I’ve mentioned before how important I think the Denver Post is in covering federal lands issues (and other Interior West issues), being perhaps the largest newspaper in the Interior West/Rocky Mountain area. In the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a sample of some of the pieces I’ve seen there. Here is a link to the cutback story.
NEWS OF IMPENDING CUTS at The Denver Post came first from Twitter. “In a staff meeting, the @DenverPost editor just told us that we are cutting 30 positions in the newsroom,” wrote City Hall reporter Jon Murray. “There are some sobs in the room.” The paper soon confirmed that its newsroom of around 100 would be reduced by almost a third, slashing its capacity to cover one of the nation’s booming cities. (Its newsroom had already been cut by two thirds, from 300 at its peak.)
From Vince Bzdek at the Colorado Springs Gazette here:
Last week, his hedge fund ordered 30 more jobs cut from The Denver Post newsroom, for a total of 75 jobs in the last three years. That’s more journalists cut than the Gazette has total in its newsroom.
Though he manages $2 billion in assets, Smith has no experience running a newspaper, or any real interest in what a newspaper does for a community.
Smith is what is known as a “vulture capitalist” and his apparent plan is to suck all the value out of the Post while he can, and then when it is a shriveled carcass and can no longer make enough profit to satisfy his bloodlust, sell it or close it.
And when that happens, one of the most dynamic cities in the country will be without its conscience, its tentpole, its beating heart.
Vultures like Smith have bought and “harvested” an estimated 679 hometown newspapers that were once serving 12.8 million readers.
Fortunately, Colorado Springs has a newspaper owned by someone with a stake in the future of the state and the city, someone who lives in Colorado and is wholly vested in its economic and civic vitality.
Most of the newspapers that are surviving and thriving now adhere to a similar model: they are locally owned by someone who thinks newspapers have a higher mission that must be preserved.
These owners believe that a city is only as good as its newspaper, and that covering local news, city council meetings, school board meetings, election campaigns, military-appreciation lunches, all those staples of civic life, are worth the investment because it is an investment in the civic fabric of the city. If a city is going to be truly good, someone has to shine a light on the bad guys, calling out corruption and incompetence. A healthy, prosperous newspaper is the watchdog, cheerleader and hearth of a healthy, prosperous city.
Things look different depending on where you are. Salt Lake City is not New York City. We don’t know the filters that the mainstream coastal media apply to what they choose to cover and how they cover it, but we can interact directly with out local news folks and they with us. Many of the best “tells both sides of the story” stories posted here have come from local press. Here’s to our local newsfolks!
There are scary and uncertain times ahead for our forests. There is just too much “Fog of War” going on for the public to sort out and fact-check for themselves. Even the ‘fact-checkers’ should be suspect, until proven reliable and bias-free. The rise of ‘fake news’ has blurred multiple lines, and many people, even in mass media, fall for the hoaxes, satire or misinformation. (Example: An article appeared on the Grist website, showing concern about a recall of “Dog Condoms”, presenting the link to www.dogcondoms.com )
By WillMcC – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4379199
It’s interesting to see how folks outside the Interior West see things, as per this New York Times story. I think there are some gaps which we can try to fill in as this unfolds.
Mr. Trump, signing the order at the Interior Department, described the designations as a “massive federal land grab” and ordered the agency to review and reverse some of them.
“It’s time to end these abuses and return control to the people, the people of Utah, the people of all of the states, the people of the United States,” the president said…
Notice that this quote specifically states “Utah”. We can see that the President’s interest could be more about the larger. more controversial and recent (December 28, 2016) ones. You can see that in this Denver Post story also, in which Zinke met with Colorado, Wyoming and Nevada governors. Also you can read about a Governor asking President Obama not to designate in this story, and asking President Trump to rescind in this story.
It was in the news at the end of the Obama administration after President Barack Obama created several national monuments, setting aside millions of acres on land and sea. At the time, some Republicans in Congress said they wanted to reform the act, which they said encouraged federal government overreach, a claim that has dogged the law since it was adopted.
