See additional articles on Journalism Ethics.

Immigration/Population Issues Underreported: Bitter Power Struggle Dominates Sierra Club Election Coverage
by Bill Dawson

It was a "bitter wrangle," the Los Angeles Times reported. Also, a "battle for control" (Washington Post) and a "nasty power struggle" (Philadelphia Inquirer), not to mention a "bitter controversy," "mudslinging contest" and "shouting match" (Grist).

With such a compellingly fierce fight under way earlier this year in the Sierra Club's national board election, it's not surprising that the nation's press covered it mainly as a political story.

The sensitive issue of population control was at the center of the fierce debate -- specifically, whether the Sierra Club should support immigration limits.

To the extent that the election, therefore, presented an extra opportunity for reporters to take a detailed look at the complex question of population's role in creating or aggravating environmental problems, it was largely a missed opportunity.

According to an extensive survey of the election coverage, based on Lexis-Nexis and other archive searches, most stories on the election concentrated on the Sierra Club debate itself, in which charges of racism, misrepresentation, election improprieties and "hostile takeover" were freely tossed about.

Population and Environment Links Go Largely Unexplored

From January through April, this survey showed, the underlying issue of the population- environmental intersection was rarely addressed by journalists in any comprehensive way, and when it was, it was most often reported in the form of often-brief quotes from Sierra Club officials, candidates and members themselves.

The emphasis on the tussle over the club's direction -- and particularly the racism angle -- began with the first prominent articles that appeared in January, both of which were influential in shaping subsequent coverage.

On Jan. 16, an Associated Press article from Montgomery, Ala., reported that Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent civil rights group, was running for the Sierra Club board in order to call attention to his concern that "right-wing anti-immigration groups" were trying to seize control of the organization.

Two days later on Jan. 18, the first major overview piece on the election appeared in the Los Angeles Times, describing a takeover attempt by "an unusual alliance of anti-immigration advocates and animal-rights activists."

The article, by Times reporters Miguel Bustillo and Kenneth R. Weiss, quoted Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope saying he did not believe three anti-immigration board candidates were racists, but that they were "clearly being supported by racists."

From then until the election results were made public in late April -- all three immigration- control advocates lost -- the political angle was dominant in virtually all coverage, ranging from national newspapers to small dailies. (Members cast mail-in and online ballots from March 1 to April 15.)

Most Coverage Reported from California, Colorado

According to the Lexis-Nexis search, relatively few newspapers undertook their own coverage of the election. Google News searches showed that many more relied on AP or other newspaper stories available via news services.

Computerized archives and the people who use them are both imperfect and unlikely to capture every article, but journalistic attention to the Sierra Club election appears to have been overwhelmingly concentrated in just two states -- California and Colorado.

About 100 staff-written articles, editorials, and staff and guest columns that clearly dealt in some fashion with the election fight's focus on immigration were found through Lexis-Nexis and by other means.Of those, 42 were in California and 16 in Colorado.

The probable reasons are not hard to guess. Various growth-related issues and environmental concerns are prominent in both states. The Sierra Club was founded and is based in California. And the best-known of the unsuccessful immigration-control candidates for the club board was Colorado's colorful and controversial ex-governor, Richard Lamm, whose role in the election was a dominant factor in Colorado coverage.

Even in the California and Colorado reporting, however, much of it detailed and thoughtful, there was little effort to move beyond the context of the election contest itself, with its charges and countercharges, to undertake any substantial examination of the demographic and natural resource issues beneath the furor.

The most notable exception was a lengthy article in the Los Angeles Times magazine on Jan. 25 by freelance writer Lee Green. He offered a detailed account of rapid population growth in the state and its varied ramifications, particularly for infrastructure. The piece didn't mention the Sierra Club election, however, and it gave little attention directly to the population-environment question. Given its publication date, the article was obviously prepared well before the election story burst into prominence.

Other especially long articles on the Sierra Club election appeared in two weekly newspapers in California, the LA Weekly and Santa Barbara Independent. Each dealt mainly with political aspects, without much discussion of population's environmental impacts.

