Calling George W. Bush "the Herbert Hoover of the environment," veteran television journalist Bill Moyers told fellow journalists that only they are left "to open the eyes of the country" in an era of unprecedented corporate and political assault on the natural world.
In a speech both inspiring and sobering but always passionate, Moyers addressed several hundred members of the Society of Environmental Journalists at their annual conference October 1. Speaking on his alma mater's campus, the University of Texas, he said it was up to journalists to uncover the news that the forces of power would rather keep hidden, even though the current level of collusion between those forces is making investigative reporting on the environment a daunting challenge.
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| Bill Moyers |
While Moyers was optimistic in the 1970s that a "Green Revolution for a healthy, safe and sustainable future" was under way, now "the reality is otherwise."
"Rather than leading the world in finding solutions to the global environmental crises, the United States is a recalcitrant naysayer and backslider. Our government and corporate elites have turned against America's environmental visionaries," said Moyers, who decried them for eviscerating the gains of the past generation while blaming the environmental movement itself for its failures.
Acknowledging that "the environmental community has stumbled on many fronts," Moyers said, "If the Green Revolution is a bloody pulp today, it is not just because the environmental movement mugged itself. It is because the corporate, political and religious right ganged up on it in the back alleys of power."
Big companies and political ideologues have fomented a backlash against environmentalism that's been far more ruthless than Moyers ever anticipated. He himself has felt that reaction, citing two of his PBS documentaries that were the target of smear campaigns by the chemical industry and its PR firms.
"Trade Secrets," a 2-hour investigative special based on records from industry archives, revealed that for more than 40 years big chemical companies purposely withheld information about toxic chemicals in their products, putting workers and consumers at risk. Furthermore, the reporting "also confirmed that we were living under a regulatory system designed by the chemical industry itself—one that put profits ahead of safety," said Moyers.
The program, which former Ted Scripps Fellow Vicki Monks worked on, aired despite intense pressure on PBS to pull it. It was widely acclaimed and won an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.
The intensity of the backlash has only grown stronger, however, according to Moyers. Compounding the problem is that "President Bush has turned the agencies charged with environmental protection over to people who don't believe in it." He listed some of the nation's key environment and resource management posts held by former defenders of polluters and lobbyists for the timber, mining and petroleum industries.
The obstacles to journalists who cover those agencies' role in environmental protection have also increased, not least at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees PBS. "The right wing coup at public broadcasting is complete," Moyers said, with the board now dominated by Bush-apppointed Republican activists and a new chair who is a former party fundraiser. He said the White House has also "handpicked" a candidate for president and CEO who is "a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee whose husband became PR director of the Chemical Manufacturers Association after he had helped the pesticide industry smear Rachel Carson for her classic work on the environment, Silent Spring."
Moyers' recent PBS series "NOW with Bill Moyers," which he headed until his retirement in December 2004, was a target of the CPB's new vision. The mission of the current affairs program was to expose injustice in the workings of power, a task Moyers apparently did all too well. He warned that under the corporation's current leadership, the public should not expect any challenging journalism from public television, and certainly no investigative reporting on the environment or conflicts of interest between government and big business.
Corporations have become "the undisputed overlords of government," Moyers said. And the Bush Administration's hostility to science has supported that corporate agenda on environmental issues. While a growing mountain of scientific evidence points to global environmental crises, most notably global warming, current U.S. policies sabotage any role for action, let alone leadership, in Moyers' analysis. In such a context, Americans' concern for the environmental problems is diminished, he said, citing a July 2005 ABC News poll that reported that 66 percent of those surveyed said they don't think global warming will affect their lives.
"But what we don't know can kill us," said Moyers, contending that journalists must report the news the public would rather not hear. To do so is to buck the tide in Washington, where according to Moyers, "denial…is the governing philosophy. The president's contempt for science—for evidence that mounts every day [about global warming]—is mind-boggling."
