Truth & Other Howlers

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The real damage, though, was to the wolves.  In my Missoula notes, I have the bald statement by a federal wildlife official that wolves will always be managed by killing them.  He was absolutely confident that his agency would always be in control of the wolf populations in the West. His statement didn’t make it into my article, but it should have. It was probably the truest thing I heard at the conference. Even though I was good at asking penetrating questions, I wasn’t ready to penetrate all the way to the self-assured legal lethality that underlies federal wildlife policy—especially when I was working for Wildlife Conservation magazine, whose readers, after all, expected the animals they read about to be both wild and living.

In seventeen years I have learned that in environmental fights in the West, as in war, truth is the first casualty.

For magazine journalists who want to know how this process works in their profession, Gloria Steinem’s tell-all essay, “Sex, Lies, and Advertising,” is a good start.  As editor of Ms. magazine, Steinem learned that advertisers expect favorable editorial content. They expect it at travel magazines, ski magazines, newsmagazines, outdoor magazines, newspapers, network news shows, and blogs. As  Steinem found out, editors who insist that their reporters tell the truth do so at their peril.

While advertisers did not control the editorial content of Wildlife Conservation, the magazine’s readers held strong assumptions about wild animals, and I knew what they were.  That understanding stopped me from seeing the whole grim truth about wolves and their management.

I’ve also learned that many people stand to materially benefit if environmental arguments are never resolved, and that they don’t mind lying to further their interests. Thus we have biostitutes, research biologists who will testify that any environmental question will not be resolved without another decade of well-funded studies. And we have environmentalists who put color photographs of wolf puppies in their funding drive brochures. And ranchers who wave newspaper clippings from the 1890s about people being attacked by wolves. And wildlife managers who say they really don’t like shooting wolves from the air but someone has to do it. And outfitters and guides who tell us that the elk and hunters will disappear from the West unless wolves are exterminated.

In all these cases, economic interest trumps reality. A journalist’s old-fashioned adherence to unbiased truth can bring clarity to our legal battles over wolves, grizzlies, salmon, wilderness, water, and land use.

But adherence to unbiased truth is under fire from Fox News on the right and postmodernism on the left.  It requires a studied “pox on all your houses” attitude on the journalist’s part, and in a world that confuses identity with allegiance, its practitioners are decried as cynics.

So be it.  Cynicism is the journalist’s best friend (and you thought journalists didn’t have friends), but it’s also the truth’s best friend. The people you’re interviewing are never your friends, and to the extent you doubt that, you risk your adherence to unbiased truth.  And if you risk your adherence to unbiased truth, turn in your reporter’s notebook.  You can make more money as a lawyer.