There Has Never Been a Better Time for Environmental Journalism

Covering the environment honestly under Trump 2.0 will be a huge challenge, argues WatchDog Opinion, with regulatory rollbacks requiring an army of courageous and skilled muckrakers to discover and explain the many profound effects on ordinary Americans. Photo: Mstyslav Chernov for Global Panorama via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

WatchDog Opinion: There Has Never Been a Better Time for Environmental Journalism

By Joseph A. Davis

The planet is breaking heat records. PFAS and toxic chemicals are everywhere. Fenceline communities are plagued with cancer. Global treaties on climate, plastics, biodiversity and the oceans are stuck in wrangling among nations. The oil and gas industry seems not only to be running the government but also to be dictating the media narrative. And the top pick for FBI director wants to put reporters in jail.

There has never been a better time for environmental journalism.

Nor a scarier one.

Is journalism up to the task? The year 2025 may tell us.

Can truth-telling save us? Untruths and disinformation spread more widely than the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Still, we cling to the belief (or hope) that news media truth-telling can save the planet. That is not a given.

 

Disentangling truth from falsehood is still

a key challenge for serious journalists.

At least those willing to take it on.

 

But disentangling truth from falsehood is still a key challenge for serious journalists. At least those willing to take it on.

That’s not everyone. There are still supermarket tabloids. There are propaganda-based cable outlets, fake newspapers run by utilities and websites focused on UFOs. There are entities like RT, who present as legitimate media in the U.S. — but are run by the Russian government.

But there still are serious journalists. We point to The New York Times climate desk as an example. The wire services. Kick-ass do-gooders like ProPublica. More importantly, there are burgeoning nonprofit and web-first outlets devoted to environmental news. Inside Climate News, The Daily Climate, Canary Media and the like.

 

Unremitting hostility to news media

We expect the Trump 2.0 administration’s press policies to be a lot like Trump 1.0’s — but worse.

Unremitting hostility to news media was a hallmark of the first Trump administration, especially at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s press office. In 2018, EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox called Atlantic reporter Elaina Plott Calabro “a piece of trash.” Routine.

The irony is that Donald Trump himself craves media attention with the intensity of an addict — even though he disparages the “fake news” loudly whenever he can.

This time, though, Trump has let his pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, say publicly that he plans to “come after” unfavorable news outlets, possibly with criminal prosecution. This would violate the First Amendment.

The Society of Environmental Journalists has opposed any such action and called on the president-elect “to pledge never to prosecute, punish, deport, jail or harass journalists solely for what they report.” We haven’t heard back.

 

Covering corruption in Trump 2.0

During Trump 1.0, the U.S. media began using the word “lie,” a word that had been rarely used, virtually taboo, in their stories. Today it is commonplace.

During Trump 2.0, the media should probably lose its inhibitions over another rarely used word: “corruption.”

That would be one honest response to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago declaration to oil execs at an April 11 dinner, where he asked them to give $1 billion to his campaign so he could undo President Joe Biden’s climate regulations. It looked and quacked like a quid pro quo.

 

Certainly, the media needs to

cover corruption in Trump 2.0. But

just as dangerous will be the possible

corruption of the news media themselves.

 

Certainly, the media needs to cover corruption in Trump 2.0 — look at the conflicts of interest already apparent with Elon Musk’s “co-presidency.” But just as dangerous will be the possible corruption of the news media themselves. At least some of them.

We are not just talking about Fox … or Newsmax … or Steve Bannon’s War Room. In the fall of 2024, we saw respectable media like The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times suddenly get shy about making presidential endorsements on their editorial pages.

Neither endorsed anyone. And neither offered a convincing justification. Although they both made it out to be somehow principled, it was hardly that. The ownership of both newspapers was obviously afraid of revenge from Trump if they endorsed his opponent.

Maybe this is why billionaires should not have a monopoly on media ownership.

 

A chance to set the record straight

Covering the environment honestly under Trump 2.0 will be a huge challenge in many ways.

The regulatory rollbacks Trump intends will require an army of courageous and skilled muckrakers to discover and explain. There will be so many profound effects on ordinary Americans to keep up with. And so many harder-to-see injuries to the many marginalized groups who lack the political power of billionaires who own newspapers, networks … and now, it seems, governments.

In 1969, it was comparatively easy to attend a press conference over the fire-prone Cuyahoga River. In 1970, it was simple to interview college protesters at the first Earth Day. Today, there has grown up a multibillion-dollar PR industry to make pollution seem normal.

Today, the challenges are harder to cover. We will need to seek out and tell the stories of those who are hungry, poor, unemployed, who are immigrants lacking permanent legal status, farm workers, Indigenous Americans, Latinos, Black people, disabled people, incarcerated people, homeless people, the people across the tracks. All the people who can’t give Trump a billion dollars.

This coming administration will not only be an unprecedented opportunity to discover these stories, but a chance to set straight all the disinformation, confront the lies, turn over the rocks and expose the corruption.

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 2. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.