Erasurehead: The future of public science reporting under Trump II

Another grand, offensive statement every day

Angie Coiro: Was the news media ready to cover Donald Trump’s first administration, with its attacks on environmental standards? 

Mark Schapiro: There are huge exceptions to this, but very broadly speaking, they weren't prepared. Nobody expected this to happen; it never happened before. The degree of aggression and the degree of brutality cutting government programs was something nobody could have prepared for, at that time. Now we know, so we have a bit more time to get prepared, psychologically and professionally.

But environmental questions are often complicated. There's obviously complicated science behind our understanding of what a healthy environment is, or what an insult to an environment is, or to an ecological system, and/or to human health. For example, when a lower maximum toxic load is established within the EPA for one chemical or another, say, and the acceptable lethal dose is decreased, the threshold for regulatory action follows. It looks like a very technical calculation, but that relatively small shift could have major implications for industry and for the health of workers and the public exposed. To actually understand the significance of those adjustments or tweaks to regulatory standards takes some basic knowledge of how to interpret scientific information and how, or if, it influences government action.

On that level, the media—again, broadly speaking—was probably not ready for the level of aggression of the assault on environmental and health regulations. I think the media got distracted by Trump's grandiose statements that many found deeply offensive. So one grandiose statement after another gets the headlines, while the real action is happening behind the scenes.

I think that's the most important thing about this coming administration: that the media not get distracted by the outrageous things coming out of the White House. Because there'll be another grand, offensive statement every day, as we know from experience. Those tend to get huge play in the media. You get the outrageous statement that gets a lot of play, then you get the response that gets a lot of play, and then you get the response to the response. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the rules governing toxic exposures or how much pollution can enter into the fresh water supply, or the programs encouraging a shift towards green energy, are fundamentally altered. We have to be prepared for such maneuvers lowering the regulatory thresholds to levels not seen before.

And that's what's going to be happening. That's where the action is. If there's anything to be aware of in the coming administration, one of them is certainly not to get distracted by the next offensive thing Trump says.

And Trump understands this. All his people understand this. It's what's made him a successful demagogue, really—which is what he is—that he himself is the MacGuffin for the policies that happen under his administration. We have to understand that Trump's proclamations can, in many ways, be the MacGuffin that takes our attention off the very profound things happening within the government itself.

A more enmeshed media world

Coiro: Do you make any distinction between how prepared legacy media is for the next Trump administration versus the newer media—blogs, online news services, independents, nonprofits? Do you see them tackling the issues differently? Have they learned from each other?

Schapiro: There's a lot of good journalism being done in both the legacy media and the online media. Does it take somewhat different forms? Yeah. The exclusively online media, there’s a lot of specialization.

There are three parts to this media scene that we're talking about here. One is the exclusively online media; two is the legacy media; three is the nonprofit media—and they all interconnect in many different ways. But I think the legacy media has learned something from the internet-exclusive media that has a specialty in environmental reporting. You have a sophistication when it comes to sites like Inside Climate News, or Grist, or other publications that are able to dive deep into environmental regulatory questions, and do very substantive reporting on the implications, and really understand the way these levers of power work to a great degree.

Here's where I think the difference is: the legacy media—there's a lot of great journalism there, but they tend to rely more on official sources, and they report on official statements. They have to record these official pronouncements; they have to tell you what the people in power are doing. So they'll do a little bit like “the administrator of the EPA announced this new initiative today, which is going to dismantle XYZ.” And then there'll always be a quote from some person going, “Oh my God, he's dismantling the XYZ.” There won't necessarily be an interpretation of how important a proviso that is.

That’s definitely not always the case, and there are huge, enormous exceptions.

I think the exclusively online media, particularly those specializing in the environment, don't necessarily feel the obligation to report the official declaration but to get deep into the sinews of how a particular policy is being executed. I think that's a difference, but of course, there is a lot of substantive reporting being done in this arena by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other legacy media, and there is some blurring of the distinctions. But broadly speaking, the legacy media have an obligation to report on the official policies and statements of government and sometimes—not always—do so without a critical interpretation or analysis of the implications.

