“News” reports elevate U.S. senators' views over Sierra Club stance

The way journalists are over-awed by people with titles was on full display last week in a story involving the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

The Tahoe Daily Tribune performed the laudable service of disclosing a letter from U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Harry Reid urging the Sierra Club to go slow in confronting the TRPA over its pending master plan, though the Club subsequently sued TRPA.

The first paragraph of the Tribune article read, “Federal legislators urged the Sierra Club not to delay the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency’s regional plan update prior to the environmental group’s challenge to the wide-ranging plan this week.”

So far, so good. The lead gave the senators their say. But where was the second sentence? That sentence should have read, “But the Club responded that it was forced to sue after TRPA refused to negotiate on improvements to the plan.”

The Sierra Club’s viewpoint was left for paragraphs 11, 12 and 13, all the way at the end of the story. In a 609-word story, the Sierra Club was not heard from until 408. An Associated Press rewrite of the story used a similar frame.

In the Reno Gazette-Journal, that meant the attack by the senators was splashed across the top of the front page, while the Sierra Club made its case inside the paper, on the jump page—which, of course, many readers never see. Moreover, the day’s main headline portrayed the Sierra Club as conducting lèse-majesté against—gasp!—the two senators: “Tahoe suit defied warnings.”

It is the Sierra Club that is on the front lines. The two senators, briefed by their aides on the matters at issue, stood off at a safe distance and dissed the Sierra Clubbers in the trenches. The senators are not the experts. If anyone was being defiant, it was the senators. They were defying fully informed environmentalists who know the terrain.

Placement and size matter. When a newspaper and a wire service elevate one viewpoint over another—and devote much more space to one than the other—it sends a message about the validity of those competing views. The Tribune and the AP put an imprimatur on the Feinstein/Reid stance while trivializing the Sierra Club’s position.

It’s true that the Nevada Legislature in 2011 enacted a bill to pull Nevada out of the TRPA unless pro-growth people got their way. But that should be treated as a related but separate issue. Tahoe affairs can’t stop because Nevada has painted itself into a corner on pullout from TRPA. Pullout would never have been enacted if Democrats and Gov. Sandoval had not been trying to curry favor with moneyed interests and believed they could do it without actually risking a pullout because that decision was down the road. While the pullout measure was enacted Sen. Reid was silent—though he found time in his message to the legislators to discuss a dead-on-arrival proposal about brothels. Well, down the road is now and since the politicians have gotten their mileage out of that measure, the Democrats should come back to life and repeal it.

U.S. senators, other politicians, corporations, executives, people with money all have an easy time getting public attention. It’s the others, the workers, the people in the trenches, the gadflies, the activists, the minorities, who have trouble getting a hearing. There’s no reason to make it harder on them.