Agency press offices. You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.

There has been passionate discussion lately about the performance of various federal agency press offices that are key to the environmental beat. EW was going to do a long investigative expose documenting the problem and naming names, but procrastinated for months ... years even. Then the administration changed. The villains evaporated.

That presents a chance to write a positive column — on how agencies should do the press-office job. And it presents a new administration with a chance to prove how much better it is than the old one.

Now here, in telegraphic “Bill of Rights” form, are some of the main things reporters ought to be able to expect from an agency press office:

1. Returned phone calls. Normally within no more than a couple of hours, and certainly by the end of the same day. Even faster is even better.
2. Prompt notice of news. Most competent agencies today have e-mail press lists, and e-mail transmission is almost instantaneous. That allows advisories and alerts to work well, even if the advisory comes only a few hours before an event. Press releases about an event can be e-mailed or put on the Web within minutes after an event or press conference.
3. Informed press officers. If a press officer is assigned responsibility for a certain subject area or realm within an agency, he or she should know with certainty the important facts about important stories.
4. Names and phone numbers. We still need to talk to humans and ask questions. Every press release should have the name and phone of at least one authoritative or quotable contact. Agency Web sites should give names and phones of press officers.
5. Access to agency people. The sources who know the most or speak with most authority are often the decision-makers and program people in the bowels of an agency, not the press officers themselves. The job of the press office is to put reporters directly in touch with agency people, not to shelter or censor them.
6. Fair and equal treatment of media. OK, let’s be realistic. Given two “While you were out” slips from two reporters, a press officer will probably return the call from The New York Times before the one from The Podunk Bugle. But both call should get returned promptly. Day-ahead leaks to the Washington Post are unfair and manipulative.
7. Access to information. In the old days, this meant paper, but in today’s electronic environment, this should be easier and better. The press office’s job is to help reporters find and get information relevant to their stories. This often means “documents” like reports, Federal Register notices, policies, studies, memos, etc. Even better is when press offices offer backgrounders with key facts and context.
8. A good Web site. An effective agency Web site can help with most of the above. It can make an agency, its staff, and its workings transparent and accessible not only to reporters, but to the public-at-large, which is the media’s ultimate audience.
9. Accuracy. Goes without saying but needs to be said.
10. Honesty. Ditto.

Joseph A. Davis

Analysis

Rarely has a piece of environmental journalism caused so much stir with industry and journalists as Bill Moyers’ March 25, 2001, documentary, Trade Secrets.

The 2-hour show, produced by Sherry Jones, documented how the chemical industry knew of harm to workers’ health caused by exposure to vinyl chloride monomer and other chemicals, but con-cealed the threat from employees exposed. The show suggests that this decades-long effort during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and later, was part of a larger legal, lobbying, and public relations “war” on the public’s right to know about toxic dangers from industrial chemicals.

Much of the ground in Trade Secrets had been covered in a 1998 feature series by reporter Jim Morris in the Houston Chronicle — “In Strictest Confidence: The Chemical Industry’s Secrets” (http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/special/vinyl/index.html). Morris is now with U.S. News & World Report. Both his work and the Moyers-Jones piece were based largely on a huge trove of chemical industry documents assembled by William Baggett, Jr., a Lake Charles, Louisiana, lawyer who successfully sued chemical companies for families of workers who had died of diseases linked to vinyl chloride exposure. The show featured the story of Dan Ross, whose death from brain cancer in 1990 was at issue in Ross v. Conoco.

The contested ground was not the toxicity of chemicals so much as the credibility of the chemical industry itself. The documents pictured an industry working for decades to conceal toxicity information, spending millions to defeat right-to-know legislation, and millions more on PR campaigns to manipulate public perceptions and discussion of chemical health risks.

Some of the documents, such as minutes of a May 21, 1973, meeting discussed plans for concealing information about vinyl chloride’s health risks from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The minutes were from a meeting at the Manufacturing Chemists Association, precursor of the Chemical Manufacturers Association and the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

Industry spokesmen on the Moyers’ program and afterwards continued to claim that the industry was devoted to openness. Their response emphasized that the industry had eventually published its findings about health risks of vinyl chloride and taken steps to reduce worker exposure.

The industry’s response to Moyers’ program was not to deny directly most of the specific charges, but to mount an aggressive pre-emptive PR strike directly at the credibility of the program. In doing so, industry provoked intense discussion among environmental journalists about ethics and procedures.