It’s interesting that the writer said simply “Republicans”.. I bet they were from the area. An R from, say, Florida is unlikely to care much. The write could have said “local and state elected officials, mostly Republican, from Utah and other western states, have questioned these large designations.” Otherwise it sounds like a partisan issue, which it is not, or not entirely, at the local scale.
The president can make national monuments only from land already controlled by the federal government, and the act generally does not change how the land is used, said Lisa Dale, the associate director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. If leases for mining, ranching, drilling or logging already exist on land to be made into a national monument, they can continue, but new leases probably won’t be allowed, she said.
It’s interesting that the Times asks Lisa Dale, from a university in Connecticut (yes, I graduated from there but a long time ago), instead of someone from the Interior West. Both of the experts chosen by the Times are on the coasts, including our sometime contributor Char Miller.
Who could be hurt by possible changes?
Most Americans support protection of public lands. According to a 2016 study from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, more than 93 percent of respondents said that historical sites, public lands and national parks should be protected for current and future generations.
Char Miller, an environmental historian at Pomona College, said that if national monuments were diminished by the review process, it would actually hurt the people opponents of the law are claiming to protect.
Some designations are controversial, as was Mr. Obama’s designation of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah in December. Republicans argued that it would hurt the local economy, but Mr. Miller said wilderness areas can bring in tourists who support local businesses.
But public lands are already “protected” from many things.. not sure how that KSG study is relevant, except to paint a picture. Miller makes an interesting claim here that local people would be hurt by removing the designation. If the land is managed the same way as before, then how will they be hurt? By the lack of monument status on lands they already work and recreate on? Or the lack of money to their communities in the future by the designation? And it’s only been in place since December for Bears Ears, so how far down the path are they?
I don’t think that these quotes are fair to the complexity of the issue that is easy to unearth just by reading Stiles’ piece.
At three of the national monuments Mr. Obama created or expanded — Bears Ears, Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine, and Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii — special effort was made to include Indian tribes in the designation process and continuing management of these areas.
Ms. Dale said that reducing these monuments or changing them “would have a chilling effect on tribal federal relations when it comes to protecting landscapes.”
People already involve Tribes in BLM and FS planning (on those same acres). Conceivably, they could be involved to the same extent without Monument status. If there is some problem with the standard way of working with Tribes, it seems to me that it should be fixed for all FS and BLM plans, and not require a designation status. It’s also possible that different Tribes feel differently about the details and the process.. and if so, some might feel “chilled” and others, not so much.
Who would it help?
If existing national monuments are reduced in size, it could benefit extractive industries like oil and gas, mining, logging, as well as ranching, Mr. Miller said, because the government could grant more leases on federal land. Given the Trump administration’s recent actions — including lifting the moratorium on drilling on federal lands and the obligation to limit methane emissions on public lands — officials might be eyeing new fossil fuel leases on previously protected land, though Mr. Zinke said he was not predisposed to make any such recommendation about the monument land.
Mr. Zinke said that he has heard claims that some monument designations have ended in “lost wages, lost jobs and reduced public access.” But he added that he believed “some jobs probably have been created by recreational opportunities.”
Some of the opposition to the national monuments may be ideological. Western ranchers and sportsmen have long complained about what they see as federal land grabs that limit their access to millions of acres of public territory. However, a majority of Americans in Western states, home to vast tracts of federal land, support maintaining public land.
(my italics)
This last bit was a bit of a stretch IMHO. Ideological? Ranchers and sportsman have “limited access”?
What was missing from this story- the gaps? The views of people like Stiles. Questions about designation and the outdoor industry. Questions about the process of designation and how that compares to other land use planning exercises on federal land, in terms of public comment and environmental review. Designation’s potential impacts on motorized and mechanized recreation. Questions about the costs to the feds, and where the bucks for more planning and visitors’ centers and so on is going to come from- and what they won’t be doing instead. But we can take these up in later posts.
I’m glad they interviewed Zinke.
“No one loves their public lands more than I,” Mr. Zinke said. “You can love them as much, but not more than I do.”
Thanks to Earthjustice for this photo of the Sunset Roadless Area.
