Responsible Journalism in a War-time Environment by Bud Ward Some environmental reporters are finding their traditional inclinations toward editorial detachment challenged by their professional concerns that government secrecy initiatives are increasingly impinging on long-held press and civic freedoms. In a period characterized by heightened anxieties about terrorists, seemingly imminent war with Iraq and growing concerns about North Korean nuclear weapons initiatives, reporters find themselves confronting issues at home about access to environmental information that is being withheld from release ostensibly because of national security concerns. Thoughtful reporters may be finding it increasingly difficult to keep separate–at least in the minds of their audiences if not also in their own minds–their professional concerns about the free flow of information and related environmental policies and other issues. The strains -- by no means limited to reporters covering environmental issues but endemic in the media -- are showing up in things like professional news organizations becoming increasingly vocal and active in opposition to changing federal government information disclosure policies. Journalism chat rooms increasingly debate this or that government effort further restricting the free flow of information that was once routinely available from federal agency websites and elsewhere. For some media, the issues are particularly acute if writers want to address environmental and natural resources, justice and civil liberties, and information policy issues. Significantly, the issue breaks not so much along liberal-conservative lines but rather creates allegiances among those who are traditionally protagonists. For journalists, the balancing act involves their deep professional commitment to the free flow of information in a democracy as opposed to what may be regarded as a flawed popular sense of civic responsibility and even patriotism in a wartime atmosphere. They recognize that the shibboleth -- that peaceful and respectful civic dissent (informed dissent) is among the highest forms of patriotism -- often falls on deaf ears amidst the shrill calls for what some see as a lock-step and single-minded blind patriotism. In the year and one-half since the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, federal actions have led to the removal of reams of environmental and natural resource information from public web sites that over the past decade had been the mainstay of responsible environmental journalism. The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation has removed information and data about dams from public perusal, and various federal agencies have gone cold turkey on nuclear and electrical power plant information that was previously widely available. Environmental Protection Agency web sites on chemical manufacturing facilities also have been sterilized, sanitized, lobotomized, or vaporized. Even the Department of Health and Human Services has removed information on their web site on use of condoms, abortions and other population control activities. New Federal Data Quality Act provisions being implemented across the federal government are seen as another means of withholding from public release information judged by abstract standards as unsuitable for distribution. In some cases, critics are alleging an information age version of "book burning": Information -- some of it peer reviewed -- long available on government web sites suddenly disappears, usually without explanation or advance notice. As if in the dark of night. The "free-market" and libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, long critical of most federal environmental regulatory programs, has threatened legal action over government agencies’ continued posting of the 1990s climate change "National Assessment," saying that the report fails to meet rigorous scientific standards under the data quality act. Critics argue that the issue is not science but politics. Among some reporters -- and, it must be said, also among others working professionally in the environmental and natural resources fields -- a form of gallows humor has set in. Garry Trudeau’s "Doonesbury" cartoons picking fun at a supposedly impotent and industry-dominated EPA under Christine Todd Whitman make the rounds by e-mail and in face-to-face exchanges among environmental journalists. (If Trudeau were to keep it up, one imagines his becoming the most widely read, and arguably most influential, "environmental journalist." Think about that.) More than one EPA office is known to have warned its staff not to use the agency’s internal e-mail system for purposes of circulating Doonesbury cartoons or even word of its existence. Another in the gallows humor category: a political editorial cartoon portrays Thomas Jefferson as the Author of the Constitution and Attorney General John Ashcroft as the Editor. The Society of Environmental Journalists recently launched a new "watchdog" edition of its popular and respected "TipSheet." It focuses specifically on the First Amendment, access, and other information disclosure/nondisclosure issues. In the absence of new funding to support it beyond an initial trial period, some reporters jest that the Constitution’s First Amendment protections may be dead before funding for the new newsletter can materialize. But reporters know deep down that it’s not funny. The best among them are thinking long and hard about how to reconcile their professional interests in a free and unfettered press with their sometimes [seemingly?] conflicting obligations as responsible citizens. There’s no question that the two can and should go hand-in-hand. But the challenge lies in communicating that message to an audience, including some editors who are often seen as being more interested in the outcome of the "Bachelorette" or "Joe Millionaire" than with increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and the fate of the planet decades hence.