After the show aired, the debate continued through a battle of Web sites. PBS did a Web version of the show and its back-ground at http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/. That site includes a written transcript of the show. The ACC published its rebuttal on http://www.abouttradesecrets.org/. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), whose president Ken Cook participated in the post-show panel discussion, put up http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org. That site claims to have “37,000 pages of internal company documents” in a searchable database.

The PBS site included Moyers’ counter-rebuttal to ACC’s specific complaints that his report had been inaccurate. Moyers’ response was that the ACC’s “corrections” were themselves inaccurate.

The ACC rebuttal site pointedly features a link to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. That code admonishes journalists to “diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing” — but also to “deny favored treatment to ... special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.”

Balance Issues: During or After?

The key point of contention over how the show was done stems from the ACC complaint that it was not allowed to respond to charges during on-camera interviews during the body of the documentary itself.

“Before airing what has been described as an expose of the chemical industry,” ACC president Fred Webber wrote PBS president Pat Mitchell, “PBS should know that, to the best of our knowledge, neither Mr. Moyers nor his producer, Sherry Jones, contacted any of the targets of this report to give these companies or individuals a chance to respond to allegations and correct possible errors.”

Webber’s letter came after about five weeks of calls and correspondence between Moyers and ACC, as they dickered over ACC input into the show. But it was ACC who first approached Moyers.

“We didn’t exclude the chemical industry from our documentary,” Moyers told the National Press Club. “We planned a two-hour broadcast in which they ... will have ... a half hour — one quarter of the broadcast to deal with the issues raised by our reporting.”

The ACC did not like this format (and did not, as Moyers implies, control the entire half-hour).

It became a matter of definitions. If the panel was part of the show, then Moyers could say the industry viewpoint was included. If the panel was not part of the show, then the industry could say it was excluded.

Panelists in the final half-hour segment included Terry F. Yosie, ACC’s vice president for strategic communications, a former EPA official who had been the point man in ACC’s effort to influence the show before it aired. Also included was Ted Voorhees, a lawyer with Covington & Burling, who represented the industry in the Ross case. Also participating was Dr. Philip Landrigan of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, an expert in environmental health and advocate of stronger health protections. The fourth participant was Ken Cook of EWG, an environmental advocacy group specializing in large research projects. Moyers moderated the discussion.

Moyers himself had argued that interviews in the body of the documentary would not be inherently fairer. “... They will have more time in that half hour,” Moyers told the National Press Club, “than they would have if I had interviewed them. And, if I had interviewed them, they would have claimed that I didn’t give them enough of the interview and that I had taken them out of context, and then they would have turned their advertising firm, their public relations firm, loose on us here .... I’m not a fool.”

Advance Review for Industry?

A related issue was whether and how much ACC was told, or should have been told, about the show’s content ahead of time — and how far ahead of time

Targets of an investigation can defend themselves more effectively in an interview if they know the charges ahead of time. Ambush interviews are common on TV, but unfair if used only to put a subject at a disadvantage. When a subject has evaded reporters and refused comment, such tactics may be a fair way to document that refusal; ACC, however, was eager to comment.

In a February 6 letter to Moyers, Yosie said he had first heard of the project in a January 15 PBS promotion. ACC sounded two themes repeatedly during the correspondence that followed. First, the trade group wanted to know what was in Moyers’ report. Second, it wanted to shape it to contain the messages about the chemical industry which it wanted the public to hear. The complete correspondence is on ACC’s Web site at http://www.abouttradesecrets.org/letters/index.html.

Yosie wrote that ACC “would like to learn more about the story you are planning to tell, including any information that has already been shared with other parties.”

Yosie also asked to meet with Moyers “to share our perspective on issues that are relevant to the broadcast. The Council is prepared to present you with important information prior to the final editing of the program. This information relates to chemical testing as well as broader issues such as the social responsibility of industry to the public.”

Moyers responded that since editing of the report was still in progress, an interview/meeting was premature.

“We follow the sound journalistic practice of not screening an investigative report to the subject of the report in advance,” Moyers wrote. “However, any participants in the discussion obviously would have to see the documentary portion of the program prior to talking about the issues raised by it.”

In the following weeks, Moyers and Yosie discussed how far ahead of the panel discussion participants would get to see the documentary portion. ACC wanted days, while Moyers offered hours.

