cancel the tour promoting his book Beyond Beef, an environmental critique of the cattle industry. Rifkin's publicist at Dutton Books received calls from phony reporters trying to get a copy of Rifkin's itinerary. After someone managed to get a copy, radio and TV producers who had scheduled Rifkin appearances started getting calls from someone claiming to be his publicist, canceling or misrepresenting his plans.

cutting the coverage

At a time when well-financed interests are working hard to manipulate the public policy debate over the environment, coverage of the issue has been cut sharply at many news outlets, especially broadcast. An analysis of network news coverage by The Tyndall Report showed that the total minutes devoted to environmental coverage declined 60 percent between the peak in 1989, the year of the Exxon Valdez, and 1993. (The leader in coverage, as it has been for years, is ABC.) The de-emphasis -- and revisionist reporting in the national media -- could lead other journalists to decide that the environment beat is irrelevant, as happened in the late '70s and early '80s. And that could hurt newspaper readership, especially for mid-size newspapers, argues Bob Anderson, veteran environment editor at Baton Rouge's Advocate. "There are a lot of highly literate people, especially in college towns, whose main interests aren't getting much attention in the nation's newspapers," Anderson says. "Many of them have given up reading newspapers, in favor of books and journals, because when scientific issues are discussed, they're often handled in a moronic fashion by a reporter who probably didn't understand what he was writing about."

Indeed. In late October, a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune attempted to describe how Clean Air Act car-pooling rules, intended to reduce ozone pollution, were likely to affect Chicago-area workers. But thanks to an editor's presumption, the story confused ozone, the air pollutant associated with smog, with the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere that shields the earth from dangerous solar radiation.

Much of the time, environmental stories are complicated and subtle, says Dan Fagin, part of the Newsday reporting team that was a Pulitzer finalist last year for reports examining the unusually high incidence of breast cancer on Long Island. "They take a lot of work, they do not have certainty," he says. "And editors like certainty. They want definitive answers. We have to train editors to move beyond that, to start to make them realize people really care about analytical reporting that includes shades of an issue. Environmental writing can be the exception to this sort of 'cops and courts' mentality of reporting. At Newsday, I think it's paid off. I think it shows you don't have to be alarmist or revisionist, that readers do care and are willing to read about the subtleties."

One kind of story that frequently skews the public's understanding of risk is the reporting of individual scientific studies, especially about supposed health risks or cures. Such reporting is a staple for the wire services, and commonly leads to a string of seemingly conflicting stories about things like caffeine or red wine or cholesterol. That does little but frustrate readers. The problem is that much of science is a process, and each study on a subject is a part of a movement toward a consensus. Also, because science is sometimes for sale to the highest bidder, any individual study should be suspect. Whenever scientific research is covered, the financing sources and the background of the researchers should be reported. That puts readers in the picture. "There's a law that for every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.," says journalist Mark Dowie, who has completed a book for MIT Press critiquing the environmental movement.

environmental alert

The more success congressional Republicans have in thwarting environmental regulation, the more environment issues will demand renewed coverage. The "contract with America" includes provisions to limit "unfunded federal mandates" assigned to state and local officials, require cost-benefit analysis of all new regulations -- in effect adding to the bureaucratic burden -- and guarantee landowners reimbursement for significant property value lost to environmental regulations. Depending on whom one believes, those initiatives are either a stealth attack by polluters and land developers on widely popular environmental laws, or tools that will be used to fine-tune the waste and abuse out of such laws. It will fall primarily
 to reporters for local news organizations, where the
 effects would be felt, to find the truth amid the politi-
 cal hyperbole.

 William Ruckelshaus, who earns near-unanimous accolades for his stewardship of the EPA under two Republican presidents, warned during a December forum at Harvard University against overzealous "laissez-faire" rollbacks of environmental legislation "because the pendulum, once swung, will inevitably come wildly swinging back."

The newly empowered Republicans have so far scorned that advice. And if the pendulum in environmental coverage swings toward its own kind of laissez-faire, the media could then find themselves back where they were in 1970 and 1990: facing a public hungry for solid environmental news but lacking the reportorial expertise to tell the story.

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