Environmental Reporters: Prisoners of Gullibility

...Meanwhile, most reporters have made little effort to learn where the EPA falls short of its promises...

...In a marked departure from Anne Burford, who had insisted on ten more years of study before doing anything about acid rain, Ruckelshaus (with Reagan's explicit blessing) initially went all out to publicize the issue...

...Our leaking efforts brought mixed success...

...That still isn't the same as succeeding...

...Our efforts then turned to convincing the public that the law would be effective...

...But at our best, the brotherhood of press officers has turned news management into a public-spirited enterprise, using its power to promote the good our agencies can do rather than to cover up their negligence or active harm...

...Once, for example, UPI beat AP and The New York Times with an EPA story on the front page of the Times...

...When I asked Crutsinger about this he laughed, then admitted, "It's pretty hard to ask tough questions when you're breaking bread with the guy...

...To be sure, there had been some talk about overhauling the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act under Burford...

...In reply, the agency mailed me a publication called "National Air Quality and Emissions Trends Report, 1981...

...There is no pecking order...

...For the most part, the reporters who attend are pleased with the arrangement...

...But this, in the end, is what makes life so easy for government agencies: by distracting reporters with a press release here, a leak about "political complications" there, they can keep reporters from making a serious effort to probe the bureaucracy and find out what happens to all the good intentions and well-thought-out regulations when they reach the level of day-to-day management...

...For one thing, the subject is forbiddingly complex...

...Todhunter dismissed the issue by telling the Post that Gross was a "complainer" The Post portrayed the whole thing as a typical fight between scientists at the EPA, then dropped it...

...But since he arrived last year, he's held only two press conferences in Washington...

...We rarely saw any of them except at news conferences...

...One thing that I hadn't heard much about lately was the EPA's goals for clean air and clean water...

...I am told [nice touch of verisimilitude, don't you think?] that the primary job now is to remove those drums and safely dispose of the remaining contaminated water!' Nelson cut all this out too...

...Once, for example, I wrote a draft of a news release that said a pesticide called dibromochloropropane (DBCP) was suspected of causing cancer, and that some workers handling it had become sterile...

...We couldn't have put it better ourselves...

...Take it from me...

...For more than two years, the Post and the rest of the press were content to let us go right on consuming EDB with our food...

...I used to be one...

...The administration was shrewd enough to know that it needed a white knight, and it found him in William Ruckelshaus...

...Over the corned beef, and with a commanding view of the Potomac, these chosen few ask "Bill" about his agency...

...Ever since, we have seen very little in the press about this important program...

...To hear the professors of journalism tell it, government press officers are useless middlemen who are hostile to the public interest...

...Results can be hard to quantify...

...Blue pencil blues With the appointment of Anne Burford to head the EPA, the agency's press officers found themselves marching to new orders...

...waterways...

...Previously, the EPA had sought to whip the public into a frenzy about the environment...

...Even Ruckelshaus's opponents in the environmental community concede that he is, as one of them puts it, "a decent, competent person ." I agree: Ruckelshaus is an able and engaging man who probably would like very much to head an EPA that he can be proud of...

...One of the first things I learned in the job is that reporters take too much on faith what the government tells them...

...But that had sparked immediate and violent controversy, and she backed off...

...He also put his card up on the cafeteria bulletin board (a not-so-subtle hint to would-be leakers—it was taken down because he didn't have permission), and took to hanging out at the Barley Mow, a bar in Southwest Washington frequented by EPA bureaucrats...

...there remains the problem of actually getting the bureaucracy to follow through on the day-to-day drudgery of monitoring and enforcement...

...It was called ethylene dibromide (EDB...

...The idea was that our capability for retribution was better left to the imagination...

...Like a sheriff facing down a band of outlaws with one bullet left in his gun, we found it useful to pretend that a fearsome posse was just about to round the corner behind us...

...Suspicious that these numbers suggested that the EPA wasn't as far along the road to rehabilitation as the press seemed to indicate, I decided to make an informal inquiry into what the EPA is doing and, more important, not doing...

...I came away from the meeting with a newfound respect for how Ruckelshaus manages to keep such obvious embarrassments out of the news...

...All of these were fairly common-sensical and ordinary things to do...

...I called the EPA and asked for a rundown on air and water quality...

...Ruckelshaus's mastery of public relations is illustrated by the heavy mileage he's gotten in the media on the issue of acid rain...

