Word on the street -- just which street isn’t exactly clear, but does it matter really?* -- is that environmental journalism issues dang-near brought the proposed Viacom/CBS merger to its knees.

Remember. You heard it here first.

Forget about the quote (you’ve no doubt seen it) Washington Post media watchdog Howard Kurtz attributed to New Yorker magazine media writer Ken Auletta.

You know the one I mean: "When [Viacom Chairman] Sumner Redstone and [CBS President] Mel Karmazin sat down to discuss this deal, do you think a major point of discussion was ‘How do we improve the quality of CBS News?’"

And pshaww also to the obvious belly-aching attributed to New York University media studies prof Crispin Miller in his own rant: "The implications of these mergers for journalism and the arts are enormous ... It seems to me that this is, by any definition, an undemocratic development. The media system in a democracy should not be inordinately dominated by a very few powerful interests."

Earth to Miller. R U there? Anywhere?

All that aside, we have it on perfectly sound speculation that the quality of broadcast coverage of today’s and tomorrow’s pressing environmental issues in fact was at the cusp of the entire negotiation. Krispin was committed, we hear, to maintaining the traditions of the "old" CBS News network .... you know, the Edward R. Murrow "Harvest of Shame" bit, and even Walter Cronkite’s more recent brand of reportage, and the late Charles Kuralt’s extraordinary CBS Sunday Morning reportage on environmental issues, including, but not limited to, the weekly show’s concluding segment in the wilds.

"We’re not selling unless we can be certain that the CBS network can provide an interested and informed citizenry with the kind of important environmental coverage they need in a democracy to make the system function as the Founding Fathers and Mothers originally intended."

Or something like that. Those may not be Karmazin’s exact words, probably aren’t. But again, ala the drudgery of it all, close enough by today’s standards.

Ends up what could have been a game-breaker is in fact the screw that holds the whole merger together. Forget about Karmazin’s championing of Howard Stern and forget too about all the concerns about still more media-lite. Turns out that Viacom’s Redstone too is committed to only the best environmental reportage.

His last name alone should be hint enough.

Now. Just sit back and watch the environmental air-time zoom. Can NBC and ABC be far behind?

Not really.

__________
* May in fact have been an Avenue. A Court or Blvd. A Way even, but who cares in this era of Drudge-inspired 80 percent accurate reporting thresholds? Does it matter? Of course not. Close enough.

September 16-19 at UCLA

Smog. Celebrity activists. Cross-border pollution. Freeways and sprawl. Pesticide- poisoned farmworkers. Troubled whales. Sewage Baywatch. Wildfires. Water wars. Desert- despoiling dirtbikes. Steinbeck’s nature philosophy. The megalopolis in the Millenium. This one promises to have it all.

The Society of Environmental Journalists’ national conference September 16-19 on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles will explore the wealth of environmental issues that bedevil Southern California, and also the basic craft of telling stories with pictures and words and other issues relevant to attendees from across the country.

Several hundred environmental journalists -- and speakers and exhibitors hoping to get their messages some media attention -- will converge on the West-wood campus for field trips, workshops, panels, and multimedia extravaganzas.

Events range from an ecological field trip to rugged Santa Catalina Island, 20 miles offshore, to a dinner reception at the Long Beach Aquarium where conference-goers can see jellyfish and a scale-model blue whale, while enjoying some nonendangered seafood.

The keynote speaker is to be David Brower, the former Sierra Club head who split to establish Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and then Earth Island Institute. With an eventual re-election to the Sierra Club Board of Directors that attracted much media interest, Brower’s career as a firebrand activist spans the history of the modern environmental movement.

Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams, Of Whales and Men, and other books, is to share his reflections on nature writing in a Sunday morning session. Among those also scheduled to speak at the meeting are Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, Earth Day 2000’s Denis Hayes, and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

The conference includes the SEJ annual membership meeting and an open Board of Directors meeting. There will also be a "Wildlife Film Festival" and a "Network Lunch," where attendees can schmooze with colleagues interested in particular topics.

The meat of the conference will be full- and half-day field tours and numerous indoor panel sessions with enough expert sources, sponsors hope, to build a story to help justify reporters’ travel time and expenses.

Complete program and registration information is available at http://www.sej.org/conferences/index.html or by calling (215) 836-9970.

