Environmental journalism after Climategate

A while ago, I contacted a journalist on a national broadsheet about something that I thought might interest him. Later he rang me to say that the story would appear in a prominent position in the next day’s edition of his newspaper, but he was upset; in fact he was furious.

As part of his research he had phoned a very senior government adviser on climate change to ask for a reaction to the story. Five minutes after this conversation he got a phone call from what he described as ‘a friend’ who works for a multinational environmental NGO. It was either Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but I don’t remember which, and it doesn’t really matter.

The purpose of the friend’s phone call was to express disapproval about the newspaper covering the story. Apparently a considerable row ensued. The upshot was that they were friends no longer, and that was the end of any more stories that the journalist would get from that source. This had upset him, but there was more.

‘Why the hell’, he asked me, ‘when I call a senior government adviser is his fist reaction to pick up the phone and talk to an environmental NGO?’.  He seemed genuinely shocked and baffled.

Journalists are a pretty funny lot, or so they often seem to those of us who are not part of their world. They can certainly appear to be cynical and unprincipled at times, but engraved on every reporters heart – when you can find it – are two irreducible principles: never reveal a source, and don’t let anyone other than your editor tell you what to write or, as in this case, not write.

This incident seemed particularly relevant when I read a post at Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist blog this morning. It was  headed ‘Hold the Good News’ and tells of the tribulations faced by the editor of the The Lancet while trying to report a welcome downward trend in maternal mortality (death as a result of pregnancy or childbirth).  He came under pressure from campaign groups to postpone publication because they feared that such a revelation might jeopardise their funding. This seems to have upset him enough for him to tell all to the New York Times who put his tale of woe on the front page.

This sentence in Matt’s post certainly rang a bell:

Journalists rarely challenge pressure groups’ claims of urgency and deterioration, because those are the two things that get editors’ attention, too.

Of course those who report the ‘news stories’ that pressure groups present to the media daily – neatly packaged in press releases that apparently cover all the angles with no obvious need for additional research – are likely to be first in line for exclusive or early access to the juiciest stories.   Those who ask questions or step out of line by producing articles that are ‘unhelpful’ are equally likely to find they are out in the cold. The extraordinary correspondence between Joe Abbess and Roger Harrabin of the BBC is an excellent example of how this works.

Until November last year, this cosy relationship between the eNGOs and the media worked pretty well for both sides.  The news hounds got resoundingly catastrophic stories with little or no effort, and the eco-warriors got the myths dearest to their hearts on the front page.

Now the paradigm has shifted and editors seem to be as eager for sceptical stories about AGW as they used to be for the old certainties.

That leaves the people at the sharp end, journalists who cover environmental matters and the PR people who feed them stories, with a whole raft of new problems. Not least of these is that if the eNGO’s continue to try and dictate what should or should not appear in the media – and even learned journals like ‘The Lancet’ – they are now likely to make a lot of new enemies. Ones like the journalist I contacted who just didn’t like an attempt to push him around and is unlikely to forget the experience in a hurry.

The currency that environmental pressure groups and political spin-doctors have been using to subvert the newsgathering process has suddenly lost much of its value.

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h/t to Bishop Hill for the link to Matt Ridley’ s interesting post.