...I worked for Ruckelshaus and his successors from 1970 to 1981...

...Ruckelshaus is managing to avoid taking the blame for his agency's failures because he is counted among the good guys...

...David Stockman had vetoed the plan on the grounds, among other things, that it would cost $6,000 for every fish...

...The water treatment operators refused, and that was the end of it...

...And the questioning is polite and restrained...

...This was true of the coverage of the Peace Corps in the early sixties, when it was perceived almost exclusively as the embodiment of the Kennedy ideal of sacrifice rather than an agency that had to teach people to dig wells and plant grain...

...It would take an engineer to interpret it...

...we're not talking here about 2 a.m...

...After the acid rain debacle, Shabecoff wrote, "Mr...

...more often, they never have any idea what is being said on their behalf by their underlings...

...Hernandez answered, "It's become a 'trigger word' that excites the American public needlessly!' Hernandez preferred that his press officers instead use the phrase, "degree of hazard:' Greve also asked Hernandez about the EPA's omission of the word "cancer" from its press documents...

...believe—as many reporters seem to—that the EPA's troubles are over just because it's now being administered by a nice guy...

...to get that, you need to get out into the field and talk to engineers and environmentalists and businessmen...

...A reviewing official in the administrator's office crossed out "sterility" and wrote in "adverse health effects!' The reference to cancer was deleted...

...Phil Shabecoff, of The New York Times, who probably covered the agency as well as anyone else after Greve moved off the beat, wrote a story headlined, "Acid Rain Options To Be Listed Soon ." David Shribman, also of the Times, wrote a story headlined, "U.S...

...I next pursued the matter with Lewis Crampton, director of the EPA's Office of Management Systems and Evaluation...

...Our press releases were more or less true...

...When Anne Burford became the new administrator in 1981, the EPA stopped talking about the program...

...It is easy to see why...

...But that increase will leave the EPA with less than the $1.35 billion the agency got in the last year of Carter's administration...

...It seemed likely that he would treat the EPA's mission with more seriousness than Burford ever had...

...Gladwin Hill wrote another front-page piece for the Times when the new program went into effect, proclaiming the dawn of "a new era . . . in the supply of the nation's most widely used commodity, drinking water!' From then on, "the purity of drinking water and other aspects of the operation of 240,000 water systems came under the supervision of the federal government!' That was in 1977...

...Why, Greve asked, were words like "hazard" being snipped out...

...EDB is still allowed to be used on citrus fruit...

...in fact, the business newsletters have always covered the EPA better than any of the other beat reporters...

...As Crutsinger notes, "they've produced no major news ." —Charles Rogers Charles Rogers was the first director of the EPA press office...

...He is probably even better known as one of the few Republicans whose reputations were enhanced rather than destroyed by Watergate...

...But there is also ample evidence—though underreported in the press—that the basic scandal at EPA remains...

...The result has been that the public allows the EPA's failures to continue...

...I honestly couldn't tell you whether Ruckelshaus remains committed to the EPA's goals, as his coverage in the press tends to suggest...

...The lesson of the Burford regime should have been that the official sources didn't give you the story...

...The role of Ruckelshaus's press officers in this process was crucial...

...Naturally, we took pride in seeing our press releases rewritten in the newspapers...

...Environmental Protection Agency!' Byron Nelson, Anne Burford's public relations director, deleted the words "exploded and" because he thought they were alarmist...

...The companies (Continued on page 32) (Continued from page 29) involved in our cleanup efforts were bound to learn sooner or later of the weaknesses in EPA regulation, because their livelihood depended on it...

...The result was a series of stories predicting a frenzy of activity...

...We have no reason to believe our drinking water is less carcinogenic now than it was ten years ago, but for obvious reasons, the EPA isn't eager to bring this up...

...At the same time, in the intervening years there has been an increase in the agency's responsibilities, perhaps the best-known example being the administration of the Superfund...

...It turned out that UPI couldn't attribute this coup to any particular initiative on its part, but rather had beaten its competitors because our messenger had failed to deliver the handout to the AP and Times offices after he dropped one off at UPI...

...One day Martin Crutsinger of AP turned to Cass Peterson of The Washington Post at one of Ruckelshaus's lunches and asked her, "Do you ever get the feeling we're being coopted...

...Reporters need to understand there is more to covering an agency than keeping abreast of press releases and office politics at the upper levels...