The Denver Post reports on efforts to get more wilderness in Colorado, and it’s picked up by the AP.. interesting to take a look at this article and compare it to the Gold Standard of Journalism here. I am a fan of interior West newspapers, but please Denver Post, don’t have annoying music and videos when we simply want to read a story!
Here’s an excerpt:
Population growth and the development boom in the West are propelling the efforts to establish wilderness protection while it’s still possible. Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials found, in a 2013 survey, that 70 percent of Coloradans consider wilderness or undeveloped open lands offering solitude very important or extremely important. And 72 percent ranked protection of more land as wilderness as “high-priority” or “essential” — an even higher proportion of residents than the high percentages favoring more forest campgrounds, community trails, urban greenways and parks.
But Congress consistently has failed to deliver on most wilderness proposals.
“We need to set aside land and protect it as much as we can,” said San Juan County Commissioner Scott Fetchenhier, who went to Washington recently as part of a delegation of elected officials.
The locals extolled “economic values” of preserving nature — fellow San Juan County Commissioner Ernie Kuhlman has said that, with the demise of mining, wilderness that enables recreation is Colorado’s new gold.
My question is what “development” is wilderness preserving “nature” from? I’d think, as a person who spent time making comparison tables of “things allowed in wilderness” and “things allowed in roadless areas,” that you could be more specific about the benefits of a wilderness designation. Perhaps your thinking would be “no mountain bikes”- it’s impossible to tell exactly from this article. But since the population in Colorado is growing, it’s likely to be more crowded in the backcountry whether it’s a designated wilderness or not. In fact, the CPW study cited in the story says “undeveloped open land” into which roadless areas, as well as other designations, would also fit.
Colorado ranks sixth among states for its amount of federally designated wilderness areas but has had few new designations recently. The state’s population is meanwhile growing at nearly twice the national rate.
What on earth does the state’s population growth have to do with designation of wilderness? This article seems to assume that these two concepts are related. It almost sounds as if the person who wrote this, or the group that spoke to them is thinking that houses will be built unless the area is designated wilderness. Maybe the lack of new designations means simply that enough was already designated? It seems to me like this article seems to simply accept the logic presented in (a press release? an interview with TWS?) without asking reasonable questions about the assertions made.
From the Gold Standard piece by Vince Byzdek here:
This method involves a kind of triangulation – seeking out multiple authoritative sources, vetting them thoroughly, disclosing as much as possible about the sources, and allowing people who are accused or challenged in our stories to have the chance to comment before we publish the stories. That means always including opposing views.<
Recently there has been much discussion of the wonderfulness of traditional media outlets, and the questionability of other sources of information. On this blog, we have reviewed articles in which the national news outlets have covered interior west and public lands issues poorly, or not at all. I like to think that everyone tries to do things right (good journalism, FS monitoring), but can fall short, due to a variety of pressures, more or less conscious biases, and so on.
Vince Bzdek is the editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette, and wrote a thoughtful piece linked here comparing “real news” as opposed to fake news. I think the whole piece is worth reading, and provides us on this blog a handy list of criteria we can apply to news articles posted here. I’ll quote a few relevant paragraphs here:
Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect,” by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel:
Journalism’s first obligation is to tell the truth.
Journalism’s first loyalty is to its citizens.
The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.
Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover.
Journalists must serve as an independent monitor of power.
Journalism must provide a forum for public criticism and comment.
Journalists must make the significant interesting and relevant.
Journalists should keep the news in proportion and make it comprehensive.
Journalists have an obligation to personal conscience.
We at the Gazette try to adhere religiously to these principles. In fact, any enterprise that purports to do real news should adhere to these principles, and you should hold us and them to these
About how to get at the “truth”:
The whole idea of objective reporting was never based on an assumption of bias-free journalists. That’s impossible, right? Instead, the concept centered on the idea that there is a “consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases do not undermine the accuracy of their work. The method is objective; not the journalist,” according to the APA.
This method involves a kind of triangulation – seeking out multiple authoritative sources, vetting them thoroughly, disclosing as much as possible about the sources, and allowing people who are accused or challenged in our stories to have the chance to comment before we publish the stories. That means always including opposing views.
