MediaWatch: April 1990
Table of Contents:
Tags Not Planted On Green Groups
Coverage of the environment provides a dramatic example of how the media's mindset prevents a balanced discussion of both sides of an issue. Reporting on left-wing environmental groups promotes their save-the-planet intentions as non-controversial, indeed beyond dispute. Reporters ignore their underlying liberal anti-industrial agenda: the same combination of crippling regulations, prohibitive taxes, and government boondoggles that stunted the economy and killed job opportunities in the late 1970's.
The media's pattern of environmental bias is vividly illustrated by a three-year study of ideological labeling of environmental groups. MediaWatch analysts used the Nexis news data retrieval system to review every story on ten environmental groups in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post in 1987, 1988 and 1989. Out of 2,903 news stories, we found 29 ideological labels, or less than one percent. Of those, 22 were applied to Earth First!, five were given to Greenpeace, and the other two went to the Natural Resources Defense Council. The rest were label-free.
Not only did newspaper reporters fail to identify their liberal tilt, but they usually failed to refer to them as partisan political activists in Washington. Reporters used the words "activist," "advocacy," "lobbying," "militant" or variations thereof, only 155 times (5.3 percent). The newspaper reporters also committed bias by omission -- four of the most active conservative environmental groups were mentioned only 60 times (an average of 15 mentions apiece). By contrast, the ten liberal groups merited about 290 stories each. That's almost 20 times more attention than the conservative groups received. Among the liberal organizations receiving special treatment:
Wildlife Groups. Cloaked in a nonpartisan public image, the "defenders of wildlife" are uncompromising liberals who have blocked a number of Reagan and Bush Administration appointments. A memo from the editor of Audubon Society magazine revealed in The Washington Post last May 31 described the environment as "being royally [expletive] by our Environmental President (gag!). Maybe with a two-pronged attack (from sportsmen and conservation groups) we can shorten Manny Luhan's [sic] tenure at Interior." Still, the National Audubon Society suffered no harsher reference to activism than "arch-advocates of bird conservation," and no ideological labels in 457 stories.
The World Wildlife Fund, once run by Bush EPA Administrator William Reilly, was referred to as "mainstream" three times in 260 stories, even though they gave a medal to doomsday ecologist Paul Ehrlich. The Wilderness Society, counseled by Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson and once home to Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, also went unlabeled.
Self-Described Activist Groups. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) received no liberal labels in 355 stories and only 20 references to activism, 16 of them in The New York Times. The Washington Post referred to EDF's activism only three times and the Los Angeles Times just once, using a Post account that described EDF as "strong clean-air advocates." Environmental Action, a group that grew directly out of Earth Day 1970 and pre-dated Earth First! "ecotage" by teaching conscientious types how to sprinkle nails on freeway interchanges in the 1970's, received no labels and only six references to activism in 51 stories.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) was often described as "the political arm of the environmental movement," but the print media refused to identify the League's political slant. The LCV has endorsed Michael Dukakis for President, New Jersey Gov. James Florio, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and California gubernatorial candidate Leo McCarthy, to name just a few. They gave President Bush a "D" report card in 1988. In 111 stories, the League was never given a liberal label. But they were described twice as "nonpartisan."
Direct Action Groups. Greenpeace, famous for disrupting Trident missile tests, had five political labels in 426 stories. Four were "radical" and one was "liberal-leaning." Despite Greenpeace's militant tactics, reporters used activist references only 41 times, or less than 10 percent of the time. Earth First!, the self-proclaimed "ecological saboteurs" renowned for advocating "tree-spiking," which has severely injured several loggers, received the harshest treatment of the lot. In 83 news stories (70 in the Los Angeles Times), Earth First! was labeled 22 times, or about 26 percent of the time. The New York Times called the group "radical" once, but also referred to it as "conventional." The Los Angeles Times employed "radical" or variants like "sometimes radical" 20 times.
Consumer Environmentalists. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the anti-pesticide activist group responsible for last year's apple panic, was the most mentioned environmental group of those studied. Yet in 691 stories, they were labeled only two times. One of those came in Andrew Rosenthal's May 25, 1989 New York Times article headlined "When Left of Center Finds Itself in Mainstream." The Los Angeles Times once called the NRDC "generally liberal," but it also described them as "a group dedicated to saving the planet from pollutants."
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a Ralph Nader spinoff also active in promoting regulation of the food supply, never received a liberal label. The group's Naderite origins were never disclosed in 254 stories. They did have the highest number of activist references (64), but most were positive-sounding, such as "consumer advocacy" and "health advocacy."
On the other hand, the American Council on Science and Health, a prominent opponent of NRDC and CSPI headed by Elizabeth Whelan, received much more suspicious treatment. In 23 stories, reporters called them conservative only once, but referred to them with adjectives like "industry-supported" or listed their corporate donors seven times. Not one story in 2,90 mentioned the industry funding of the liberal environmental groups.
Free-market environmentalists were not only skeptically treated, they were comparatively ignored. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, headed by former EPA official Fred Smith, was mentioned only eleven times, and not once on an environmental issue. The Reason Foundation, a California-based free-market think tank, was mentioned 12 times in the Los Angeles Times. Of its three mentions between the news sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post, two were in obituaries. The Political Economy Resource Center, an up-and-coming free-market environmental research foundation based in Bozeman, Montana, merited only one mention. The New York Times labeled it a "tiny, hard-core, market-incentives think tank."
As environmental issues become more prominent on the American political scene, the public would be better served if reporters spent some time investigating the liberal, anti-business agenda of most environmental groups, and provided more than token attention to organizations that suggest market-based solutions.