...To be sure, with the advent of the investigative journalism vogue, the credulous status quo has occasionally been shaken up...

...And it is true of the coverage of the EPA today, where the real story isn't William Ruckelshaus's good intentions—or Ruckelshaus at all—but the performance of an organization pledged to do countless mundane tasks to achieve a clean and healthy environment...

...Beginping in the early 1970s, the EPA had discovered that the chlorine used by city governments to disinfect the water was combining with otherwise harmless organic chemicals to form carcinogens...

...Starved for budget funds while staggering under the weight of new responsibilities, the EPA is unable to adequately enforce environmental regulations...

...Time magazine published a cover story called "The Poisoning of America!' which pointed out that the U.S...

...To his credit, Ruckelshaus averaged about one press conference every four weeks back in his first term at the EPA...

...meetings in garages, or mysterious calls to pay phones, or blindfolded car rides out to hideouts in the country...

...one story in The New York Times even revealed that he upbraided his own agency's enforcement staff for dragging its feet...

...The unhappy result is that bureaucrats who support bad policies are protected, while would-be whistleblowers are ignored...

...But for some reason Greve seemed to be the only person making these simple efforts with any consistency...

...I happen to know a lot about the way EPA press officers get the media to tell the story the EPA's way, because I used to be one...

...Rooting for Ruckelshaus I'd retired by the time of the next episode in the saga of the press and the EPA, which should be familiar to everyone: a congressional investigation revealed that Rita Lavelle lied about her knowledge of a conflict of interest with her former employer, Aerojet, and that the agency was too friendly to business interests in general...

...was creating "more than 77 billion pounds of hazardous chemical wastes a year;' of which "only 10 percent are being handled in a safe manner!' When the EPA issued regulations to require safe deposit of these wastes, a Washington Post editorial headlined "No More Love Canals" said, "EPA's decisions so far, though very slow in coming, appear to represent a model of a mature, costconscious but vigilant regulatory effort...

...Ruckelshaus has, by most accounts, attacked acid rain with considerable vigor, but has run into political complications ." But this was no time to make excuses for Ruckelshaus...

...In those days, the idea was to get the media to help turn the EPA into an enforcer that struck fear into the heart of polluters...

...The reporters are divided into "A" and "B" groups and are invited on a rotating basis—never more than nine at a time...

...Hernandez acknowledged that "the average citizen is going to hear that his life is threatened by some chemical many fewer times:' but assured Greve that "when there is a serious problem, we certainly will ring the bell!' Greve is no longer covering the EPA, which is a shame because his reporting stood head and shoulders above the rest in its ability to penetrate the middle level of the bureaucracy, where the real work gets done...

...The deadline for clean water had also passed, and goals for cleanup remained unmet, and were likely to for years...

...Few handouts, however, can be completely honest, and ours were no exception...

...Sometimes the administrators get a chance to approve such quotes before they are sent out...

...A few people grumbled about Ruckelshaus's industry ties (he was senior vice president at Weyerhaeuser), but most remembered him as the dedicated first administrator of the EPA and the man who had too much integrity to fire Archibald Cox...

...UN's Robert Sangeorge says he likes the "access" to Ruckelshaus: "It really gives me an insight into his thinking and policy formulation ." Sangeorge also likes the civility of it...

...But I don't Jim Sibbison is a former reporter for the Associated Press and press officer for the EPA...

...Since then, there has been little discussion about whether those laws are being enforced with the kind of vigor that they have in the past...

...In the long run, however, the willingness of the press to allow the EPA's press officers to manage the news proved harmful...

...For example, I remember a young newcomer to the press office basking in glory when "his" first major feature story appeared in The New York Times...

...This struck me as very strange...

...Along with his boss, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out President Nixon's order to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor...

...Both documents were largely irrelevant since, except for 1981, these were pre-Reagan years, and I was given no information on the quality of U.S...

...The deception lay in what we didn't say...

...Ruckelshaus can probably take some credit for next year's $1.209 billion budget—an 8 percent increase from last year, much touted by President Reagan in his State of the Union address this past January...

...The result was that Greve got some excellent stories—not just the censorship story, but also a wonderfully detailed story about the abolition of the EPA's noise-control program, another about mass resignations by demoralized EPA employees, and another about the role of industry lobbyists in selecting Anne Burford to head the EPA...

...I'm sure you have no idea...

