MediaWatch: August 1990

Reporters Discuss "Subversive Mission"

Earth First, Journalism Second. Preaching the gospel of liberal environmentalism is still taking precedence over journalistic standards of balance. From Minneapolis comes amazing testimony from a May 17-20 teach-in sponsored by the Utne Reader, the counterculture's Reader's Digest. American Spectator roving editor Micah Morrison first covered the conference, prompting MediaWatch to review a tape of a panel on "The Challenges and Limits of Advocacy Reporting."

The panelists agreed there should be no limits. Barbara Pyle, Turner Broadcasting's Vice President for Environmental Policy and Environmental Editor for CNN, told the gathering she "met a lot of resistance and was considered to be a real fringe lunatic for many, many years," but she continued undaunted. "I feel that I'm here on this planet to work in television, to be the little subversive person in television. I've chosen television as my form of activism. I felt that I was to infiltrate anything, I'd do best to infiltrate television."

Dianne Dumanoski, an environmental reporter for The Boston Globe, described how little her job had changed since her days at the left-wing alternative weekly The Boston Phoenix: "I've become probably even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things that I think are true rather than maybe putting some of that in my own voice. But essentially it's the same thing. I'm getting the same ideas into print and to a larger audience. That's sort of what I see my subversive mission as."

Dumanoski 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 press with no balancing idiotic other side.'"

Alexander's Encore. The panel also included Charles Alexander, who boasted at a Smithsonian Institution environmental seminar last year: "As the science editor at Time, I would freely admit that on this issue we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy."

This time, 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."

Faced with an audience openly hostile to "irrational" capitalism, Alexander had to defend Time's failure to call for an end to the free market: "I don't think you'll be reading in Time that the market is the problem and that we must replace the market. If we did that, then half of our readers would think we've gone nuts ...What you'll see us doing is proposing specific market interventions to correct the failures of the market rather than just coming out and saying we've got to ditch the market economy. I don't think that that would influence many of our readers. We're trying to be a little more subtle."

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