White House Misstatement Raises Coverage Issues By Joseph A. Davis Bad information was reported as gospel the weekend of February 9-11, when a number of major media failed to check an important statement from the White House. Spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that President Bush had received a letter from California Gov. Gray Davis asking him to relax federal environmental requirements to help California deal with its electricity crisis. It was a great story. The only thing wrong with it was that it wasn’t true. The Financial Times (FT.com) jumped on this hot story. Not questioning whether pollution rules had much to do with California’s crisis, and not questioning whether Gov. Davis had indeed asked Bush to relax them, FT.com confidently led with the assertion that the White House energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney would approve the rule-relaxation soon. FT was hardly alone. Reuters and the Dow Jones Newswires moved the story of Fleischer’s statement immediately -- apparently without seeing the letter or checking with California. Reuters simply said Davis had asked Bush to "waive environmental protections." Likewise, the National Journal Group’s Congress Daily moved the simple White-House-said story. Ditto Agence France Press-Extel (AFX), who made it into a "waiver on federal air quality standards." Fleischer made the statement about a February 8 letter from Davis at a regular White House press briefing on Friday, February 9. The wires reported it by late Friday afternoon, and it stood largely unchallenged over the weekend until Monday, February 12. That was when Davis’ spokesman Roger Salazar told reporters, "The interpretation of the president’s press secretary was incorrect. ... There was nothing in the letter that in any way, shape or form asks the president to lift environmental regulations." While Fleischer’s error may have been unintentional and merely ill-informed, it was not in the deepest sense an "innocent mistake." It was an untruth that advanced the anti-regulatory policy agenda of Bush administration clients in Congress and in the oil, coal, and utility industries. The bogus request seemed to validate the assertion -- made by key House subcommittee chair Joe Barton (R-TX), among others -- that California’s electricity problems were caused by that state’s stringent air rules. Barton, for that matter, is pressing for relaxing the Clean Air Act nationwide. Bush himself had blamed California’s woes on environmental regulations as early as January 18, in a CNN interview. That earlier assertion of the linkage had sparked stiff objections from California officials and environmental groups. Reporters who had been covering energy or environment beats routinely would likely have spotted the buried premise. There was, to be sure, just enough truth in the California air quality- energy connection to make it dangerously decep-tive. By any competent analysis, there are at least half a dozen major causes far more responsible for California’s electricity crisis than air regs. Of all the states, California already has one of the cleanest energy mixes -- heavy on hydro, nuclear, natural gas, and renewables. Any rules that might have delayed powerplant construction were state rules, not federally imposed ones, and California had already eased those itself. The air issue could only arise because of the tissue-thin margin between California’s electricity demand and its available supply. Most utilities and states never get that close to the edge. But in a Stage 3 alert, those oil-fired peaker plants and older, marginal coal plants whose hours had been restricted for air-quality reasons suddenly became critical. Californians, who suffer most from the air pollution there, had already worked out a deal extending the operating hours of those plants in exchange for quicker installation of pollution-control equipment on them. But those few marginal plants were only the tiniest part of California’s total generating capacity -- and running them longer was only the tiniest and most temporary bandage, when the real solution Davis sought was at least 5,000-20,000 megawatts of new, clean generating capacity. The incident may have offered a lesson in how a story can go wrong. Probably newswires who cycle out everything they get almost immediately were most prone to error. Perhaps some of the problem was inherent in the nature of the White House beat -- where many, maybe too many, stories consist simply of dumb-terminal displays: "The president said X today." But it may also be a lesson in the value of specialists -- environment and energy reporters -- in an area where slow swimmers and generalists tend to get eaten by sharks. Some news media came out of the water with limbs intact, and even looking pretty buff. An AP story June 9 included a lead referring to "sharp disagreement over whether the request amounts to rolling back environmental rules." The AP managed to get comment the same day from Salazar and even Winston Hickox, head of CalEPA. That story was carried by a number of dailies, including the Deseret News, (2/10) and the Cincinnati Post (2/10) -- and even, to its credit, Dow Jones Newswires (2/9). Even more on point was a February 10 story in the Washington Post by William Booth. The headline read: "Calif. Pollution Laws Blamed in Crisis" -- but the story focused squarely on whether that blame was justified. Booth, too, managed to get a Davis spokesman and other California officials on the phone before filing his story. "In California, however, there is wide disagreement with the premise that somehow strict environmental and air quality regulations have either stopped producers from generating electricity or kept companies from building new power plants in the state," read the Booth’s second paragraph. Another pointedly skeptical story came out in USA Today the same day as Fleischer’s statement. That story, by Jonathan Weisman, was a response to the release of Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski’s energy bill the day before. The point of Weisman’s article was that all sides in the debate were eagerly exploiting the California crisis as a way of pushing their agendas. Weisman bluntly asserted in his lead, for example, that the California crisis had "virtually nothing" to do with drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- a linkage made often by the oil lobby. He later cited sources saying the crisis had nothing to do with federal air standards either. But he also noted that environmental groups were using the crisis to argue for tighter fuel-efficiency standards and new tax credits for efficient vehicles. Reprinted with permission. Published in Environment Writer newsletter March 2001, by the National Safety Council's Environmental Health Center.