In addition, what stories an outlet chooses to cover, or not cover, is a judgment call of what is “significant, interesting and relevant” which can vary person by person. It’s not like that’s a bias, but as we see on this blog, different people find different things interesting.
One of the structural problems I’ve found is that with Forest Service stories, if it’s about litigation, the FS is not allowed to comment (of course this makes sense, but..). Even when it’s about a project not in litigation, when I was working, I found that many public affairs people were careful not to counter claims directly as that sounds “defensive.” So if what Bzdek says is true, and I do believe that having at least two points of view described in a story makes sense, then this structure actually may prevent journalists from doing their jobs well on these topics.
I’d be really especially interested to know what the journalists and public affairs folks who read this blog think about this.
I saw FOIA from the government side when I was a regional FOIA coordinator as an unfunded mandate that made agency staff drop their priority work, but then sometimes get bogged down in attempts to deny requests under changing administration policies regarding the “presumption of openness.” But when I hosted a FOIA conference, I invited a newspaper reporter as a guest speaker to offer the rest of the world’s perspective. Which is a lot like the one in this editorial.
Now, in the previous post here I was critical of what I thought was the Administration’s focus on climate change as the source of wildfires.. only to find out that perhaps it was the New York Times’ spin and not entirely the Administration at all! So let’s compare coverage in the Denver Post and the NY Times…
Here’s the story today from the Post.. more useful details, no climate change ..
The Obama administration wants to fundamentally shift how it pays for firefighting in the United States — something Western lawmakers and governors have been agitating to change for years.
The proposal, which doesn’t increase overall spending and is part of President Barack Obama’s budget this year, essentially allows for separate funds to fight fires so the federal government doesn’t have to take money away from prevention.
Amid a number of the most destructive wildfire seasons ever recorded, the Obama administration has been cribbing cash to fight fires from the same pot used for suppression and prevention.
In a classic robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul scenario, the departments of Agriculture and Interior had to transfer $463 million in 2012 and $636 million in 2013 to fight fires. Those dollars came from programs that removed brush, managed forests and grasslands, and focused on forest health.
“We can’t keep putting our thumb in the dike,” said Gov. John Hickenlooper, following a White House meeting on the issue. “At some point, we’ve got to make the kind of investments that begin to solve the problem.”
Under the proposal unveiled Monday, the costs to fight severe wildfires — those that require emergency response or are near urban areas — would be funded through a new “wildfire suppression cap adjustment.” This funding mechanism removes firefighting cash from regular discretionary budget caps, thus protecting prevention funds.
This budget cap adjustment would be used only to fund the most severe 1 percent of catastrophic fires, and Congress would need to fund costs for the other 99 percent of fires before the cap funds become available.
In an interview, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called the previous funding method “a vicious cycle.”
“It would also allow us to do a better job to work on the 70,000 communities who are now … surrounded by forest,” he said. “They want the benefit of beautiful scenery. This would give us the resources to better prepare those communities.”
Wildfire destruction has become a worsening problem. Six of the most destructive fire seasons in the past 50 years have been since 2000.
Hickenlooper said White House officials on Monday brought Western governors to the Situation Room to view drought, rain and water table conditions nationwide. White House officials said one-third of American families live within the wildland-urban interface.
“It was very sobering,” Hickenlooper said.
In November, El Paso County Commissioner Sallie Clark told a Senate panel her community needed the federal government’s help to clear dead, dangerous brush adjacent to urban neighborhoods.
On Capitol Hill, where the president’s plan would need approval, bipartisan bills are pending in both the House and the Senate that support the new funding scheme. Both Democratic Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet support the Senate plan.
“This strategy will ensure we fight today’s fires without undermining efforts to get ahead of tomorrow’s blazes,” Udall said in a statement.
Bennet, who held a hearing last fall on the issue, agreed. “Today’s announcement addresses this issue by promoting a smarter, more sensible approach to dealing with wildfires that will save us money in the future,” he said in a statement.