ACC Demands Retraction

When Yosie did not get what he wanted from Moyers, ACC’s Fred Webber wrote PBS’s Pat Mitchell on March 15, saying: “We are greatly concerned about the language which has been on your website and in your winter newsletter that promotes ... “Trade Secrets”, which says it is “based on a massive archive of secret industry documents as shocking as the ‘tobacco papers’”. Please issue an immediate retraction of this language from all promotional communications about the program. We are an industry that makes life-saving and essential products, and we resent being compared to purveyors of an addictive product that provides no benefit to society. The comparison is wrong and damaging.”

Use of terms like “damaging” — together with carbon-copying the correspondence to both CMA’s and PBS’s general counsels, implied the threat of a product-libel lawsuit. Yosie had pressed Moyers to tell him whether particular products or companies were mentioned in the report. Eventually, the letters started coming from ACC General Counsel David F. Zoll rather than from Yosie. Moyers told Yosie in a phone call that no individual products were mentioned during the show, and Yosie meticulously created a record of this in his next letter.

PBS President Mitchell backed Moyers and did not buckle. She responded that the tobacco reference in promotional materials “makes no comparison of the products” of the tobacco and chemical industries, but “merely draws a comparison between the two industries’ secret documents.” Furthermore, she wrote, “It is longstanding PBS policy that subjects of a journalistic report are not permitted to view the program in advance.”

Pre-Show Publicity

On March 22, three days before it aired, Moyers’ show was the subject of a 700-word story by media reporter Howard Kurtz on page one of the Washington Post’s “Style” section. Kurtz fo-cused on the issue of whether chemical industry response would come during or after the documentary. ACC by this time had put up its Web site and had posted its correspondence with Moyers.

An unusual feature of the publicity for Moyers’ show was that some grass-roots environmental groups were organizing “viewing parties” — which seemed to signal advance inside knowledge of the show’s content.

ACC president Fred Webber charged in a letter that “Within an hour of PBS’s first Web posting of the announcement of the program, the Web sites of several activist groups announced mature plans for a nationwide anti-chemistry campaign,” with Moyers program as “the centerpiece of their effort.”

Moyers acknowledged during the show that “the foundation I serve made a small grant to Mr. Cook’s organization a few years ago,” but added “I didn’t meet him until three weeks ago.” EWG seemed to know that the show would feature Baggett’s documents, because immediately after Moyers’s show aired, EWG posted thousands of pages of them on its Web site.

In addition to the publicity apparatus of PBS and its network of stations, the New York PR firm of Kelly & Salerno Communications publicized the show.

Who Won?

In this epic battle of spin and counterspin, the important question may not be whether Moyers or ACC won, but whether the public won or lost.

Did Moyers get beyond “he-said-she-said journalism,” helping viewers arrive at the truth behind contradictory assertions by environmentalists and industry?

“These internal industry documents are a fact,” Moyers said in a luncheon address to the National Press Club. “They exist. They’re not a matter of opinion or point of view. They state what the industry knew, when they knew it, and what they decided to do.”

But if he-said-she-said journalism was missing from the body of the documentary itself, it certainly had its innings in the post-show panel — and also in the battle of Web sites.

The documents which were the key material and greatest strength of Moyers’ show may also have been its greatest weakness because he relied on them so heavily. It is hard to make good TV from paper documents. The misdeeds they documented were 30 or 40 years old and had mostly been corrected. Moyers did only minimal checking to see whether the picture they portrayed was accurate. Talking to industry people involved in the events would have added depth and context that would have made it harder to demonize industry. The show was less successful at connecting these historical events with policy struggles still going on today over chemical right-to-know.

Moyers’ decision to limit industry’s voice to the post-show panel probably helped insulate the show from efforts to manipulate content and neutralize its impact. It seems likely that the ACC, if interviewed, would have come up with the same mix of non-responses, non-denials, inaccurate “corrections,” and free commercials for better living through chemistry that it fielded after the show.

Moyers told Kurtz that “If I had given it to them too far in advance, they would have tried to do what industry has always done” — namely try to pre-empt the show with a PR campaign of their own. But in fact, the ACC campaign was already in full swing, and Kurtz’s article, which did a solid job of trying to report the controversy fairly and objectively, was a manifestation of ACC’s successful campaign to frame the issue.