Meanwhile, you have the nonprofit journalism organizations—ProPublica, Floodlight, and Drilled, for example—that spend months and months diving in, and will come up with something over two, three months that actually really reveals something of the inner workings of these policy shifts. Ultimately, they end up kind of playing off each other.

And sometimes the nonprofit media ends up landing in the pages of the legacy media, or the reverse. It's a more enmeshed media world. I think the distinctions are not as clear as they once were. But they still are there, probably in subtle ways.

Coiro: What journalists and news sites would you recommend people follow, as we move into the second Trump administration?

Schapiro: I think Inside Climate News does really great reporting on climate and the fossil fuel industries.

Amy Westervelt: her podcast Drilled does really great work on climate. Environmental Health News is really good to watch for good news stories. They pick up interesting stories coming out on environmental health questions. Capital and Main (for whom I had a column on climate and the media) does solid work on the fossil fuel industries and their influence on climate policies, particularly at the state level.

Some of the science journals—Nature Communications, Nature, Science Magazine, Climatic Change, and there’s Nature Climate Change. These are science journals, peer-reviewed. Very worth looking at if you're a journalist to see new insights science is providing us.

Let the information tell the story

Coiro: You’re lecturing at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Schapiro: Yeah, I just taught a class in narrative fundamentals. Next semester, I'm teaching science reporting. Other years, I’ve taught climate journalism.

Coiro: How do your students see the cultural divide over science and the environment? Are they skeptical of press-release journalism and overt bias?

Schapiro: Well, they’re not going to journalism school to learn press-release journalism. So, yes, they’re skeptical of the interests that might be at play, at all levels. They are highly aware of the implicit biases that might exist in their own work, and that of others. As for the cultural divide, they come in on multiple sides of that divide, but the key point is: they value, like all of us, accuracy. Not ‘objectivity,’ whatever that’s come to mean. I think they accept that everyone approaches a story from a point of view and a historical background that sensitizes them, or not, to the subject matter.

They're pretty savvy. That said, I think, in many cases, enough to notice, they’re accustomed to having their own point of view made clear, certainly more so than my own experience coming up in journalism. There may be, in this generation that's coming up amidst the blogs and the strong voices and the multiplicity of outlets—each of which has a different identity—that identity or perspective is part of the journalistic process. There might be this overvaluation of individual voices in this kind of cacophonous situation, which I think could be softened a little bit. Not eliminated; not tamped down in the name of objectivity, because that doesn't exist. But tamped down in the sense of: let the information tell the story. Let the information tell the story. In this huge, multifarious cacophony of voices in the media world they’re coming into, some levels of restraint are important to communicate a story effectively and accurately.

Raid the government websites

Coiro: Looking to the new administration: are there environmental stories that you're concerned may be lost, either because people are distracted, or because the stories are too technical in a world that likes things fast and boiled down? What might be out there that we'll have to look a little harder to find?

Schapiro: There is already, we know, a lot of fear among journalists, scientists, and NGOs, that the data now available through government agencies like the EPA or FDA, or the Interior Department, is going to be no longer available. Big concern. If it's possible for people to start raiding the government websites and downloading all the data that's there, that would probably be a good strategy. If you have the resources and time to do that, now would be the time to get that material because it may not be there for long. [Editor’s note: a coalition led by the Internet Archive is mounting a comprehensive capture of public research websites in government archives You can get involved in the effort to preserve public data here.]

One of the initiatives of the Biden administration—which was fairly significant in this regard—was about tying government policies to a climate framework. So, actually seeing the climate impacts on agriculture, climate impacts on urban planning, the climate impacts on fixing infrastructure—that was an explicit attempt by the Biden administration to acknowledge and act on the broad-ranging disruptive impacts of the changing climate. I think that's helped contribute to some significant initiatives on the climate front.

But now, I suspect, the language about climate change is probably going to disappear. There's probably going to be not a single word related to ‘climate change’ from the federal government as North Carolina gets hit by another hurricane, the intensity of which has never been seen before, or parts of Florida drown as the sea level rises. There will be no government office that has the words “climate change” anywhere. That's a very important thing to know about, and reporting on the implications of that willful blindness will be crucial.

