April seems to be Earth Month on PBS. While today may be Earth Day, PBS has allocated a significant amount of airtime this month to broadcasting shows on the state of our planet and what we can do about it. Recently, I brought your attention to NOW’s report on the world’s glaciers and how their accelerated disappearance affects everything from our drinking water to the price of bread at the supermarket. David Brancaccio’s report was beautiful and picturesque, if not incredibly sad.

Yesterday, Frontline aired a very fine piece of reporting from Hedrick Smith entitled, “Poisoned Waters“. Smith is a veteran storyteller who has been able to tell a story of our nation’s water, while maintaining a sense of great fluidity in his reporting. He explores the health, scientific, political and community waters of this important subject by showing, in great detail, the situations in the Chesapeake Bay on our East coast and Puget Sound in the West. The story is fascinating, informative and I highly encourage you to take the time to watch this 2-hour piece (I have embedded it below).

Although the entire report is well worth watching, there were two moments that really stuck with me: First, the discovery of frogs with six legs and male fish with eggs in the Potomac river. The other was the way environmentalists and community activists are now framing this issue, with some preliminary success. I’ll explore that later, but first I want to remind readers of one of the reasons scientists are finding mutated animals in our waterways: Endocrine disruptors. We have repeatedly focused on the issue of BPA (or Bisphenol-A) in certain plastics used to carry and store our food and water. In addition, the EPA has for years stalled on fully regulating their use, as required under a law passed by Congress a decade ago. Well, it turns out that these same endocrine disrupters that, in humans, can cause higher instances of breast cancer, lowered sperm count and a whole host of other problems, are also contained in the drinking water for many of our municipalities. The causes range from industrial to agricultural, but one thing is clear: Washington, D.C.’s water supply has a host of endocrine disruptors and other substances in it and the scientists who are studying this problem won’t drink D.C.’s water.

One of the most memorable moments for me was when a community activist in Virginia acknowledged what needs to be done: Market the solution instead of the problem.

By marketing the solution to our environmental woes, we can move away from the self-imposed position of caging ourselves as victims vs. perpetrators in this fight and instead explore what needs to be done to fix the problem. One example Smith reports, can be seen in northern Virginia where developers were set to suburbanize yet another plot of farm land and forests. Instead of trying to block the action by framing it in environmental terms, activists opposed to this development lobbied the community to their call based on the expected higher tax burden (due to more crowded schools, hospitals and other administrative matters), as well as increased traffic congestion, guaranteed under any development scheme. The citizens demanded action and the developers were forced to abandon their plans and adjust to the changing public climate.

Perhaps the newspaper industry could learn a thing or two from these environmentalists and community activists: Instead of blaming the Internet and trying to advertise the industries downfall (due to multiple reasons), why not approach this from a more constructive angle and market the solution… Granted, they need to first find this solution…

NOW, hosted by David Brancaccio, aired a piece on PBS this week entitled, “On Thin Ice” about the word’s melting glaciers and how this affects our lives and the lives of others around the world. Brancaccio travelled to India and the Gangotri Glacier with ice climber and environmentalist Conrad Anker, who is also profiled in the report. In addition, they explore Anker’s home state of Montana and the disappearing ice in Glacier National Park. The hour-long special report is beautiful on one hand and depressing on the other, but that’s what makes it such a damn fine piece of reporting. Please take the time to enjoy this report and think about what you can do in your own life to positively have an effect on the environment…. Isn’t it about time?

“Seventy-five percent of the world’s fresh water is stored in glaciers, but scientists predict climate change will cause some of the world’s largest glaciers to completely melt by 2030. What effect will this have on our daily lives? With global warming falling low on a national list of American concerns, it’s time to take a deeper look at what could be a global calamity in the making.

This week, in a special one-hour NOW on PBS, David Brancaccio and environmentalist Conrad Anker—one of the world’s leading high altitude climbers—trek to the Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayan Mountains, the source of the Ganges River, to witness the great melt and its dire consequences first-hand. The two also visit Montana’s Glacier National Park to see the striking effects of global warming closer to home and learn how melting glaciers across the globe can have a direct impact on food prices in the U.S.

