Clean Coal, Clean Tar: Media Not Swallowing It Anymore

NBC Nightly News made media history when Brian Williams uttered these words while looking into the camera:

Coal. While you might have heard the phrase 'clean coal' during the presidential campaign, it's actually an oxymoron. Wishful thinking. Coal does not burn cleanly and it's hugely expensive to make it burn that way.

It was merely and finally a bit of honest reporting, but nonetheless, it crossed an important watershed: to actually say out loud that capturing carbon and pumping it underground forever was still "wishful thinking." It supplied a taste of what was sorely missing from mainstream media offerings during the entire Bush administration and right on through the presidential campaign.

It's easy to understand the causes of the long, shameful silence. After all, the Oval Office was occupied by fossil kings. McCain still had a shot to win thanks to generous donations from the oil wing of the Republican party. Big Coal had cornered the market as primary sponsor of the Presidential debates. Even Obama was genuflecting to the myth of clean coal to secure his victory. The networks weren't about to the rock the boat, the First Amendment notwithstanding.

So to hear Brian Williams take a clean shot at dirty coal seemed like a signal heralding a great thaw of a long media Ice Age that has prohibited honest reporting on the fossil fuel industry.

One swallow doesn't a summer make, so it was an important confirmation of the coming change of seasons when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broke a damning story on tar sands. It seems they, too, took courage from the incoming American administration that wasn't going to roll over and play dead while the filthiest fossil fuel known to man flowed across the border.

CBC News has obtained a government document that says reducing greenhouse gases from Western Canada's oilsands will be much more difficult than some politicians and the industry suggest.

The ministerial briefing notes, initially marked "Secret," say that just a small percentage of the carbon dioxide released in mining the sands and producing fuel from them can be captured.

The oilsands are the fastest-growing source of CO2 in the country, set to increase from five per cent to 16 per cent of total emissions by 2020 under current plans.

Capturing the gas and pumping it underground has been the key public strategy for reducing the oilsands industry's contribution to global warming.

But as we already knew from Brian Williams' report, "capturing the gas and pumping it underground" is wishful thinking. To the oxymoron of clean coal, now please add the oxymoron of clean tar. All within the span of single week.

Let's see how quickly the rest of the mainstream media pivots to the new reality which North America now has permission to accept, thanks to the election of Barack Obama and his unequivocal statement:

My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change.

He's given mainstream media conglomerates new editorial marching orders, or so it seemed to me. I called Brent Cunningham, Managing Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, to see if the thaw I was perceiving was, well, wishful thinking on my part.

Hardly. A big shift in the media coverage of issues would be no surprise to him and is par for the course. Here's what he said.

Part of what happens is you do have a new set of ideas and a new set of priorities emanating from the White House, and that changes the press's agenda. The press likes to talk a lot about how it sets the agenda, but by and large it amplifies the agenda coming from the sources of power in society.

One of the best analogies is the way the tone of the coverage of the debacle in Iraq was covered once it was clear it was going down the tubes and Bush's approval ratings plummeted. The press say this isn't true, but if they are being honest, they need a certain license to report things that otherwise may produce the kind of controversy media companies don't like.

Replacing Bush with Obama as the nation's editor-in chief (my words) would be welcomed, too.

We've got a new agenda in the White House and it's probably one, frankly, that a lot of reporters think is much more evolved than the one we've labored under for the last eight years. So stories suddenly have news pegs that they didn't have before and reporters have a realpolitick rationale to sell to editors that didn't exist before. You also usually have a fairly healthy turnover in the front line reporter corps.

Of course, there are certain exceptions to this sea change.

At SolveClimate, we make regular sport of bashing the Wall Street Journal's editorial page for its unrepentant refusal to recognize free market failures such as global warming or the financial crisis. We don't expect their subprime minds to change, although we will be gleeful to hear their editors fulminating in the wilderness, rather than from the apex of the Rovian (as in Karl) and Newtonian (as in Gingrich) communications machine.

And then, there are also the unseasoned newbies, like Politico's Erika Lovley, who took a public beating for freshly carrying the water for climate deniers. As the mainstream media was starting to adapt itself to the President-elect's priorities, she swam against the tide in an act of journalistic malpractice which produced what Grist called "two of the dumbest stories of the decade on climate science."

Perhaps Lovley is angling for a slot on the Wall Street Journal's edit page. Seems like a perfect fit.

The rest of us only hope that the media will also make the same promise that the President-elect did when he embraced his victory in Chicago the night of November 4th.

I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face.

Now there's a credo every editor-in-chief worth her salt should have no difficulty espousing.

See Also

Post-Election, Wall Street Journal's Identity Disorder Intensifies

Greenhouse Asses at the Wall Street Journal

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