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Just Thinking: SEJ Meeting
Something stank.
Okay, it was audible. But to many it just plain stank. Big time. The applause,
after all, was deafening.
Some wished not to have heard it at all.
Standing O. Not just one or even two. Not just to
say thanks for accepting the invitation to speak, but in conspicuous
agreement with the message.
For those traditional journalists with ink in the
veins, it hurt. Hurt badly. Deeply. Not just a passing glance.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was delivering a red-hot political
stemwinder. He did so in what clearly was a decisive swing state within
just two weeks of a bitterly fought presidential election. An election
in which environmental issues, as usual, paid nary a discernible role
in the broad electorate’s mind, notwithstanding the very clear philosophical
differences between President Bush and then-candidate John Kerry on
the issues. Kennedy spoke using the kind of heated rhetoric even opposing
candidates avoid in referring to their adversaries: Kennedy used “lie”
and also, are you ready?, “impeach” in decrying Bush administration
environmental and other policies.
The venue for this partisan and hotly politicized
diatribe? You’re thinking it was a Democratic fundraiser, or an environmental
activist get-out-the-vote drive? It wasn’t. It was the Friday evening
plenary session of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ (SEJ) annual
meeting in Pittsburgh. A keynote address.
Got that? Picture that? Just think of it: Repeated
standing ovations at a journalists’ annual meeting for a blatantly political
speech by one of the nation’s leading environmental activists. Reporters
applauding?
Come again?
Go figure. Let’s. Or at least let’s try.
There are, after all, ways to rationalize it:
There are lots of ways to rationalize it for those
so inclined.
But I’m not so inclined.
Sitting in that room, one would be hard-pressed to
conclude that those weren’t reporters—at least some of them, and some
is too many—joining in those PDAs. (Think “public displays of affection”
and not “personal digital assistants.”).
Some reporters, true to their professional convictions,
stayed seated and noncommittal. Too many others did not.
Nor was it possible, sitting in that room, to conclude
that the applause was merely a polite sign of appreciation for the speaker’s
merely having accepted the group’s invitation to speak in the first
place. That just wasn’t the case, and you’d have to have been blind
and deaf to conclude otherwise.
While some in the Q&A seemed almost to indulge Kennedy
and virtually offer political counsel, a Knight-Ridder reporter mercifully
played the role of independent journalist and asked whether such rhetoric
from the far left wasn’t just as culpable as that from the right in
fostering distrust and impeding progress.
Kennedy had an interesting rejoinder here. He averred
at one point by saying that he was “probably more conservative than
many of you in this room,” at least on certain issues, such as support
for “choice” and for free market policies.
Ouch. The truth, if that’s what it was, hurts.
The fact is that environmental journalists have a
problem perhaps unique to their calling: They are battling the perception
that many of them have both inside and beyond their newsrooms of being
“greens with press passes,” as a former Scripps Howard reporter used
to say.
The fact, too, is that SEJ, as the single national
symbol for environmental journalists and an excellent one, must share
that burden. Denying its existence would serve no one well, least of
all those committed to the sound practice of independent and journalistically
sound environmental reporting.
The fact is that the SEJ annual meeting is the single
most visible manifestation of the field. The shocking/frustrating/disappointing/disgusting
public displays of affection (PDAs) are far more visible than the very
worthwhile internal soul-searching those standing Os are triggering
among the group’s serious and committed members.
One can argue: The no-applause rule is a vestige of
an earlier period of ink-in-theveins journalism, an era now consigned
to the trash heaps of yesteryear.
One can argue: Even among “traditional” daily newspaper
reporters, there is no single mindedness on the value and merit of that
no-applause practice. Let alone among what passes for journalism today
in the form of various broadcast, web, blog, and other media.
One can argue: Reporters attending a meeting to “learn”
are in a different role from those attending an event, a press conference,
for example, to cover it.
One can argue: The polite reception given EPA Administrator
Mike Leavitt the next morning offset the applause for Kennedy and, the
previous evening, for Teresa Heinz Kerry.
Argue all you want. The PDAs for Kennedy’s fiery speech—clearly
coming both from journalists and non-journalists attending the SEJ meeting—make
clear one point: Those journalists longing to be and be perceived as
being more committed to the “j” than to the “e” in the term environmental
journalism have their work cut out for them. The remedy lies in the
most determined, most independent, and most responsible journalism on
issues involving natural resources and the environment. It’s not an
easy road in today’s media climate. It’s just the only one that has
even the faintest chance of working in the long run.
December 2004
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