Washington Post columnist David Broder made an odd confession recently:
“If you want to be a stickler for journalistic ethics, I shouldn’t even be writing about the Great Lakes, because I have a huge bias – especially when it comes to Lake Michigan.”
Broder recalled youthful summer visits to a cabin on Lake Michigan and explained that for the past 50 years he has enjoyed another cabin on the lake’s Beaver Island.
“Like everyone who comes under its spell, I love Lake Michigan,” he wrote.
Broder felt a need to reveal that background before explaining his support of a new federal plan to clean up the Great Lakes.
But is it an embarrassing impingement of journalistic purity to favor a clean environment?
Environmental journalists are rightly cautious about getting painted green. It’s often a cheap shot by critics who feel wronged by coverage — fair or not.
In my view, and the view of many of my generation, journalism is the key word in environmental journalism. You seek truth regardless of where it lies.
To be honest, early in the hey-day of environmental reporting, journalists sometimes failed to adequately challenge green orthodoxy. A lot of that had to do with struggling to report on increasingly complicated issues requiring knowledge that scientists — let alone reporters — still sought.
That’s a sin hardly confined to covering the environment. It still happens today. And with a widening view of what constitutes a journalist, it is even acceptable in some quarters more interested in implementing a script than seeking the truth.
Still, I and many of my colleagues, have carved careers around whatever the green equivalent is to the journalistic cliché, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”
(What would that be? If the EPA says the water is dirty, take a drink? If a manufacturer extols smokestack reductions, check out its sewer outfall? If an environmental group says the air is impure, breathe in a lungful? None are as catchy as mother’s love.)
All that said, perhaps its time for journalists to admit a bias toward a clean, sustainable environment.
Is that such an objectivity-compromising sin?
Well, would you say the crime reporter is biased if you overheard her remarking that murder is a poor way to settle a dispute? How will murderers ever get a fair shake in the media if we allow such people to report?
Is it OK for the education reporter to indicate that literacy is a fundamental value and measure of quality of life? Could such a reporter fairly and accurately cover a school strike? I think so.
I like to drink and breathe.
I admit that the cleaner water and air become, the better off I am. I favor the stuff. Environmental journalists should feel no shame in such an admission, or even if such values influence the angles they take when reporting.
That does not mean they no longer challenge assertions or weigh the relevant merits and costs of getting every last contaminant out of the environment. It can mean acknowledging that sometimes the best thing you can do for someone’s health is to give them a job, and that sometimes that job may require compromises on the environment.
Whether those compromises are required or worthwhile is exactly the kind of stories environmental journalists should be exploring.
No one is unbiased. The key is for journalists to manage those biases and to be transparent about them. In this exploding world that is recasting and broadening the definition of a journalist, not everyone believes that.
But there is a great need for those who do believe that — who cling to traditional journalistic values of fairness and accuracy, and yet who are not so afraid of cheap shots and false criticism that they hide behind a false shield of objectivity.
Clean air and water and sustainable communities are worthy goals. I fail to see how acknowledging that is a compromise of journalistic ethics.
David Broder’s experience with Lake Michigan make him precisely the kind of journalist who should be writing about attempts to restore it.
Echo Editor David Poulson is the associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism