This Week:

Quote of the Week

The "Stranglehold" of Regulations

"What's the Story Here?"

Greetings,

It's good to be back. I enjoyed picking and eating the wild blueberries on the Lake Superior island where we camped.

This week I point out that government regulations on corporate behavior are sometimes effective. I do hope that such a stance is not seen as some sort of promotion of "big government." My point in writing about the effectiveness of environmental regulations is simply to refute the corporate line, which says that the Free Market is Good, and that regulation is Evil. It's not always so, even in our corporate-dominated public regulatory environment. I'm not arguing for "more regulation," per se. I'm arguing for less corporate power.

Welcome to the new readers this week. As I always say, if you don't like this issue, give it a few weeks. They're all different! And, to readers old and new, I always appreciate your comments and questions,

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

At the end of a short Associated Press story on July 25th about the U.S. fighting to block the enforcement of an international treaty against torture (an outrage in itself, but I couldn't find any snappy quotations to use on that), appeared the following paragraph, which could be filed under the "Don't Bother Us With Facts!" category:

"On Monday, the [Bush] administration cut support for the U.N. Population Fund, accusing the agency of sending money to Chinese agencies that carry out coercive programs involving abortion. The agency denies the accusation, and a U.S. government fact-finding mission found no evidence that agency money was being used in such a way."

The "Stranglehold" of Regulations

The June 19th issue of the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") carried an article explaining the frantic efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to raise money before the new campaign finance rules come into effect this November. Control of the U.S. Senate is at stake, the money-people believe. And "regaining [control of] the Senate would allow the [Republican] party to ‘relax the stranglehold of rules, regulations, and restrictions on American business,'" according to the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Bill Frist.

While I am not here to argue that rules and regulations are inherently good things, it is important to know of the cases where regulations have been successful in limiting some of the worst excesses of corporate America. Although a regular reader of the corporate press may find the concept of "successful regulations" a little hard to grasp, they're not really so unusual. Here are a couple of recent examples drawn from news reports in the Times.

Regulations I: Budgeting for Air Pollution

In an article on June 8th entitled "E.P.A. and Budget Office to Work Jointly on Diesel Soot Rules," the Times reported on a Bush administration plan to weaken air pollution rules. The Times called the plan "controversial," but I think it is quite creative. It seems that "states, cities, and clean-air groups" want the federal E.P.A. (Environmental Protection Agency) to speed up the process by which they limit the highly-polluting "soot," or fine-particle pollution, that is emitted by diesel engines, which "has been linked to elevated risks of heart and lung illnesses and premature death."

As of now, the E.P.A. has the responsibility of drafting such regulations, and they are supposed to base their work on health and environmental concerns. Many people think this seems reasonable; the Bush administration does not. The Bush idea is to have officials from the Office of Management and Budget help with the drafting of these environmental regulations, ostensibly to "streamline the overall rulemaking." It seems far more plausible that the goal is to assure that any draft regulations are as cheap to implement as possible, so they impinge as little as possible on corporate profits.

Some people, according to the Times, "sharply criticized that approach, saying health and environmental experts, not budget analysts, should write environmental rules." And that, essentially, is the story as the Times sees it. (In a separate article this week, I discuss the decision that this—and not something else— is "the story.")

"Some experts," the Times tells us, said the Bush plan "made sense," quoting a representative from the anti-government Competitive Enterprise Institute. ("We believe that consumers are best helped not by government regulation but by being allowed to make their own choices in a free marketplace," says their mission.)

The real story here, oddly enough, appeared as a caption attached to a graph that was pasted in next to the Times report. That graph shows that "Regulations [already in place] have sharply cut soot from gasoline-powered cars and trucks. Emissions from [unregulated] off-road diesel vehicles remain high." Time for a Nygaard Notes Alternative Headline, I'd say. How about: "Bush Administration Seeks Weakening of Effective Air Pollution Regulations." Or, "Bush Proposal Would Save Money, Cost Lives."

Regulations II: Marine Oil Pollution

In a classic example of getting the facts right but the story wrong, the Times of May 24th carried an article headlined "Offshore Oil Pollution Comes Mostly As Runoff, Study Says." The story is nominally about the fact—accurate, I have no doubt—that "85 percent of the 29 million gallons of marine oil pollution in North America each year comes from users—drivers, businesses, boaters—and not from the oil industry." Such pollution "will be hard to prevent," the Times makes a point to tell us.

The real story—found in the article itself, but not emphasized—is seen when you look at the reason that this percentage is what it is. The story points out that "spills from tankers, barges, and other oil transport vessels totaled less than a quarter-million gallons in 1999, down from more than six million in 1990." Now, why would that be? As the article points out, "The shift follows a substantial tightening of environmental regulations on oil exploration and shipping since the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in 1989." The dramatic Valdez accident got an enormous amount of press—as it should have—and has become a familiar symbol of system failure. However, the apparently very effective public regulations and rules that followed in its wake got much less press. This is a built-in shortcoming of daily news media, since the success of any preventive strategy is that "nothing happens"—no huge spills, less cancer and other diseases, nothing unusual to see and put on the news.

I would think that a 96 percent decrease in oil spills as a result of more "regulation" would be newsworthy. It doesn't seem to be, however, and the result is predictable. When business buttresses its eternal calls for less regulation with claims of the ineffectiveness and needless cost of "big government," there is little in the public consciousness to counter that argument. Perhaps the problem is that there is no "Environmental" section in the daily paper, but only a "Business" section.

"What's the Story Here?"

