MediaWatch: February 1990
Table of Contents:
Janet Cooke Award: Today:Earth to Ehrlich
Few causes inspire more passionate reporting than the environment. Perceived by journalists as a can't-miss opportunity to demonstrate their conscience (who is against the environment?), those who normally naysay charges of media bias concede -- even boast -- that they are pushing an agenda. Last year, NBC Capitol Hill correspondent Andrea Mitchell acknowledged that "clearly the networks have made that decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy." NBC has been one of the most active advocates, airing a second three-part series of environmental reports by that left-wing "master of disaster," ecologist Paul Ehrlich.
As they did in May, in January Today gave Ehrlich a production and travel budget to narrate three completely unchallenged six-minute reports. In the eight months since the May series, Today has given no air time to a different point of view. For its repeat performance of imbalance, NBC earns this month's Janet Cooke Award.
NBC provided an unrebutted platform for Ehrlich's apocalyptic views. In so doing Today encouraged people's worst fears, making them more receptive to massive government intervention favored by liberals. It's not just a matter of ideological bias, but of attributing respect to a discredited record of doomsday predictions. It's not just a clash between objective and advocacy journalism, but between science and politically motivated pseudoscience.
Ehrlich authored the 1968 panic manual The Population Bomb, which began: "The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
The Ehrlich series kicked off January 9 with a story on "how man is destroying the entire ecological system with something that appears to be completely harmless." What was this global threat? The cow. "The dog may be man's best friend, but cows are family
...our dependence on the cow is destroying the world environment. "Overgrazing turned American public lands into severe desert, Ehrlich exclaimed. "Under the best of circumstances, it would have taken hundreds of years for the land to regenerate itself." But later in the report, he praised a private ranch where "scientists have measured fantastic improvements" in just 20 years. Not only did Ehrlich contradict himself, he missed the distinction. Public lands are treated carelessly, while private lands flourish with a mindful property owner.
The January 10 report used overpopulation as an argument to discontinue capitalism: "What concerns ecologists is that these [Third World] countries look to the United States, Germany, and Japan as models of development. They think the only way out of poverty is to industrialize."
Ehrlich continued: "But the foundations of our survival -- the world's forests, soils, water, and air -- have already been badly overexploited as a result of vast overpopulation in the industrial nations, who do, after all, use 80 percent of the world's resources to keep the standard of living high for less than 20 percent of the world's population. The most explosive social reality of the next century is that the world's ecosystems cannot support the spread of the American lifestyle to the underdeveloped nations of the world." How ironic that Ehrlich singles out Western democracies, whose citizens have demanded comparatively stringent pollution controls, while ignoring the heavy polluters of the Soviet bloc. As the world abandons command economies for cleaner service economies, Ehrlich proposes turning the clock back to the pre-industrial age.
Greenhouse hysteria dominated the January 11 segment. Repeating frantic forecasts of global warming, Ehrlich solemnly declared: "There is an even greater threat that scientists can only speculate about. As global temperatures rise, they may cause the massive West Antarctic ice sheet to slip more rapidly. Then we'll be facing a sea-level rise not of one to three feet in a century, but of 10 or 20 feet in a much shorter time. The Supreme Court would be flooded. You could tie your boat to the Washington Monument. Storm surges would make the Capitol unusable. For Today, Paul Ehrlich in Washington, DC, on the future shoreline of Chesapeake Bay."
A more earthbound assessment recently came from the American Geophysical Union. In the case of a 3-to-4 degree warming, they reduced estimates of expected sea-level rise to 12 inches, down from an estimate of 25 feet in 1980. Of course, scientists are not even unanimous about that much warming. As University of Virginia environmental scientist Patrick J. Michaels said, "The question scientists should now be asking is not how much it will warm over the next 50 to 100 years, but why has it warmed so little during the major carbon dioxide buildup?"
When asked about the Ehrlich series, Today spokesman Mary Neagoy told MediaWatch "We're real happy with what he's done for us." Neagoy admitted that Ehrlich had a definite point of view, which is why Today put him on the air. Neagoy claimed Ehrlich was only one "among a lot of people we used," but no one else was given a travel budget and eighteen minutes of solo airtime. When asked why Ehrlich was used as an NBC reporter, Neagoy said "all kinds of news organizations use all sorts of people as reporters. Doctors are medical reporters. Lawyers are law reporters. It's common practice." But it's not common practice to sign up partisan doctors like Benjamin Spock or lawyers like William Kunstler who advocate a particular political cause, without providing an opposing viewpoint.
Julian Simon, professor of economics at the University of Maryland and author of The Ultimate Resource, a fact-filled refutation of Ehrlich's contentions, told MediaWatch: "On just about every point where his statements can be tested against evidence, Ehrlich is wrong. Indeed, he has been wrong across the board since the 1960's. Every one of his predictions has been falsified. How many times does a 'prophet' have to be wrong before he stops being a prophet?"
NBC may want to show off its environmental conscience, but Ehrlich's long-discredited reputation should be an embarrassment to the network. But his role as NBC's number one environmental expert continues. They have announced he will be "among the people" they plan to use for their upcoming coverage of Earth Day. They apparently agree with Bryant Gumbel's on-air assessment at the end of the series: "That's good stuff."