The last summer of the ’90s has been a scorcher to remember. Coupled with an extremely dry spring, the summer’s sizzling temperatures and lack of rain have had disastrous human and economic consequences.

Scores of counties -- indeed, some entire states -- have been designated drought disaster areas. The Secretary of Agriculture has called the drought the worst since the Depression. The Washington Post published a periodic "Drought Diary."

For journalists, it has been a season to revive the debate about whether hot summers, drought, and extreme weather are the result of global warming -- or the result of natural climate fluctuations, and just a vivid example of what life could be like if pollution creates radical climate change. The drought also gave reporters a chance to take the political pulse of the global warming debate.

Here’s how it played in stories across the country.

• Christian Science Monitor: "With extreme weather hitting many places, people may wonder what scientists really know about climate change. Climatologist Jerry Mahlman ... laid out the following scheme ....

  "There are ‘virtually certain facts’ with odds of 99 to 1 of being right:

  • "Humans are pumping out greenhouse gases that warm Earth and will affect climate for many centuries to come.
  • "Natural climate variability makes it hard to pin down human impact. Also, it will take more than a decade to significantly clear up key scientific uncertainties such as the effects of changes in clouds, atmospheric water vapor, ice, and ocean currents. It will also take at least a decade to figure out what may happen to local weather.
  • "No matter what we do to reduce emissions, atmospheric carbon dioxide ‘will eventually exceed a doubling of pre-industrial levels.’ Therefore, ‘significant climate change is almost guaranteed to occur.’"

• Gannett News Service: "As much of the country chokes through dry spells or full-blown drought after a month of deadly heat, climatological doomspeak is flying fast and loose.

  "Some forecasters are calling this the ‘drought of the century’ in some areas.

  "Last week, Vice President Al Gore joined television’s Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy’ to warn fifth-graders about global warming....

  "Is it hot and dry? Yes, in some parts of the country.

  "Is global warming or La Niña to blame?

  "Impossible to say....

  "Is the planet getting warmer because of industrial emissions? Many mainstream scientists believe it is, but very few will come out and attribute this summer’s heat and drought to it.

  "A heat wave -- even a couple of scorching summers in a row -- do not add up to global warming, they stress."

• Newsweek: "Do recent droughts and heat waves have you thinking the greenhouse effect is to blame? Individual years don’t prove a thing. But the ’90s are indeed the hottest decade since records have been kept ....

  "Congress won’t pass the international Kyoto agreement that would limit emissions. Why? Kyoto won’t police China, the No. 2 emitter behind the United States ....

  "Emissions are down ... despite the booming economy. One deduction: regulating emissions won’t quash the boom. Another: we shouldn’t regulate, since things are improving on their own."

• New York Times (op/ed by Bob Herbert): "We can do it. We can keep our heads buried in the increasingly hot sand until we’re all as crisp as french fries.

  "Or we can try to raise our collective consciousness and do something about global warming ....

  "We could get this problem under control, but that would require political leadership and a fair amount of willpower -- two qualities that currently are in spectacularly short supply.

  "So we’ll wait. Not enough people dying yet, and not enough property destroyed. We’ll keep our heads in the blazing hot sand until we actually feel the flames of a full-fledged catastrophe."

• New York Times (editorial): "A high-pressure dome has kept rain from the mid-Atlantic states this summer, a weather pattern related to the occurrence of La Niña, a drop in sea-surface temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific last winter. It is hard to tie any single drought unequivocally to the solid evidence of global warming, but that too lurks in many people’s minds as the ultimate cause of this summer’s parching."

• Time: "While a single heat wave doesn’t make a worldwide meltdown, a great many scientists believe that by continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humans are forcing drastic climate changes. Yet Congress seems determinedly indifferent. As the lawmakers prepare for their summer adjournment, legislative efforts to slow that warming by reducing greenhouse emissions have all but ground to a halt ....

  "Congress has been nibbling at the global warming issue piecemeal, with opponents throwing up obstacles at almost every turn in the form of directives and riders tacked on to major spending bills so they slip through the legislative process virtually unnoticed ....

  "While Congress remains bitterly divided along party lines on other issues, opposition to climate-change initiatives has surprisingly broad support on both sides of the aisle."

• U.S. News and World Report: "Are these natural disasters a sign that global warming has finally arrived with a vengeance? Might they be signaling some impending millennial apocalypse?