None of this is to say that reporters in California and Colorado omitted attention to the environmental topic underlying the immigration debate.

Bustillo and Weiss of the Los Angeles Times, for instance, included basic statistics about demographic trends and consumption rates, along with historical context about environmentalists' population concerns. Their March 24 analysis dealt with how the Sierra Club debate "has exposed a rift in the nation's environmental movement itself" over immigration.

A long article on the election in Westword, a Denver weekly, mainly focused on Lamm's role in the election as an entry point into a discussion of the immigration debate and the racism charges. But it also contained several paragraphs on Colorado's rapid growth.

And in both states, numerous opinion articles addressed the basic population-environment issue directly, if relatively briefly.

Little Original Staff-Written Coverage in Most Papers

Beyond California and Colorado, however, there was much less original coverage of the issue of any sort, even in nearby states with some similar features.

For instance, in Texas -- which is the second most populous state after California, also shares a border with Mexico, and has a large and growing immigrant population -- only two staff-written articles on the Sierra Club election were located by Lexis-Nexis and in individual archive searches at the state's leading newspapers.

One was a moderate-length election overview in the San Antonio Express-News, and the other was a story reporting the election results in the Houston Chronicle. Neither article examined the environmental issues themselves in depth.

Various factors may explain the large disparity in levels of California and Texas coverage, but one reason is probably the fact that immigration has not been a major source of political dispute in Texas in recent years, as it has in California.

NPR's 'Living on Earth' Trumps National Newspapers

At national and other large newspapers, staff coverage of the Sierra Club election almost uniformly focused on the multifaceted election dispute itself.

Straightforward pre-election overview stories by staff reporters, all of modest length, ran in the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and USA Today. A search of the Wall Street Journal's online archives revealed no coverage of the election, though the Journal's editorial page has often dealt with both environmental and immigration issues in recent years.

(By far the most detailed discussion of population-environment issues, per se, that was found among national media outlets was not in a newspaper but on National Public Radio's "Living on Earth," a lengthy interview by host Steve Curwood with Paul Ehrlich, population studies professor at Stanford University, which was broadcast on Feb. 20.)

Meanwhile, other related angles were explored in some newspapers of varying size where staff reporters wrote about the election.

In California, for instance, during the time the debate was unfolding, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury-News all ran feature articles about growing conservation commitment among the state's Hispanic population, though only the Times story mentioned the Sierra Club election.

In the Mercury-News article, reporter Paul Rogers wrote that "Latino voters are turning out to be the most devoted environmentalists in California."

Other approaches were also evident in stories explicitly related to the election.

Expanding the political frame of reference, an article in the Kansas City Star portrayed the Sierra Club contest as part of a growing national debate over immigration, including President Bush's immigration proposal.

Other newspapers cast their reportorial eye in more of a local (or regional) direction, even if was not to explore topics related to population growth in their areas.

The Oregonian of Portland published a lengthy article about the election that was essentially a profile of Sierra Club board member Paul Watson, an ally of the immigration-control candidates, whose Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is based on San Juan Island in neighboring Washington state.

The Ithaca Journal pegged its election overview to David Pimentel, one of the immigration-limit candidates and an emeritus professor at that town's Cornell University.

The Fresno Bee's coverage, meanwhile, demonstrated how national coverage could have local repercussions.

The New York Times' election overview had quoted a website column in which a Sierra Club member supporting the immigration-control candidates had called Hmong immigrants "drug-addicted polygamists." That caused offense in the Fresno area's sizeable Hmong community, which led to three articles in the Bee.

One of the briefest of the localized accounts was surely a four-paragraph blurb in a Charlotte Observer gossip column, shortly after the election results were announced. It noted that "Charlotte's Goddess of Green, Lisa Renstom, became a national name this week as the top vote-getter."

The column noted that Renstrom and other winners "beat a slate of candidates who wanted the Sierra Club to focus on controlling U.S. population through immigration policy."

Editor's Note: The Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, publisher of Environment Writer, receives grant support from the population program of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.