“None of this should have surprised us,” Moyers told the National Press Club. “This is the industry that 30 years earlier had mounted a blitzkrieg designed to destroy Rachel Carson’s credibility as soon as the New Yorker published the first of her three-part condensation of Silent Spring.

The ACC argued that the show could not possibly be fair or balanced, because it did not include more time devoted to the industry’s chosen message.

“Investigative journalism is not a collaboration between the journalist and the subject,” Moyers responded during the panel discussion.

Had Moyers revealed more of the show’s content or tried to defend himself in advance against charges of unfairness, he could effectively have given the industry a seat at the editing console.

But that strategy had its downside. Industry attacked his editorial judgment anyway. Not contacting them with even a few simple questions made it seem like he was afraid of them, avoiding them, uninterested in the facts, or close-minded to their perspective.

Ultimately, Moyers’ editorial choice allowed the chemical industry to shift the focus of public attention away from its own past misdeeds and credibility — which he had demonstrated was low, and which was the real subject of his report — to his own credibility and “ethics” as a journalist.

Your Secrets Are Safe With Us

Group Charges Suppression of Dioxin Reassessment

“We Had This Water Brought in Special for You Folks”

Of course it made the Washington Post’s Style section when Bush told reporters and Congressfolk they were serving a special purpose that night. Bush said he had been studying arsenic in drinking water and experts told him he had to test about 3,000 glasses of water. “Thank you for participating,” he joshed.

The joke was lost on some environmentalists. A dozen or so environmental, health, church, and cancer-victims’ groups shot back with an April 5 letter taking offense at the joke. They said they were “deeply dismayed by your lack of respect for the feelings of those who believe that arsenic or other toxic contaminants may have played a role in causing their illness or the illness or death of a loved one.”

EPA Kills ‘Read Only’ Chemical Risk Data

EPA Lets Clinton TRI Lead Disclosure Rule Stand

A new analysis of census bureau data on the United States’ 100 largest urbanized areas says anti-sprawl efforts are missing half the battle if they focus on per capita land-use and consumption choices or on population growth and not on the two causes together.

Land-use consumption decisions and population growth “share equally in the blame” for urban sprawl, the authors maintain based on their analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

“On average, there are more of us, and each of us is using more urban land, and therein lie two halves of the problem,” write Leon Kolankiewicz, a planner, and Roy Beck, a former newspaper environmental reporter. Their report, “Weighing Sprawl Factors in Large U.S. Cities,” is published by NumbersUSA.com, an Internet organization that tracks U.S. population trends.

The authors write that the nation’s 100 largest urbanized areas grew over an additional 14,545 miles over the past 20 years, extending over more than 9 million acres of natural habitats, farmland, and other rural space. Calling sprawl “one of the nation’s hottest political issues,” they write that communities need by and large need to address both land-use/consumption issues and population growth if they hope to counter negative impacts of sprawl.

“Anyone advocating U.S. population stabilization who derides the importance of consumption and planning controls is ignoring half the story of American sprawl,” they maintain. “Any Smart Growth advocate who relegates population growth to a side issue is turning a blind eye to half the problem and, thus, approximately half the solution, which is population stabilization.”

The authors say cities with declines in population, such as Milwaukee or Detroit, can still experience sprawl. “Detroit had no population growth whatsoever between 1970 and 1990, but it still was swimming in sprawl,” they say, adding that the average sprawl (percentage increase in total urban land) for 11 urbanized areas with no population growth was 26 percent. Were it not for those areas’ population declines, they write, their sprawl “likely would have been far greater.”

In the top 100 urbanized areas, the authors found that 50.9 percent of sprawl related to population growth and 49.1 percent related to per capita land consumption. “To ignore either growth factor, for sure, would be to ignore a vast amount of lost natural habitats, farmland and other rural space,” they write.

They take a region-by-region approach in concluding, for instance, that the Northeast, Border States, and Great Lakes face per capita land use sprawl as a “primary” factor and population growth as a “significant” factor. For the Plains states, Old South, and Chesapeake Bay Watershed, both are “primary” factors, while for Texas and the Pacific Northwest per capita sprawl is “significant” (20 to 39 %) and population growth “primary” (61-80 %). For California, the desert Southwest, the Mountain West, and Florida, they find per capita sprawl to have been a “minor” factor (0-19 %) and population growth the “overwhelming” factor (81-100 %).