...The effect of a variety of chemicals on the air we breathe and the water we drink isn't always immediately understandable to sophisticated scientists, so how can reporters feel confident challenging what we tell them...

...Associated Press: "EPA Chief Said Considering Reduced Acid Rain Cleanup Plan!' Cass Peterson, The Washington Post: "The arduous process of policy options [on controlling acid rain] is headed into extra innings...

...We acted immediately,' I had Burford saying, "because of the risk of another fire from about 5,000 drums on the site that are still intact...

...Ruckelshaus is, after all, a political moderate and a man with an unimpeachable reputation...

...In 1974, a series of scare headlines about cancer and drinking water broke out in the press...

...The original idea was to cover a wide range of agencies, but they later decided to focus just on the EPA...

...One advantage Greve had over other reporters was that his editor was less interested in the day-to-day news than in the idea of how a government agency changed in the transition from Carter to Reagan...

...The Environmental Protection Agency,' Schmeck wrote in a page-one article for the Times, "has found the drinking water of 79 American cities polluted with traces of organic chemicals, including some that are suspected of causing cancer...

...I also received an old press release quoting Kathleen Bennett, who was head of the air program under Burford, saying that the air was getting cleaner from 1975 to 1981...

...most of the time they would simply consider the merits of the press releases we sent them by messenger, then rewrite them or toss them into the wastebasket...

...Unfortunately, the high pitch of emotion over the mismanagement by Burford was never translated into a high pitch of emotion over the ongoing damage that's been done to the agency...

...The same pattern occurred with the EPA's effort to require companies to deposit hazardous wastes in government-approved landfills, in the hope that it might prevent calamities such as the one that occurred at Love Canal...

...Again, he did not provide me with a list showing specifically where the dirty waterways were...

...apparently my ear for dialogue was no longer up to EPA standards...

...Then came the bad news from Nova Scotia...

...Let me show you how the process works...

...This problem is compounded by the fact that few reporters cover the EPA beat full-time...

...That's the way it was at the EPA back in the early seventies, during Ruckelshaus's first term as head of the agency...

...It took a national scare over foods in grocery stores contaminated with EDB to force the EPA, in 1984, to ban its use on wheat and other grains...

...But most of the time the EPA's press releases go unchallenged...

...Research for this article was partially funded by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism...

...No cities were identified by name...

...Back in the pre-Reagan era, we at least had announced periodically in press releases the state of the nation's air and water cleanup efforts...

...There is a feeling of collegiality...

...Here again our publicity bombardment initially proved beneficial for the citizenry...

...By that time, it was a governmentauthorized news story, so the press gave it big play...

...The truth of the matter is that official sources alone will never give you an accurate picture of an agency's successes and failures...

...In the same press release, I invented a quote for Anne Burford, as press officers frequently do for their bosses...

...How can industry take seriously a government agency so visibly torn between its shrinking resources and its sweeping mandate to rid the air, water, and land of contamination...

...In October 1981, for example, a senior scientist named Adrian Gross risked his own job (he was later demoted) by calling The Washington Post newsroom with a warning that the EPA's new Reagan-appointed scientist, John Todhunter, was allowing the use of one of the most toxic of all pesticides, a then little-known carcinogen found in citrus fruit and in the wheat used in baking bread...

...The press jumped on the scandal story, with the result that Lavelle and Burford were sent packing...

...Obviously he finds the brown bag lunches more congenial...

...The deadline for most air pollutant cleanups, he said, was 1982...

...What would be a difficult job under the best of circumstances is made virtually impossible by the White House's unwillingness to fund the EPA adequately...

...Harold Schmeck of The New York Times caught the spirit when he covered a news conference conducted by Russell E. Train, then the EPA administrator...

...Hernandez subsequently left along with Burford and Lavelle...

...So how effective were our efforts in the following years...

...The main thing we tended to omit was that we weren't able to do as much about the problems we were complaining about as we implied...

...They are selected among the nation's leading news outlets—Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the networks, and so forth...

...We could even take credit for some scoops...

...The rules of the game were thus reversed for those of us who wrote the press releases...

...The leaders of the EPA's water-supply program called for heavy publicity, and we gave it to them...

...But let's assume, for the purposes of argument, that he does...

...Lunch with Bill Every two weeks, a handful of Washington correspondents bring brown bag lunches up to the EPA's 12th-floor dining room and break bread with William Ruckelshaus...