As long-time readers are aware, I often report on news items that I claim are "buried" or "de-emphasized" in the major media. I especially pick on the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print"). Is this simply a neurotic fixation on my part, or do I have a larger purpose in mind? Of course, there is a larger purpose, and I thought it might be helpful to readers to explain what it is.

Imagine that you are an editor at a large and powerful newspaper. Since you work on a daily newspaper, your business is "news." This means, among other things, that you can't just up and decide to publish an article on any issue you want, at any time. An article needs to have a "hook," or an "angle," in order to justify its taking up valuable space in today's newspaper. That is, it must contain some freshly-released or newly-discovered information that would qualify it as "news."

Furthermore, this "news hook" must mark it as an article that can be produced in line with the traditions, capacities, and journalistic norms of your paper. (Contrary to their irritating slogan, neither the Times nor any other paper is able to publish "All The News That's Fit To Print." Hundreds of choices—based on value judgements—are made in every newsroom for every edition of every paper.)

As an editor, articles are "pitched" to you every day, either by one of your reporters, by some interest group, or perhaps simply by appearing on one of the many news services (AP, Reuters, Agence France Press, etc) that constantly come before you. The editor's shorthand question that condenses all of the decisions she/he must make before deciding which stories get in the paper typically will be: "What's the story here?"

Problems and Solutions

In my piece on regulations elsewhere in this issue of the Notes, I report on a June 8th article in the Times about federal rules regulating air pollution caused by diesel engines. The "story" for the Times, in this case, is reflected in the headline: "EPA and Budget Office to Work Jointly On Diesel Soot Rules." That is, the "story" is the proposal by the Bush administration to change the way rules are made. I don't know how this story was pitched to the editor at the Times, but I do know that the article that appeared in the Times gave evidence of several other "hooks."

In the fourth-from-the-last paragraph of the Times article appeared the following words: "On Monday [June 10th] two groups of state and local air pollution officials plan to release a report on how diesel emissions from construction and farm equipment cause thousands of avoidable premature deaths a year and result in tens of billions of dollars in health costs."

The promised report, entitled "The Dangers of the Dirtiest Diesels: The Health and Welfare Impacts of Nonroad Heavy-Duty Diesel Engines and Fuels," was indeed released on June 10th, and indeed said what the Times said it did. Sort of.

The Times claimed that the report said "diesel emissions...result in tens of billions of dollars in health costs." In fact, the report did not stress the costs of these unnecessary illnesses and deaths, choosing instead to talk about the $67 billion of "estimated monetary benefit" that would result if the EPA would implement new air pollution regulations for diesel engines. That's a crucial difference. By stressing the depressing costs of pollution rather than the easily-attained benefits of increased regulation, two things happen.

First, by focusing on the problem rather than the solution, the Times encourages readers to get depressed about the bad news instead of active about the hopeful news. This is part of the reason why so many readers and friends tell me that they never read the newspapers. "It's too depressing," they say.

Secondly, by leaving out the important positive role that environmental regulation can have, have had, and could have on the public health, the Times misses an important opportunity to counter the Big Business propaganda that all regulation is bad, and that market forces can be trusted to keep us healthy and happy.

The Agenda Is Set

But there's an even bigger problem with the Times' decision to "lead" with a story about the proposal for a new regulatory system instead of the reality of, and proposed solution, to the problem of the needless deaths and costs caused by unregulated air pollution from diesel engines.

What difference does it make, some may ask, what the headline is, as long as the information is all in the article anyway? Here's where one has to remember the role of the Times as an "agenda-setting" newspaper. Very few newspapers (or any media) outside of the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and a few others, have the resources to "stay on top of" the enormous volume of news that is reported every day and to which they theoretically have access. Most regional papers, when deciding "what the news is" thus take their "cue" from the agenda-setting media. Since most United Statesians get their news from their local media, the editors at the Times play a large role in deciding what is "news" for the whole country.

My theory would thus predict that, by its failure to report on the pollution study and its recommendations, the Times essentially guaranteed that the study would remain unreported in the nation's daily papers. That's what we see; a database search of the nation's daily newspapers found exactly two articles on this major study.

Similar results were found when I looked back at an earlier study on the subject by the same group (with the phenomenally lengthy name "The State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators and the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials"). That study, the results of which were released in March of 2000, reported that "the filthy soot spewed by diesel engines is responsible for a shocking 125,000 cancers in the United States. This is not only cause for tremendous concern, but reason for swift and certain federal action." They reported, in a hopeful tone, that "tens of thousands of cancers, not to mention a host of other public health and environmental hazards, can be avoided if EPA implements [stronger regulations]." The report was unambiguous about the federal government's role, saying, "Because states and localities have limited authority under the Clean Air Act to tackle this perilous source of air pollution, it is entirely up to EPA to exercise federal leadership to address this critical national issue."

A search of the national media for coverage of this report, again, turned up only one feature story anywhere in the nation, this one in the Atlanta Constitution. Thus, most United Statesians never heard of it.

So...What's the Story Here?

This little case study contains three important points. First, deciding what is "news" is a subjective and arbitrary process. Second, the decision as to what is "news" is increasingly made by a very small number of people, namely the editors at the large and powerful mega-media corporations, exemplified by the New York Times. And, finally, for reasons that are worth thinking about (but about which I have no room to write this week), the "major" media often fail to report, or mis-report, stories of great importance to all of us.

So, what's a concerned person to do? You're doing it. By reading and supporting truly alternative media like Nygaard Notes—and by taking action on the things you learn from them—you are doing your part to reduce the power of the corporations and begin to put it where it belongs: with the people.