They say that increasing competition for readers’ and viewers’ time-and the attention-getting impact of tabloid media-are forcing reporters to oversimplify their stories and play up conflict, drama, emotion and doomsday scenarios even more. Not surprisingly, stories on the environment have often been written with “an unquestioning, alarmist spin,” in Rensberger’s words.ĭespite recent improvements, many journalists worry that the alarmist spin continues in some quarters-and may be getting worse in some ways. “We didn’t believe the industry scientists because we were conditioned not to trust them,” Clifford says. This resulted in what Frank Clifford, an environment reporter for the Los Angeles Times, calls a “one-sided debate.” In the case of environmental reporting, the unchallenged sources were often environmental activists and their scientists. To Boyce Rensberger, longtime science writer for the Washington Post, this represents a coming of age for environmental journalism, the same sort of transformation he saw take place with science writers a decade or more ago, when they began to “write stories with a more skeptical tone.”Įarly science writers were inexperienced and prone to believe whatever scientists told them, Rensberger and others say. an increasing sophistication about magnitudes of risk,” says Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “There’s more context now, more precision.
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