Nationwide, they write, per capita sprawl was a significant factor of 20 percent or more in eight of the 12 regions they classified and a minor factor (19 percent or less) in four regions. In no region was it an “overwhelming” factor, comprising 81 percent or more of the cause for the sprawl.

Population growth, on the other hand, was a significant factor in all 12 regions and the primary factor in nine of them, including four regions in which it was the “overwhelming factor” in increased sprawl. They suggest that the news media need to better understand the significance of the Census Bureau if they are to report more effectively on the population implications for sprawl. They maintain that media commentators equating sprawl with economic vitality are out of synch with the American public generally.

For information on the 62-page Kolankiewicz/Beck report, call (877) 885-7733, or contact the publishing organization at info@sprawlcity.org, Web site http://www.SprawlCity.org.

Localizing the climate change story to the Great Lakes region will be a highlight of this year’s Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute, sponsored by Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.

A Tuesday, June 5, opening keynote talk by The New York Times’ science and environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin will open the meeting, which is scheduled to run through Saturday, June 9. Revkin has covered environmental issues for The Times since 1995, initially reporting on the metropolitan region before moving to global environmental issues in June 2000 to take the beat of the retired William K. Stevens.

The National Safety Council’s Environmental Health Center (EHC), publisher of Environment Writer, this year is cosponsoring the Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute in cooperation with Michigan State’s journalism school. EHC staff currently working on an update to their Reporting on Climate Change reporter’s guide, will be among the faculty speaking at the meeting.

The Wednesday, June 6, session is scheduled to open with an overview on global climate change science by Anthony Socci, Ph.D., who had worked with the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) before joining the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation last year. Socci’s remarks will focus on improving understanding of climate science issues.

The University of Michigan’s Peter Sousounis, Ph.D., who headed a recent federally funded Great Lakes regional assessment of climate change impacts, is to discuss knowns and unknowns of potential impacts on the Great Lakes region. Professor JimTeeri of the University of Michigan, a popular speaker at past Great Lakes Training Institute programs, will discuss specific impacts on plants and forestry. Jeffrey Alson, of EPA’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, mobile sources laboratory, is scheduled to address mobile source technologies in the context of climate change.

Program participants on Wednesday evening are scheduled to enjoy an annual outing for an informal dinner at the Lansing Lugnuts/Kane County Cougars minor league baseball game at nearby Oldsmobile Stadium.

Computer-assisted reporting, environmental journalism ethical issues, and a visit to the University’s Kellogg Biological Station research site are among scheduled Friday and Saturday highlights.

Keynoter Andy Revkin’s reporting career spans experiences ranging from Hudson River PCB pollution to the murder of Amazon rain forest activist Chico Mendes, about whom Revkin wrote in his 1990 book The Burning Season, which became the basis for an HBO film of the same name.

Revkin in 1992 wrote “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast,” which became the companion volume to an American Museum of Natural History exhibit on climate change. He is a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Journalism Award, and he also has won an Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) award. A graduate of Brown University in biology and of Columbia University’s graduate journalism program, Revkin the musician and songwriter has occasionally accompanied legendary folk singer Pete Seeger in regional folk festivals. He is an accomplished offshore sailor, whose first journalism job involved sailing a 33-foot sloop 1,000 miles along the New England coast and writing and photographing a piece for Offshore magazine.

Journalists interested in attending the 2001 Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute should contact Barb Miler at (517) 432-1415 or mille384@msu.edu. The registration deadline is May 21, and registrations of reporters beyond the Great Lakes region will be accommodated once regional reporters’ applications are considered. Registration fee for the training program is $75. Further information, including application form, is online at http://environmental.jrn.msu.edu/Lake.htm.

The 2001 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America went to Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, two Florida TV reporters whose 1996 story on bovine growth hormone was spiked by a Fox Television affiliate after pressure from the drug’s manufacturer, Monsanto.

The $125,000 prize for North America is awarded annually by the Goldman Foundation to “environmental heroes” on each of six continents.

Akre won a $425,000 court judgment in August 2000 as a result of the incident (See October 2000 and May 1998 EW). She and Wilson refused to change their story after Monsanto pressured their station and were fired in 1997. In 1998, they sued the station. A more extensive account of their story is on their Web site at http://www.foxbghsuit.com/.

Note: Formerly published by the National Safety Council. Reprinted with permission.