Starting now, journalists are going to have to learn enough to understand what is and is not a climate-related extreme. But equally important, they need to get familiar with talking to scientists. One of the things about the EPA is they would put together all the studies on whatever it was. They wouldn't actually put them together like some handy guide, but they would be an umbrella where you could find valuable information about the environment, and sometimes a source to offer a comment or two. Maybe not on everything; it’s still a cantankerous federal agency, and sometimes the reporting by me or anyone else was critical of the agency itself. But it had some level of openness to journalists, and that's going to close down immediately.

So I think journalists should get acquainted more with talking to scientists, reading the scientific journals, not waiting for an interpretation or an action by a government agency. But go to the scientists who used to inform NOAA and NASA and EPA, and talk to them about their work and their perception of the changes that will no doubt be happening. I've heard pretty reliable sources about how the current people in the EPA are nervous already about losing their jobs—find them and talk with them. I’m sure they’ll have something to say about what’s likely to be going on.

I know the EPA’s scientific board of advisors, a leading group of scientists who inform the EPA, is preparing to be disbanded. They’ll go back to their positions, mostly in academia and research institutions. But you've got to get to know who those are. There's not going to be a central place anymore to find them.

Hopefully, many state, local, and municipal governments will continue to produce some levels of information and initiatives people can report on also. But there's a huge array of things people should keep an eye on—for example, the water supply. What's going to happen to the Clean Water Act, which the Supreme Court has begun the process of unraveling? Probably continue unraveling? One of the more preposterous things Trump said during the campaign was to the effect of, “we're going to have the cleanest water and air in the world.” While at the same time, it looks likely that his administration will further limit the EPA from acting to protect the integrity of that water supply or constrain the industries that pollute it.

So let's have a look at that. Are we having the cleanest water in the world, as the ability to regulate tributaries into major rivers, and to slow or prevent the flow of toxins into the water supply, is weakened? We don't know yet. But we can assume from past experiences. Let's put that statement up to a test.

The other thing is the continuing trend towards oligopoly. That goes across the board when it comes to the economy, and the economy has obviously major implications for the environment. But the existing oligopolists, who are going to be deeply at Trump's side as he engineers this next term, have on target the Federal Trade Commission—which could be criticized, but it's already done quite a bit to at least send warning signals to some of the biggest tech companies, the biggest agriculture companies, and others for their anti-competitive behavior.

So you could be looking carefully at the increasing concentration of economic power. That’s going to have huge implications, without any kind of check that the FTC provides. Or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which probably is going to be blown up on day one. That hasn't yet evolved into a major force, but it does have some important protections. Journalists should also be talking to whoever's running these organizations. Getting them to provide some inside information would be helpful.

Reverse engineer Project 2025

Coiro: Any last thoughts to prepare journalists for environmental reporting under Trump II?

Schapiro: In the big picture, we should learn how to report on agencies: deep within the mechanisms, big regulatory and legislative initiatives that have to go through Congress. The EPA, for example, has done a number of environmental justice regulations about the proximity to poor communities of fossil fuel facilities.

We need to understand how those regulations are enacted, and then find out what's happening to them. It's like reverse engineering Project 2025, written by Trump’s allies to identify the major areas in government they’d like to reform or eliminate. So reading it with an eye on the agencies and levers of regulatory power it identifies for upheaval would give journalists a sense of where the action will be for the new administration. Approach it like a tip sheet identifying areas for reporting, and investigation, and asking the classic questions: Who benefits, who loses?

Whatever you say about their ideology, those people understand government. A lot of them were in government. They were congressional aides; they were agency figures. They've been in DC for decades, so they understand the mechanisms of government. Project 2025 is extremely precise as to how to engineer a change in the priorities of these agencies. I would hesitate to recommend anybody reading Project 2025, but if you were to, you could learn a lot about where the levers of power are that are worth paying attention to. That's where the tension is going to be.