Fishing for headlines

For the past year, it seems, everywhere you turn there’s been a story about the sorry state of the oceans. There have been countless reports about a frightening decline of fish in the ocean. Americans have also read about troubled coral reefs and hideous fish kills. The drumbeat is so heavy, Time Magazine has had two cover stories on the subject. Not only has this same suite of stories cropped up from one coast to the other. But the same few scientists appear with surprising regularity. Folks like Sylvia Earle, formerly the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Also Carl Safina at Audubon and Jane Lubchenco, a biologist at Oregon State University, who was president of the AAAS in 1996. Sometimes they’re even quoted together in the same article. It’s not so uncommon for the same scientist to appear in many publications. Journalists often run a Nexis search or do other research to see what’s been written on the topic they’re plunging into, and a lively quote in one publication is an invitation to place a call to the same expert. But in the case of the fish stories, this isn’t simply an example of pack journalism. There’s actually been a concerted campaign, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, to catapult oceans into the public eye. Starting in October of last year, Pew arranged meetings with key journalists to sell ocean stories. Their salespeople? Earle, Lubchenco, Safina and coral reef expert John Ogden. For example, on October 9, 1996, the foursome travelled to San Francisco. Eleven days later, a story about the woes of the ocean splashed across the Sunday Examiner. Sylvia Earle was quoted. Generally speaking, stories with an environmental slant take a different approach than straight science writing. Reporters generally spend much less time looking at original sources of information, and more time talking to advocates. One result is that assertions are less likely to be challenged. For example, Earle is frequently quoted worrying that global fish catches peaked in 1989 and have been going downhill ever since. The Examiner story, for one, unblinkingly made that assumption. Yet that’s not really true. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, fish catches have reached a plateau since 1989 (they also were flat throughout the 1970s) and the best years on record are 1994 and 1995. And when aquaculture is considered, global fisheries production has actually been increasing steadily.