It’s fascinating to me how stories are reported in different regional and national newspapers. And what newspapers are more likely to “blink out.”
Anyway, here’s my question for this story…”one-third of families live within the wildland-urban interface.” That seems like a lot to me. Does anyone know where this figure came from?
I’ve been thinking about how people use the terms “science” as in ” policies are better if they’re based on science”; and law as in “environmental laws are great because Congress made them, but if Congress messes with any of the case-law derived interpretations, that would be bad.”
It’s almost like there’s an idealized institution that people appeal to in some arguments, while sometimes ignoring or downplaying the realities of the institution. I think it will be helpful to talk about in future discussions how that plays out..for example, are Franklin and Johnson’s involvement with prescriptions on O&C lands making it “science.” What if it were two other scientists who developed a different prescription, would that still be “science”? It’s not hard to imagine other ecologist/economist pairs that could come up with other prescriptions.
Now, Congress’s messiness is laid out for the whole world to see through the press. But in my experience dealing with Forest Service projects wending their way through the system, I saw the “real” side of “science” (which I already knew about); the courts, and the press. Now I am not saying that any of them are any worse than any other; but they are all human and not perfect institutions. Human behavior in groups tends to be fairly similar and is not always perfect. When we talk about institutions, then, it seems to me, we should generally be talking about the institution as real and not as idealized.
Now people who are in the trenches on projects and see this firsthand, do not really have a voice. As agency folks, you are not allowed to question (in public) some of the issues or problems you see. For one thing, that might make powerful folks angry at the FS. For example, on one case, one of our attorneys said “we think the judge has the law wrong on this, but we won’t tell him because he is a young judge and we don’t want to have him biased against the FS for his career.” The fact that others critique the FS, but the FS can’t (usually) engage in meaningful public back and forth means that only one side is represented to the public, as we’ve discussed before.
Which also brings up that none of the feedback loops in the table allow for public discussion of claims and counterclaims, as we have on this blog. It’s too time-consuming, perhaps, but not having a place for that to occur seems to me to also be a problem. And we have to look at who is involved in the discussion and how members of the public get involved or not.
I am interested in your thoughts on this table. One thing I thought we might be able to do on this blog, that might be helpful, would be to keep tabs on some of the journals and post relevant information on this blog so that these critiques are more available in the public sphere.
What do you think about the table? What would you change or add? What ideas does the table generate in your mind?
This came across my desk through the climate change communications group at U C Boulder.. I think it’s interesting to share as it helps explain how we’re all a bit “on our own” when it comes to reporting of issues, and how reporters need our help, as experts, into the future. We also need really unbiased sources of information, which I hope this blog is, to some extent, both because of attempting to be fair and because we have both sides represented and available to critique. It’s somewhat scary for information other than what we can check for ourselves, though, I’ve gotta say.
In 2012, a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.
Signs of the shrinking reporting power are documented throughout this year’s report. Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978. In local TV, our special content report reveals, sports, weather and traffic now account on average for 40% of the content produced on the newscasts studied while story lengths shrink. On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012. Across the three cable channels, coverage of live events during the day, which often require a crew and correspondent, fell 30% from 2007 to 2012 while interview segments, which tend to take fewer resources and can be scheduled in advance, were up 31%. Time magazine, the only major print news weekly left standing, cut roughly 5% of its staff in early 2013 as a part of broader company layoffs. And in African-American news media, the Chicago Defender has winnowed its editorial staff to just four while The Afro cut back the number of pages in its papers from 28-32 in 2008 to 16-20 in 2012. A growing list of media outlets, such as Forbes magazine, use technology by a company called Narrative Science to produce content by way of algorithm, no human reporting necessary. And some of the newer nonprofit entrants into the industry, such as the Chicago News Cooperative, have, after launching with much fanfare, shut their doors.
This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands. And findings from our new public opinion survey released in this report reveal that the public is taking notice. Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.
At the same time, newsmakers and others with information they want to put into the public arena have become more adept at using digital technology and social media to do so on their own, without any filter by the traditional media. They are also seeing more success in getting their message into the traditional media narrative…(more)