Moyers' hope for turning that tide caught some in his audience by surprise. He called on journalists to reach out to Christian conservatives, who Moyers said could most effectively call the president to task on the environment. While some of their leaders are "implacable," Moyers said, "millions of these people believe they are here on earth to serve a higher moral power, not a partisan agenda." And their receptivity to environmental concerns, sometimes called "creation care" within church circles, is growing. Moyers cited the Evangelical Environmental Network, and a National Association of Evangelicals document that declared that "the Bible implies the principle of sustainability," with a mandate to conserve and renew the earth rather than deplete or destroy it.
Yet while many conservatives "may believe Christians have a moral obligation to protect God's creation, most remain uninformed about the true scope of the environmental crisis and the role of the Republican Party in it," according to Moyers. Thus most Christian conservatives vote their consciences on social issues rather than environmental issues.
A Christian and son of a Baptist deacon himself, Moyers encouraged journalists to challenge evangelicals "to look more closely at their moral choices—to consider whether it is possible to be pro-life while also being anti-earth."
"If you believe uncompromisingly in the right of every baby to be born safely into this world, can you at the same time abandon the future of the child, allowing its health and safety to be compromised by a president who gives big corporations license to poison our bodies and destroy our climate?"
Noting the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case that galvanized opinion last spring, Moyers argued that President Bush does not "err on the side of life." "He is playing dice with our children's future—dice that we have likely loaded against our own species, and perhaps against all life on earth."
Journalists should not write off conservative Christians when they need to see the moral complexity of environmental issues, said Moyers. He encouraged journalists in search of new readers to aim stories at this 50-million-member audience, but to do so with an understanding of their worldview and the language necessary to reach them.
When 45 percent of Americans hold a creationist view of the world that discounts Darwinian evolution, there is going to be skepticism about science and its claims, Moyers said. And not just evolution, but "paleontology, archaeology, geology, genetics, even biology and botany." To many Christian conservatives, it's possible that environmental reporting "could seem arrogant in its assumptions, mechanistic, cold and godless in its worldview. That's a tough indictment," he acknowledged, but one that must be faced if journalists are to learn how to convey news to this audience.
Moyers was careful to state that journalists must not give up fact-based analysis or a search for verifiable truth, but he encouraged them to tell stories "with an ear for spiritual language, the language of parable, for that is the language of faith." He used the biblical story of Noah and the flood as an example, noting its parallels with the challenge of telling the story of climate change:
"Both scientists and Noah possess the knowledge of a potentially impending global catastrophe. They try to spread the word, to warn the world, but are laughed at, ridiculed." While no one acts, faithful Noah takes on "the daunting task of rescuing all the biodiversity of the earth…Noah then can be seen as the great preservationist, preventing the first great extinction," Moyers explained, doing "exactly what wildlife biologists and climatologists are trying to do today: to act on their moral convictions to conserve diversity, to protect God's creation in the face of a flood of consumerism and indifference by a materialistic world."
Moyers recognized that some in his audience might be uncomfortable with such an approach, but pushed journalists to strive for understanding: "If we can't empathize with each person's need to grasp a human problem in the language of his or her worldview, then we will likely fail to reach many Christian conservatives who have a sense of morality and justice as strong as our own." And journalists may end up being part of the problem as a result.
In an era that mimics the corrupt Gilded Age of a century ago, Moyers admonished journalists to make the same response their predecessors did, who birthed a "golden age of muckraking journalism" that went after sleaze and cronyism. Like Lincoln Steffens who exposed electoral fraud, or Nellie Bly's quest to reform mental hospitals by going undercover and pretending to be insane, like John Spargo's crusade against child labor in coal mines or Upton Sinclair's campaign to reveal the wretchedness of the meatpacking industry, journalists today have to fight for tomorrow, said Moyers.
The photo of his five grandchildren beside his computer reminds him of journalism's enormous responsibility. Children have no vote, no voice, no party, no lobbyists in Washington, Moyers said. "They have only you and me—our pens and our keyboards and our microphones—to seek and to speak and to publish what we can of how power works, how the world wags and who wags it…There is no one left, none but all of us."
Read the transcript of Bill Moyers' SEJ address. You can also download an audio MP3 file of the speech at SEJ's web site. Bill Moyers was the 2004 recipient of the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
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