MediaWatch: June 1992
Table of Contents:
Once Again, Reporters Have No Time for Balance
SAVE THE PLANET, SLANT THE NEWS
This month's U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro has become the latest excuse for reporters to abandon balance in favor of "saving the planet." Not only were free-market environmentalists and skeptical scientists ignored, so were any arguments that might make the U.N.'s proposed treaties seem less necessary. On May 8, ABC reporter Ned Potter, using only greenhouse promoter Michael Oppenheimer as a source, portrayed the U.S. as a polluting global outlaw: "The United States has been the biggest producer of greenhouse gases and the toughest holdout against legal commitments to control them."
The day the summit opened, June 3, CBS reporter Doug Tunnell editorialized: "Just imagine: the government of a major industrial country in the North that's responsible for about one- quarter of all the CO2 emissions in the world, and whose leader calls himself the Environment President. But this President forced the U.N. to water down a global clean-air accord, and refuses to sign another agreement to further protect endangered species." Other than EPA chief William Reilly mentioning the "financing mechanism" for six seconds, Tunnell ignored the contents of both treaties.
Boston Globe reporters Ross Gelbspan and Dianne Dumanoski tried to panic the Eastern seaboard with a May 31-June 2 series that began with a newscast from 2030: "Food riots erupt in Boston... Nature helps avert a water war between New York and Pennsylvania ...Garbage dumping begins in the Grand Canyon...Red Sox game smoked out in Chicago [by Saskatchewan prairie fires]...Scenarios like these are being forecast by more and more scientists. Unless skyrocketing rates of pollution and population growth are reduced soon, they warn, many biological systems needed to sustain humans will collapse within the lifetimes of today's children."
The Globe did devote a small box to critics. Wrote Gelbspan: "These voices are increasingly in the minority. And as evidence has accumulated, the tide of the debate has swung increasingly toward those who believe that the Earth's ability to withstand untrammeled human activity has reached the breaking point." Gelbspan quoted greenhouse promoter Stephen Schneider: "It is journalistically irresponsible to present both sides as if it were a question of balance...It is irresponsible to give equal time to a few people standing out in left field." Gelbspan ignored a Gallup poll of 400 climate experts from the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. While 60 percent agreed global temperatures rose in the last century, only 19 percent believed that warming was induced by human activity. Nobody reported that.
