MediaWatch: May 1990
Table of Contents:
Earth Day Without Alternatives
In the television age, protests are no longer simple expressions of democratic discontent; they're often elaborately planned public relations mega-events. Most protest organizers would settle for a small 24-hour news binge, but the organizers of Earth Day on April 22 enjoyed a solid week of anticipatory coverage and homage. Media outlets did much more than report on Earth Day: they celebrated it.
In the midst of all the feel-good stories about cleaning up roadsides and recycling beer cans, the networks failed to investigate the radical views of Earth Day organizers. In 1970 organizer Denis Hayes explained the true Earth Day agenda: "I suspect that the politicians and businessmen who are jumping on the environment bandwagon don't have the slightest idea what they are getting into. They are talking about emission control devices on automobiles, while we are talking about bans on automobiles."
To see what kind of environmental viewpoints the networks relied upon this Earth Day, MediaWatch analysts watched all morning and evening news shows during the week of April 16-22, in addition to Nightwatch, the CBS overnight show. MediaWatch compared the amount of time given to liberal environmentalists (Earth Day and major environmental group staffers and ecologists like Barry Commoner) to the time given to free-market environmentalists. We differentiated between talking heads (people appearing in news stories) and in-studio interviews.
Liberal environmentalists were offered more than 30 times as many opportunities to speak as their opponents, tallying 68 talking head appearances, compared to two soundbites by one free- marketeer. Interviews were just as heavily weighted: 26 liberal environmentalists to one free-marketeer.
Although reporters relied heavily on liberal environmentalists, they rarely questioned them about their hostility to free enterprise or their advocacy of massive government intervention. (In fact, not one environmentalist was described as liberal.) Instead, most of the soudbites and interviews allowed them to make generalizations about the precarious state of the planet and the need for action. By providing them with an unchallenged platform in which they simply appeared to be concerned citizens with reasonable solutions, the networks made viewers more likely to believe drastic government action is needed when they call for it on other occasions.
In naming Denis Hayes ABC's "Person of the Week," Peter Jennings simply echoed Hayes' frustration with how the environment suffered since 1970, mostly under Reagan. He never investigated Hayes' radical proposals, and concluded by lauding Hayes as "the true believer whose reverence for life has always been a calling, never a fashion, who millions of Americans owe a vote of thanks."
Liberal activists fielded questions like this one posed to Meryl Streep by ABC entertainment reporter Chantal: "The first Earth Day, of course, came out of the '60s, when people were so concerned about changing the world and wanting to make it better. I think a lot of people miss the '60s for just that reason. And yet, we've just come out of a decade that was so materialistic, so money-oriented. How do we show them what you're talking about?"
Bryant Gumbel questioned liberals by criticizing conservative policies: "Well, you've all touched on it a little bit, but the failure of the government, particularly the problems encountered in the Reagan years, are very much with us and prompt the question: Is government even equipped to take on these issues or must we talk in local terms?"
The majority of morning show interviews came on April 20. On CBS, Nightwatch interviewed eight left-wing guests, including West German Green Party leader Petra Kelly, anti-technology activist Jeremy Rifkin, and Washington Post reporter Cynthia Gorney, who's writing for Mother Jones on how to go green in "this grossly over-consumptive and wasteful society." Rifkin told host Charlie Rose that "A radical reduction in energy use is not a big sacrifice: it's just hanging habits...convenience culture is destroying the planet."
In another segment, Rose questioned Jay Hair of the National Wildlife Federation, Mike Roselle of the radical group Earth First!, and Barry Commoner. Rose's comparatively probing questions about free enterprise and the environment demonstrated the kind of hostile rhetoric simmering beneath the feel-good coverage. "It's the very principles of the free market, the free enterprise system, that has caused this," Commoner stated. "That simply won't work. We have got to get the common interest in environmental stability into the decisionmaking process, and I'm afraid, when we do that, it won't be a free enterprise system."
On ABC's Good Morning America, co-host Charles Gibson introduced "three men with three different approaches to environmental activism." Gibson's idea of a diverse panel: polar explorer Will Steger, Howie Wolke of Earth First!, and David Brower of the Earth Island Institute, a man too radical for the staffs of both the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. When Gibson asked a challenging question about probable job losses from environmental proposals, Wolke replied: "Any time a transition is made, there's going to be a loss of jobs during that transition period. Let's face it: people were unemployed when they closed down Auschwitz."
NBC's Today was the epitome of imbalance. Bryant Gumbel interviewed Ellen Silbergeld of the Environmental Defense Fund, rainforest advocate Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institution and Paul Ehrlich, notorious author of The Population Bomb, which falsely predicted mass famines in the 1970s. Rather than allow someone to challenge Ehrlich's lengthening record of false predictions, NBC continued to legitimize Ehrlich. Earlier in the week Today gave him his third unchallenged three-part series in the last year.
What the networks failed to do was offer time to almost anyone who challenged the scientific, economic, and political assumptions behind the entire Earth Day protest. The dominant save-the-planet message was shared by nearly everyone, including all of the 17 soundbites and interviews with celebrities and most of the 21 administration officials and 11 corporate spokesmen.
The only exception: meteorologist Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia, who joined the debate over global warming on This Week with David Brinkley (clips of which were later used once each on World News Tonight and Good Morning America). Earth Day Alternatives, a coalition of free-market environmental groups, held a press conference and made numerous spokesmen available, but was shut out completely. News people, who have prided themselves on always finding sources to counter any conservative consensus over the past decade, preferred to let the Earth Day consensus go unchallenged and allow the Earth Day organizers to remain untainted by any hint of radical politics.
