Watch a video below for more information.
It appeared to be an overwhelming sentiment last week. A host of government officials, the Governor, private landowners, conservationists and environmentalists all gathered to both announce and celebrate that the California-Nevada sage-grouse population did not warrant Endangered Species Act protection.
Predictably, though, there was generated speculation that this celebration was not enough. Some journalists sought activist perspectives to parlay a counter-narrative that this celebration was, in fact, some kind of travesty for the bird.
There are problems with this approach. Countering expert viewpoints with advocacy perspectives presents a false mean. It’s a manipulative but very common journalistic practice: Report on an issue that scientifically has little debate – vaccinations, GMOs, climate change and a host of others – and pit expert views against those of critics as if the two perspectives are on equal footing. (A great panel was held recently, in which I joined the Executive Director of Immunize Nevada and a scientist from the Desert Research Institute, to discuss this very issue. Sadly, few, if any, local journalists were in attendance.)
Despite this form of he-said, she-said journalism being well documented as disingenuous, and ultimately creating misleading impressions among readers and viewers, it’s an en vogue journalistic tool used to frame stories and is still widely used today.
Sure enough, after last Tuesday’s announcement, the local Associated Press, which seems to struggle with objectivity on similar topics, and the Washington Post, both framed their news stories of the otherwise positive announcement as something to be politicized and skeptical of.
The subtext of their virtually identical headlines, for example, is really a question that the bird should receive protections.
Surely decisions, such as ESA listings, will have agendas driving them – from all sides – but by citing notoriously litigious and agenda-driven activist groups, and ignoring readily available evidence — even the easily digestible fact sheet handed out at the press conference — both the AP and Post crafted misleading impressions about what the announcement was really about.
Here’s why: According to Pete Coates of the USGS, arguably the expert on the species, “Within the bi-state area…there hasn’t been evidence of sage-grouse populations declining or increasing in the last 10 years, and this is a study that was recently conducted by the USGS.”
The encroachment of pinyon-juniper trees, over the past one hundred years or more, into lower-elevation sage-brush lands are cited is a large threat to the grouse, and deliberate, collaborative conservation efforts (i.e., pinyon-juniper tree removal on large tracts of land) over the past 15 years have contributed to the stability of the bird’s population.
The announcement last week should have been persuasive enough — these experts were, indeed, on hand to verify information and answer questions — but instead, (some) journalism got in the way to suggest otherwise.
Disclosure: I helped to produce this video.