  "The situation is not so simple and probably not so dire -- though weather experts can’t say for sure exactly what’s going on. Like all weather, droughts and heat waves have complex causes, including random ones with no explanation ....

  "Those who deal with the global climate seem more certain that the summer heat and even the year’s drought are not evidence of a profound change."

• Wall Street Journal (op/ed piece by Sallie Baliunas): "Last month’s heat wave has prompted by-now-predictable warnings about, as Time magazine’s cover puts it this week, ‘New Concerns on Global Warming.’

  "But actual temperatures have not cooperated with the computer models .... One reason for the failure of the models is that they overlook an important natural factor that probably influences temperatures: the changing sun ....

  "This know-nothing approach is counter-productive. Discoveries about the causes of climate change, like a varying sun, are the key to creating better models. Introducing the sun’s impact in the models has shown that human effects on temperature are much smaller than first projected, and perhaps insignificant compared with natural temperature changes. Those who are worried about global warming can cool down."

• Washington Post: "With a severe drought emptying reservoirs from Montana to Maryland, and California threatening to drain the last drop from the Colorado River, it may seem like an opportune moment for the United States to approach its friendly northern neighbor for some of that cool, clean Canadian water.

  "With 20 percent of the world’s supply of fresh water, Canada has more water than it could ever need. Even after discounting for icebergs, that’s still four times the per capita renewable water reserve of the United States.

  "But don’t count on Canadians sharing any of it. For nothing, it seems, stirs Canada’s nationalistic passions more than the prospect of exporting its precious national fluid ....

  "Tom Osborne, a leading Conservative member of Newfoundland’s provincial legislature, predicts that in the coming era of global warming, Canada could become the Saudi Arabia of H2O ....

  "This fall, the Canadian government plans to push through legislation banning bulk water removal from all boundary waters over which it has jurisdiction."

• Washington Post (op/ed piece by David Ignatius): "As we near the end of this scorching summer, a reasonable person can’t help wondering whether the drought and shimmering heat we’ve been experiencing are a preview of what’s ahead if global warming continues.

  "The problem, of course, is that a reasonable person can’t be certain about global warming. The scientific data are still tentative; meanwhile, a powerful political lobby denies that any real problem exists ....

  "Right now, the global warming debate bears an eerie resemblance to the smoking debate several decades ago .... As with tobacco, there are powerful economic interests that would be harmed if we ever decided to take global warming seriously. For generations, members of Congress invoked all those poor tobacco farmers to explain why they wouldn’t take tough action against smoking. But when it comes to global warming, we’re all tobacco farmers. We’ve built an entire economy that lives off carbon dioxide emissions. There are the oil companies that produce the hydrocarbons, and the car companies and electrical utilities that burn them.

  "So it’s no surprise that Congress is siding with industry in opposing any action to reduce global warming, just as it sided for so many years with the tobacco companies."

The National Safety Council’s Environmental Health Center (EHC), publisher of Environment Writer and other environmental journalism resources, is inviting resumes from environmental writers and editors to fill several staff positions in its Washington, D.C., offices.

Candidates must possess outstanding research and writing abilities, have experience with a range of environmental and natural resources issues, be Web- and Internet-savvy, and be committed to credible and authoritative policy research, analysis, and writing. Candidates should submit resumes electronically to ehc@nsc.org, or fax to (202) 293-0032, ATTN: Bud Ward.

Positions involve extensive writing and research in wide range of environmental issues. Program and staff management experience a distinct plus. Strong interpersonal skills, creativity, and commitment to "nonprofit entrepreneurialism" desired.

For more on range of EHC program activities, visit http://www.nsc.org/ehc.htm.

Match the Quotes

Are this summer’s drought and temperatures from hell caused by global warming? It depends who you quote. Here are several points of view. Match the quotes with the quoted.

1. "The world we are going to live in over the next 30 to 40 years will be different climatologically than the world has been in the whole history of civilization."
2. "The fact that it’s hot for a week has nothing at all to do with global warming, which would be measured over decades, not days."
3. "It’s difficult to relate a particular climate event to global warming, but if the atmosphere warms, you would expect more heat waves and longer periods of drought. But relating this to global warming, I’ll get you an equal number of scientists who will argue both sides of that."
4. "We are taking small isolated events, albeit bad ones like this heat wave that has killed people, and broadening them way beyond the point they should be broadened."
5. "I don’t believe it."
6. "Water is the commodity of the next century, and those who possess it and control it could be in a position to control the world’s economy."

