Magazineland has discovered environmental outrage. Mother Jones' cover story and Vanity Fair's feature uncannily struck the same note in the late summer. Coincidence? Perhaps not. The major theme of Osha Gray Davidson's MoJo piece ("No president has gone after the nation's environmental laws with the same fury as George W. Bush...") may not be as important as the minor theme ("... and none has been so adept at staying under the radar"). The importance of these stories has to do with tone and emotion -- and public perception. Michael Shnayerson in Vanity Fair contrasts the confrontational James Watt with his "protégée" and Interior Secretary successor Gale Norton, the latter seeking "partnerships" with industry and smiling "pretty much all the time." In other words, the authors say, the genius of whatever "war" the Bush administration has waged on the environment has been its quietness, obscurity, secrecy, and blandness.

This is an issue that implicates the media. "Happily for Bush," Shnayerson writes, "most voters of both parties, distracted by 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, remain oblivious to the story. Environmental news comes and goes, and no one connects the gathering dots to see the big picture."

Certainly, few newspapers have indulged themselves in summaries of the Bush environmental record as panoramic as these two publications. News is daily, eyes on the ground in front of its feet. One result is that large conclusions rarely get drawn, either by the media or their audiences. Both of these stories connect the dots.

These magazines and their readers expect writers to have strong viewpoints (and these do), while more conventional publications, such as newpapers, virtually forbid it. Democracy may depend on an informed citizenry, but media more and more depend on emotion to make money. Tabloids rule the roost. Outrage is the emotion du jour that these two articles elicit. It's a bit like TV wrestling, where the bad guy always hides his victim's face from the ref before gouging his eyes. It's a "viewpoint" thing. The ostensible ref, in the striped shirt, is blind and clueless; but the real ref, the audience, sees every move and is outraged. Example: "The White House has been darkly brilliant at using the courts to do its dirty work -- through methods such as 'sweetheart suits' from industry" (Davidson)

Both articles tick off lists of "several dozen Bush appointees who, like Norton, once worked as lawyers of lobbyists for the extractive industries, hammering away at environmental laws. Now they hold high posts in the agencies they once attacked" (Shnayerson). Both articles achieve their effect, not merely with emotionally loaded words, but with an accumulation of evidence (e.g., a sidebar of thumbnail bios) you never see on TV and rarely see in newspapers. Both magazines go deep and wide (Mojo with a Suwanee River sidebar by Ted Williams and Vanity Fair with an exhaustive look at Interior Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles). The longer magazine format allows this to a degree you rarely see elsewhere outside of major feature news outlets.

The two articles are important because they set the bar at a level newspapers will have trouble matching. But the magazines in which they appear may limit how seriously they are taken. We expect Mother Jones to be doing sweeping radical critiques of the Bush administration, but not to be read by enough people to generate serious ad revenues, let alone an electoral impact. Vanity Fair, on the other hand, is a confection for the leisure class (or wannabes). Its readers, stretched out by the pool, have the patience and wherewithal to go through 38 pages of designer perfume ads before they get to the table of contents. So a feature longer than 5,000 words is not a stretch. But we also suspect the Vanity Fair piece of being an effort to snag some gravitas for an issue otherwise given over largely to "young royals," or of being an expression of editor Graydon Carter's grudge toward the Bush administration. Too bad, because a change in either editors or fashions might mean that coverage like this would disappear. (See: Mother Jones article; Vanity Fair piece not online.)