Covering the AP

Here's an excellent piece about a weird trend: Associated Press stories that skip covering the action at global climate conferences in favor of writing about the conferences' carbon footprint. It's written by a friend of mine, a journalist who just happens to be a computer scientist.

I call her a journalist because she commits journalism. She doesn't work for a professional news org. She blogs, she cares about what happens in her small California town, and she digs relentlessly. She knows more about the pertinent discussions in 21st century journalism than 95 percent of the news media's professional class, and I include myself in that number. To me, referring to Anna Haynes with a qualifier ("amateur," or "citizen," etc.) in front of the word "journalism" is not only an insult to Anna, but to journalism.

Because she doesn't have a masthead behind her, people don't always answer her calls. They blow her off without a second thought. And when she's working on something, she sweats the ethics obsessively. I know this because she reaches out for advice when she's unsure, because she really, really wants to get it right and be fair.

In this piece, Anna examines this trend of stories that cast climate change activists and leaders and scientists in the role of hypocrites, because they travel to conferences instead of staying at home. It's a can't-win narrative for global warming activists, and obviously it's not applied to conferences on other topics. Is it an interesting question? Sure. But how many times is it an interesting question? At what point does this repeated storyline stop being a legitimate question and start becoming a pandering hand-job to the people who leave comments like this one:

The general public is really tired of self-appointed saviors preaching at them from the podiums of very expensive, very exclusive resorts, especially when the message is that the rest of us have to buckle down and start living like Third-Worlders to 'save the Planet'

Anna is much nicer to this commenter than I want to be. "General public" my ass.

Anyway, she asked me for feedback on this piece, and here it is: I sure wish I'd written it.

Comments

[Anna]

Thank you Dan.
Hey, I'm wondering something, perhaps you or one of your readers could answer - what is this page saying?
(are Op-Eds typically for sale? or are they talking about advertising, clearly marked as such, on the Op-Ed page?)

[Anna]

Also, a clarification re this -

"Associated Press stories that skip covering the action at global climate conferences in favor of..."

In fairness to the writers, these "footprint" stories were written before the talks began, i.e. before was much in the way of conference action to cover. Yes there were other, better angles the stories could have taken (to name one: "is the conference's carbon footprint something we should care about, and why?"), but "what's gone on in the talks so far" wasn't one of them.

[Anna]

"...these "footprint" stories were written before the talks began" ...although now that I say that, I don't know for sure about Robin McDowell's Bali one; it appeared Dec 4, and the good ship Wikipedia says the conference started Dec 3. Pity I can't ask her, and get it straight.