M E D I A

Environmental journalism is in its demise, and its collapse opens even more opportunities for PR practitioners to increase their influence in the news room," emphasized John Stauber, an American investigative journalist, at the Society for Environmental Journalists' national conference, held in Boston last October. Stauber's comments came at a seminar on greenwashing, a PR method that makes companies appear greener than they actually are. It is not just an American phenomenon.

In the United States, fewer than 20 giant corporations own half of all the media. This has increased the conflict of interest between the public's need for information and the desire of corporations to provide "positive" information. Reporters, notoriously underpaid and overworked, simply fill in the space between ads because there is no time to do in-depth or investigative reporting, said Stauber.

This scenario offers a good opportunity for the public relations industry to put so-called "free" media/public relations articles into the newspapers. Free media equals advertisement that ends up looking like news. Stauber argued that most news and information in newspapers originates from the desk of PR practitioners. A working reporter gets dozens of phone calls, letters and faxes from PR firms every day. Hard-pressed journalists greet these materials with relief rather than suspicion, a lifesaver on a low-news day.

The advertising industry has learned that one of the best ways to influence an audience is to put its message in the mouth of publicly-trusted "experts" such as scientists, doctors or university professors. Corporations also fund nonprofit research institutes and information services.

Environmental journalism suffers from other PR effects as well. Public relations firms provide companies with biographies of environmental reporters and tell PR managers whom to contact if they want to complain about something that was written. Some PR firms focus on journalists - and whether or not the stories they have written were favorable or unfavorable. During the conference there was a scandal in Washington, D.C. at the U.S. Department of Energy because DoE officials had ordered a similar analysis from a PR company in order to monitor environmental journalists.

The state of Hungarian environmental journalism is similar to that in America. Investigative journalism is dead, even before it was born. Capital in the Hungarian media is also highly concentrated. Now that political pressure has eased off, the financial pressures of a nascent capitalist economy are upon us. We now suffer from business censorship instead of the former political one.

Journalists are underpaid and overworked. Many journalists make money by writing PR articles, and often write PR articles and news articles about the same company at the same time. In Hungary, contrary to the situation in America, there are no ethical codes ruling journalists' behavior at editorial offices. With few exceptions, editors often purposely mix the "real" news with the ads. The most typical examples are the "special issues." One of the most respected daily newspapers in Hungary published a special issue on nuclear energy "sponsored" by the nuclear industry. You can image how well the antinuclear movement argued on those pages.

The biggest problem with environmental journalism in Hungary is the lack of information. There are no independent research institutions or neutral information services. Many so-called independent research institutions are under industry control. Since the political changes, the government has given them less and less money; and the only chance for them to survive is to work with industry. In the States, there are many objective professional organizations providing information, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Few Hungarian newspapers can afford to maintain their own databases, and libraries have no budget to subscribe to even the most important foreign dailies, like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are busy with elementary financial problems of their own, often leaving PR companies as the only professional source of information for journalists.

The hazardous waste-site campaign is a good example. The nuclear industry in Hungary hired Burson Marstellers Hungary, a well-respected international PR company, to inform the public about the hazards and benefits of nuclear power. And they did, offering a lot of information, all from their own point-of-view.

In Hungary, we have 60 PR companies. They hire more media experts than the newspapers have environmental journalists. And they have more money than NGOs and independent research institutions do to properly inform the public.

Yes, greenwashing is here too.