Margaret Wente: Comment on environmental journalism

Dec. 2005

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We in newsland regard ourselves as hard-headed, skeptical objective folks. But show us a forlorn polar bear on a melting ice floe, and we check our brains at the door. Our environmental coverage regularly serves up the most hysterical, most credulous and most selective stories in all the news. The truth is, most of what passes as environmental reporting is little more than cheerleading for the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund. It’s about as objective as the news reports you used to read in Pravda quoting party leaders on the glorious 14th party congress. 
The difference is, in Pravda, all the news was always good; on the environmental beat, all the news is always bad.