Along the way, Brancaccio and Anker talk to both scientists and swamis, bathe in the River Ganges, view a water shortage calamity in India, and come as close as any human can to seeing the tangible costs of climate change.

“We can’t take climate change and put it on the back burner,” warns Anker. “If we don’t address climate change, we won’t be around as humans.”

Read David Brancaccio’s daily dispatches from India and see images from his extraordinary trip (Image courtesy of PBS.org).

Yesterday I wrote about Mediarology and the need for greater education and accuracy in reporting the issue of climate change. Instead of searching for a balanced story, reporters should be looking to write an accurate story. Climate expert Dr. Stephen Schneider, who coined the phrase Mediarology, has lobbied for and gained momentum in the effort to change public policy and perception towards better preserving the environment. As we wrote yesterday,

This is where Schneider hits it on the head: “…to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.” This is why accurate reporting and not just trying for a semblance of balance is so necessary. The two biggest things business and special interest groups have done to harm the environment in the public debate are:

A) They changed the term from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change.’ Warming is bad, change is just different.

B) By injecting doubt into the world of hard science, they have allowed the lazy reporters to merely transcribe the false drivel, instead of questioning its accuracy.

I would like to mention a third catalyst in the fight for our future: The lobbying effort. The Center for Public Integrity has released a study documenting the dramatic increase in climate change lobbyists on both sides of the debate. By its count, since 2003 there has been an increase in lobbyists by more than 300%, with industry lobbyists outnumbering environmental lobbyists 8 to 1.

What does this mean to the world of journalism? That without the proper education, time and resources invested in the reporter, the cost-effective option will be to send out the feelers when a question arises. 8 to 1, that this question will be answered by someone lobbying on behalf of the industry groups. If members of Congress are outnumbered by climate change lobbyists 4 to 1 and industry lobbyists outnumber environmental lobbyists 8 to 1, you can see for yourself this worrying trend and from where we are most likely to get our information.

Number of Lobbyists on Climate Change by Sector

Journalism students are told to keep things fair and balanced in their reporting and those who succeed can hope for a role with Fox “News”. But for those out there who would like to both advance their careers beyond that of fluffer to Bill O’Reilly, as well as perhaps advance discourse and transparency in our world, they should take a lesson in how to report intelligently, instead of just focusing on a perceived balance.

Recently Bryan Walsh, a writer and podcaster for TIME on issues related to the environment, discussed the difference between balanced reporting and smart reporting with Eric Pooley. Pooley, a former managing editor for TIME, is writing a book on climate change and using this issue as an example, shows how economic and environmental illiteracy leads to balanced reporting (or the stenographer approach) instead of intelligent reporting. In the podcast, Pooley quotes the great English journalist Henry Lucy as saying,

“I’d rather take a poet and teach him about business than take a business person and teach him how to write.”

Pooley continues with his example of how the Warner-Lieberman Carbon Cap bill may have been killed last year, partially due to a lack of accurate reporting. He discusses how reporters were taking the balance of the opposing views on the subject, rather than reporting on the facts of the bill and what the actual effects would be.

“The result of this (uneducated group of journalists) is that since relatively few of us get taught, we do freeze up a little bit as a class around balance sheets and around economic studies… (This) leads reporters into the he-said, she-said, painstakingly balanced approach (to writing a story).”

With tighter budgets and fewer reporters on the beat, interconnected issues like environmental policy suffers in its coverage due to the lack of education and knowledge in the field. In the end, Pooley does commend the New York Times on their recent accouncement of a team of reporters dedicated to covering environmental issues (including business, science and political reporters). This approach will undoubtedly better serve the public and lead to more comprehensive, accurate reporting on environmental issues. The entire intervew (only 8 minutes long) can be heard here:

Reporting on Climate Change