Is there such a thing as "Green Journalism"?
One of the questions we at GreenforGood.com will try to address is the issue of "green journalism." As a veteran journalist and author, I find it an increasingly intriguing, but complicated, topic.
One of the chief questions raised by the decline in trust in mass media, the plunge in newspaper readership, and the business-model challenges of the Web is: What Is Journalism For? Is it to make money? Or is there a higher calling involved in a democratic society?
In the late 1990s, when it became obvious that the Internet was altering forever the media landscape in America, I did a lot of reading about the history of news. Although early purveyors of news had sound business sense (at least, the ones who survived!), it wasn't profits that drove them to publish. It was moral outrage over selected events of the day, and a sense of democratic purpose to inform the masses. Even as newspapers came into their own in the 1800s, the rallying cry was to "raise hell!" ("Col." Alden Blethen, founder of The Seattle Times, had each foot planted firmly with his dualistic business vision of "Raise hell and sell newspapers!") Most of the great muckrakers, investigative journalists and publishers of the halcyon days of American journalism shared a goal of disrupting the status quo and tilting at the rich and powerful. Newspapers gained the opprobrium of "yellow journalism" for their crusades, but no one accused them of not standing for anything.
There isn't much hell-raising in mainstream press today. Or at least the way I would define it, which is moral crusading. Newspapers used to do daily investigations and run constant updates for weeks on end of corrupt or unseemly practices. Today true investigative reporting is rare, especially contrasted with the overall content of a newspaper or broadcast (I'd guess that less than 1 percent of reports have any investigative art to them). The bulk of "reporting" in mass media is simple regurgitation of corporate or government press releases, a practice more akin to stenography than journalism. (An exception, interestingly enough, is in sports news, which may present a better model for Web journalism than anything else in mainstream media.)
So what does this mean for "green journalism"? Interestingly, I'd put the investigative flavor of green reporting much higher than overall journalism, simply because green itself implies needed change in our society. So when green journalists (at this point, we're talking almost exclusively about bloggers; mainstream media have little green acumen to the point where reports on extreme weather events or scientific departures rarely even mention global warming in passing) pick up on a report or study showing that Horizon, for example, is billing its milk "organic" while using the same old inhumane corporate farm practices on its cows, or that Wal-Mart is mis-labeling products as "organic" when they're not, the theme by its very nature is investigative simply because it does not parrot the corporate or PR line.
But green journalism does not even have to be investigative to be effective. It can be something as simple as a feature on composting or worm bins. Or it can be a blog meme on carbon footprinting. It can celebrate a green hero, as Elizabeth Kolbert did in The New Yorker with Amory Lovins, or examine a green lifestyle, such as The Washington Post's article on the Earthaven ecovillage in North Carolina.
We'll talk more about green journalism in upcoming blogs, in the context of What Is Journalism For? In the meantime feel free to send in your thoughts to paul at greenforgood.com, or post comments here. Thanks!
Paul Andrews, for GreenforGood.com
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Labels: carbon footprint, climate change, global warming, green lifestyle, green living, greenforgood.com, sustainability
posted by Paul Andrews @ 8:54 AM
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