MediaWatch: July 1992

Janet Cooke Award: CBS: Blind "Eye of the Earth"

Pessimism dominates everything the network news touches. Like a reverse Midas, the news turns gold into toxic waste, calm into calamity. Signs of hope lie unacknowledged. Government statistics and reports disproving bad news go unreported. Environmental coverage is perhaps the most notorious example. Mix the media's taste for bad news with their desire to side in favor of "saving the planet" and you have a potent combination of bias by omission. For sticking with discredited environmental theories and ignoring scientific dissenters, CBS News earned the July Janet Cooke Award.

On the May 31 Sunday Morning, host Charles Kuralt introduced the first report in the CBS "Eye on the Earth" series with a flourish: "Our motor cars free us and foul the air. Our factories supply us with everything we need and poison the water. Every time humanity makes a great leap forward, we land deep in toxic mud."

Reporter David Culhane used the report to glorify the reputation of CBS News as the first network to "care" about the environment. He began with a Walter Cronkite clip from 1969: "What is happening to our world is directly related to too many passengers. Before there were too many people, it did not seem to matter if we used up the environment. The earth is rich in natural resources; we could use up a spot and move on. No longer." Culhane failed to note that the expected consequences of "overpopulation," namely mass famine and resource scarcity (as measured by exorbitant prices), have not occurred since Cronkite's sermon.

But Culhane's mission wasn't truth, it was self-promotion. He announced: "It was 1969. Walter Cronkite was introducing America to a new subject...Twenty-three years later, Walter Cronkite still feels a deep sense of concern."

Cronkite congratulated himself: "All these things were impinging upon our future. That's what got us excited about it. I'm very happy to say that I think we were pioneers, we were on the cutting edge, and it's amazing really, that we have come as far as we have in barely a quarter of a century."

But Culhane couldn't let the notion of improvement stand. To accentuate the negative, Culhane produced Barry Commoner, the socialist ecologist who ran for President in 1980 on the Citizens Party ticket. During Earth Week 1990, Commoner appeared on the CBS show Nightwatch and declared: "It's the very principles of the free market, the free enterprise system, that has caused this....We have got to get the common interest in environmental stability into the decision-making process, and I'm afraid when we do that, it won't be a free enterprise system."

Commoner gave Culhane the grave assessment he was seeking: "I think that the situation is more dangerous now. The global problems that we now understand much more clearly, global warming, the ozone problem. Those are very serious. They're global." Neither pointed out that the same environmentalists who warn of global warming now spent the 1970s warning the media about global cooling.

Culhane continued: "In 1969, Barry Commoner was one of the first scientists to speak out about these very new concerns ...Despite a trillion dollars spent in the United States to improve the environment, and some successes, Commoner thinks the overall record is dismal." Commoner painted a dark picture: "If you look around to environmental pollution generally, where we have numerical data, the improvements are on the order of 10 to 20 percent."

Wrong. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) figures on urban air quality from 1979 to 1988 show that the amount of lead in the air declined 89 percent, sulphur dioxide declined 30 percent, and carbon monoxide declined 28 percent just in ten years.

Later, Culhane pretended there had been no progress in reducing air pollution: "Barry Commoner agrees that government is not providing the leadership to change the environment. He says there are many ways government could produce immediate action. For instance, with the air pollution that was there in 1969 and is still with us now."

Culhane also promoted the theory that acid rain has caused major damage to American lakes and forests, saying acid rain is responsible for "killing fish and further damaging plants and trees."

Wrong. Culhane ignored even his own network's 1990 report on acid rain. As reported by Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes, the government's ten-year scientific study on acid rain, the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project (NAPAP), found that there had been no discernible damage done to crops or forests at present levels of acid rain emission.

Culhane then shifted his attention to the cause of the day, the Rio Earth Summit: "At first, President Bush threatened not to attend the Rio conference, but then agreed to go after other nations accepted his version of the major treaty on control of greenhouse gases. He wanted no timetables or binding goals. Political and environmental critics say the treaty has been gutted."

So who did Culhane bring on to be Bush's political critic? Cronkite, the supposedly objective news anchor: "I think we led the world in this area for so many years, and now the world's awakened to the problems. We know the situation's critical all over the world, and those people are ready to move, and here we are putting on the brakes. I think it's terribly disappointing." If the 1969 news clips didn't prove Cronkite's bias, his 1992 statements definitely did. In the end, CBS didn't so much burnish its history of reporting as remind viewers of its history of liberal advocacy.

When contacted by MediaWatch, Culhane said he'd call back. Reached later in the day, Culhane said he couldn't talk: "I'm literally out the door. I mean I have a cameraman and producer standing here." Asked if he could call back later or the next day, he said: "We're literally right in the middle of a production." If Culhane decides to respond to this article, we'll print his response in the next issue.

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