...In both of these cases, the laziness of the press was initially helpful to the cause of cleaning up the environment because it led reporters to make the EPA out to be a ruthless enforcer of its policies...

...now, a less, shall we say, active administration wanted to try a cooler approach...

...Ruckelshaus had the gall to show up at a news conference there with a cap emblazoned with the message, "Stop Acid Rain ." He then announced that there would be no timetable for reducing acid rain...

...Another time I began a press release this way: "An expenditure of $250,000 for emergency cleanup work at a site in metropolitan Los Angeles, where a chemical dump exploded and burned, has been approved by the U.S...

...Press accounts portray him battling valiantly with the White House for a larger budget...

...the air and water really were dirty, and we really were out to make it cleaner...

...And of course, not even a probe of the Washington bureaucracy's middle ranks can give you the best picture of how good a job EPA is doing...

...Those of us inside the EPA who saw the agency's regulatory efforts being undermined and wanted to tell our story grew more and more frustrated at the failure of the press to seek us out...

...Environmental Reporters: Prisoners of Gullibility by Jim Sibbison A year ago, the newspapers were filled with headlines about the misdeeds of Anne Burford and Rita Lavelle at the Environmental Protection Agency...

...I believe a great deal of the problem has to do with the press's dependence on official sources in covering the EPA...

...True, the blatant mismanagement and conflict of interest that characterized the EPA under Burford seems to have ended with her departure...

...Where once we had written freely in our news materials about the hazards of chemicals, employing words like "cancer" and "birth defects" to splash a little cold water in reporters' faces, suddenly we were urged to be more cautious...

...I would rather have courteous dealings ." It is reasonable to wonder whether this genteel attitude is a healthy thing for the press and our nation's environment...

...I would rather be cordial with the agency people I cover:' he says...

...He led the EPA in its early days as a crusader for a cleaner environment...

...instead, reporters seem only to have concluded that you shouldn't believe the Anne Burfords of the world...

...The agency has concluded that the problem exists throughout the country'.' By the time Schmeck's article appeared, the EPA had already gotten what it wanted out of such publicity: a Safe Drinking Water Act signed by President Ford...

...and Canada in Acid Rain Accord ." And so it went...

...Finally, a few of us decided to seek the press out...

...the story was not intentions but results...

...The reporter I turned to, Frank Greve of Knight-Ridder, took the story to John Hernandez, then deputy administrator to Anne Burford...

...He showed me a map of the United States with many metropolitan areas shaded black to indicate unhealthy air...

...As Ruckelshaus explained it to Time magazine, the policy was to single out "violators with the greatest visibility: This, he says, "got the message across" to those who might be tempted to follow the same path...

...Since then, the EPA (and, consequently, the press) has gradually come to talk less and less about safe drinking water, while city governments have, alas, gradually caught on to the idea that our efforts weren't quite as awesome as Gladwin Hill foretold...

...Then came the appointment of William Ruckelshaus as EPA director and the furor died down...

...It turned out the EPA wanted some big cities to install costly activated carbon equipment to filter out the carcinogens...

...It's a little easier to ask those sorts of questions at a press conference...

...We might, for example, announce restrictions on a cancer-causing pesticide without mentioning precisely what we would do to enforce those restrictions...

...I had better luck when I decided to leak the story of the EPA's censorship of its own press releases...

...In the nine months Greve had the assignment, he made a point of going every day to the EPA offices, dropping in on not just the official sources at the top but also on the GS-12s and GS-13s, asking them what was going on, and if they had any story suggestions...

...The bluffing sheriff The first observation I'd like to startle you with is that press officers can do a lot of good...

...He also told me many waterways were still polluted across the country, and that the EPA gives $2.4 billion each year to cities for sewage treatment plants...

...When we broke these rules, we were censored...

...The New York Times's Phil Shabecoff calls them "useful',' though "not as good as a one-on-one interview...

...One major story we promoted in those preReagan years was the discovery of cancer-causing chemicals in the nation's drinking water...

...Those who are perceived as the good guys never have been subjected to as much skepticism as the Burfords have...

...Call it hubris, but I came to feel that we press officers were the real journalists and the reporters were the publicists...

...But rather than highlight agency failures, these articles have the peculiar effect of keeping attention riveted to Ruckelshaus's good intentions, a theme that Ruckelshaus no doubt encourages in the periodic brown bag lunches he holds with reporters (see sidebar, page 34...