Christopher Lee's "Federal Page" piece reports that EPA paid the Weather Channel $40,000 to produce and air videos about ozone depletion, urban heat problems, and UV radiation "as part of the Bush administration's efforts to inform the public about climate change." Lee reports generally good grades on scientific and technical merits from an outside environmental engineering professor asked by the Post to review the pieces: "I certainly didn't see any scientific issues with them," Lee quoted Washington State University Professor Brian K. Lamb as saying. "They seem to be factually more or less correct."

A Natural Resources Defense Council staffer, Dan Lashoff, also generally praised the pieces, and the Weather Channel's Ray Ban, vice president for meteorology, likened the pieces to ones the Weather Channel has done with funding from NOAA and from the U.S. Forest Service. By contrast to a 22-minute "video special" the Weather Channel did in 2003 with $90,000 of EPA funding, "the shorter videos come across as a blend of a traditional news story, a public service announcement and an educational video," Lee reported. He said the roughly two-minute pieces carry a line that they are a co-production of EPA and the Weather Channel but "do not explicitly say that the agency spent taxpayers' dollars to secure the Weather Channel's participation." He quotes a Weather Channel spokesperson as saying, "While we did disclose it, we will go the extra mile to ensure there is no confusion."

Lee reports in the article that the Weather Channel, under the contract with EPA, "was to provide access to the segments through its web site. The EPA had the right to review scripts and suggest content, but the Weather Channel retained editorial control." An EPA spokesperson emphasized that the unseen narrator for the piece is a meteorologist ... "so he's not pretending to be a reporter, he is a reporter. We're being completely up front." The EPA support of the stories brings to mind -- yet differs from -- a recent EPA effort reported in Environment Writer that extends beyond broadcast meteorologists to include news anchors. See http://www.environmentwriter.org/resources/articles/0605_epa.htm.