Need a government expert -- let’s say an expert from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration -- on ocean life and phytoplankton?

Or on volcanoes or the "heat island" effect in urban areas?

Or maybe on leaves and foliage, comets and impact craters, El Niño, fires, or clouds?

Where to turn?

NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS), in the Greenbelt, Md., Project Science Office, has one answer, a NASA’s Earth Observing System Global Change Media Directory.

The directory provides reporters contact names, affiliations, numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses, and fax numbers for 237 scientists representing more than 30 scientific disciplines "at the center of NASA’s Earth Observing System, from ozone chemistry and natural hazards to global warming and ecosystems."

Representing a range of government, academic, and research organizations, the scientists are indexed according to area of expertise -- Aerosols to Water Resources: Policy -- and by location or affiliation.

Reporters wanting a copy of the Global Change Media Directory should contact Emilie Lorditch at (301) 441-4031.

Maps.

Editors love them. USA Today, among others, has made a killing with them and blazed some important new paths along the way.

Environmental journalists could use them more effectively -- far more effectively -- in communicating with their audiences on everything from hurricane and severe storm risks to urban sprawl, from global warming to sewage treatment, from siting of air quality monitors to siting of new or expanded industrial facilities.

You get the picture.

Now reporters can get an intense three days of training on "one of the most powerful tools of computer-assisted reporting ... the ability to analyze data on a map by plotting incidents, showing trends, and overlaying data to find geographic patterns."

The language comes from the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR), which from October 22-24 are sponsoring the mapping "bootcamp" at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo.

The training on geographical information systems (GIS) is to be done by Jennifer LaFleur of the San Jose Mercury News and Andrew Lehren of NBC Dateline and the IRE/NICAR training staff.

"Reporters have used mapping or GIS to show disaster damage, demographics, crime, accidents, redlining and many geographically based stories," IRE and NICAR say in promoting the training. They say the limited class size attending the October 22-24 training will provide reporters "the basics of mapping, geocoding and spatial analysis using ArcView GIS," a widely used private GIS program.

For more information on the course, call (573) 882-2042, or send e-mail to info@nicar.org.

‘Window on the World’ CD

It’s not every Sunday that your daily paper -- in fact more than one-million copies of any daily paper -- comes complete with a CD-ROM and a promise from the paper saying the free CD "puts you into orbit."

But that’s just what the Times of London did, just about a year ago now, in providing on the cover of its "Sunday Times Magazine" a data-packed CD-ROM which the newspaper promoted as "your gateway to the globe."

"With it you will see a very different view of planet earth, courtesy of the satellites circling above us. You will learn what they can teach us about ourselves, our environment, our businesses and our future."

Offering no warranties about possible viruses, defects, or other glitches, the paper distributed the "Window on the World" CD-ROM produced by the British National Space Center and containing more than 60 multimedia files on more than 2,000 pages.

Describing the CD-ROM as "really two CD-ROMs in one," the Sunday Times said one section is aimed particularly at school children and teachers, the other primarily towards business users.

The CD-ROM comes complete with Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Adobe Acrobat, and Quicktime, and the paper warns that initial installation might take some users "up to 20 minutes."

Based on data from 40 satellites, the CD-ROM provides users; videos, sound, photos, interactive games and other learning tools, and it allows copying and pasting of text and images. The business component of the CD-ROM provides "real-life case studies from 200 companies in 11 business sectors illustrating how use of earth observation satellite data offered commercial benefits."

You can discover the latest dramatic colour images of El Niño from NASA’s Topex/Poseidon page, for instance," the paper said in promoting the CD-ROM.

EHC, publisher of this newsletter, has been provided copies of the CD-ROM and the "How to Use" instruction page for distribution specifically to accredited journalists covering environmental and natural resources issues. Reporters wanting a copy should provide a stamped self-addressed envelope and a business card or their news organization’s letterhead to: Environment Writer, c/o Window on the World, Suite 1200, 1025 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20036; or send e-mail to marstilk@nsc.org with your request for the CD-ROM.

In addition, reporters attending the Society of Environmental Journalists’(SEJ) annual meeting in Los Angeles September 16-19 can get a copy of the CD-ROM from Environment Writer staffers Bud Ward or Joe Davis and also through the SEJ reading room.

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