It's Not Easy Being A "Green" Journalist

MarketWatch Columnist Jon Friedman Says There's A Lack Of Good Reporting On Environmental Issues

(MarketWatch)  As that great pundit Kermit the Frog once famously mused, it's not easy being green.

Thomas Kostigen, a MarketWatch columnist and author of the new book "You Are Here," might add a corollary: It's also not easy being a green journalist - and trying to make sense of the environmental beat.

Environmental concerns and the accompanying "green" movement are putting a lot of heat on journalists, who are anxious to show the public that they're in tune with the zeitgeist in America.

But many of them don't really understand the nuances of the subject -- and therefore have a hard time communicating ideas and insights to their readers and viewers. They're failing to shed much light on the environmental discussion.

Beyond sticking to a few catch-phrases and earnestly spouting a do-good philosophy gleaned from Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," the media aren't doing much to try to explain the green phenomenon.

Lost in the abstract

"I think most journalists get hung up on the jargon," Kostigen said. "They talk about global warming and carbon emissions as opposed to climate change and pollution. In other words, they get lost in the abstract and the science."

I asked Kostigen if the media's ignorance was based on a failure to grasp the facts or a political bias.

"Well, terms like 'green' and 'global warming' have become pejorative from a conservative standpoint because they are associated with political positions, largely liberal positions," he said. "But this again is the media's fault for combining politics with science."

Kostigen frets that television journalists may not cover environmental stories well because "it's an intellectual subject -- and that doesn't make for good TV. You can't see carbon dioxide in the air, so that's that. The Web gets caught up preaching to people. Web sites and blogs want you to become an all-sum environmentalist. The print media, meanwhile, [are] hung up on green tips: eco-friendly product ideas."

Some pundits suggest there are two main problems in communicating environmental stories to the public. On one hand, some journalists are so knowledgeable about science that they can't condense their thoughts to tell a simple story. On the other hand, some don't grasp basic scientific ideas and fail to sound credible in their reports.

In a piece titled "Science and Journalism Fail to Connect," Dan Fagin, who heads the science-journalism program at New York University, wrote: "How can we expect Americans to know anything beyond what they happen to remember from science class? Journalists certainly don't tell them."

It's high time that journalists did.