The O.J. environmental story: can environmental news compete with sensationalism.

One Friday night last June, 95 million Americans watched O.J. Simpson's white Ford Bronco glide along the highway at 16 miles-per-gallon followed by a team of police cruisers on the most famous car chase this country has ever seen. A posse of newscopters hovered overhead as the sUnset grew pinker in the Los Angeles haze. The ozone level reached .09 parts-per-million, just exceeding California's air quality limits. Across the land millions of viewers wondered if O.J. would step out of the Bronco alive.

If you think this is a silly way to start a story, you're right. If you think it's original, you're wrong. Marla Cone covers the environment for The Los Angeles Times, living in the citadel of sensationalism, and she says, only half in jest, that a colleague of hers "managed to write a story about Yellowstone and get O.J. Simpson in the lead."

But some of the harshest critics of our nation's news, which seems to have become a revolving soap opera of celebrity tragedies and lurid trials, are the reporters themselves. "The state of the press just plain stinks," says Tom Winship, the retired editor of The Boston Globe, which won 12 Pulitzers under his tenure. "It's too cynical, negative, superficial. And we have a particularly bitchy Washington press corps." If you doubt him, try to remember how many stories you read about the failure to reform the 1872 Mining Law. How many about Whitewater? Now which one will cost taxpayers $100 million in lost revenues this year?

At last fall's Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference in Provo, Utah, Jim Detjen, a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, retired as the group's president and delivered his swan song for a troubled news beat. After the surge of interest in the late 1980s that peaked on Earth Day in 1990, he has watched the new sensationalism overtake serious reporting on the environment. "I have seen no good studies documenting this, but it's a feeling that many of us have based on the anecdotal evidence of environmental beats being cut back or eliminated," he says. The corporate owners have cut budgets for investigative reporting to increase profits. And newspapers and TV stations that have been losing readers and viewers have chosen to chase after the tabloid audience.

Detjen thinks this strategy has backfired. "We have climbed into bed with the sensational fringes of the industry, and we are paying for it with lost credibility and eroded sales," he says. One poll found that only 21 percent of the public believes that the media is honest, much less than the 37 percent who believe President Clinton. To gain back their lost readers and viewers, newspapers and TV stations "need to do what we do beat," Detjen says. "Report the news." Reporters should be sniffing the air, drinking the water, tasting the food and otherwise covering the environmental issues that affect people's daily lives. "Provide them with thoughtful and useful information," he says, "and they will come back for more."

Some people don't buy this lament. "You're the saviors of the world?" Mei-Mei Chan, executive editor of the Idaho Falls Post Register asked the conference hall. "That's the problem. Environmental reporters have a sense of being holier than thou." Conservative critic Michael Fumento accused the crowd of practicing its own form of sensationalism, publishing "toxic terror" stories about dioxin and other issues marked by scientific uncertainties. And Rick Rodriguez, managing editor of The Sacramento Bee, said that his readers hardly put the environment at the top of the list of stories they want covered. Instead, they rank it right in the middle.

To be sure, the environment has never been an easy news beat. It's too slow, too complex, too filled with scientific uncertainties rather than obvious issues of right and wrong. "Murder is simple. We all know how to cover it," says Erin Hayes of ABC News. "But if you have 40 parts per quadrillion of 2,3,7,8 dioxin in the river, some people will say that's not so bad, while others will say it's really bad. There will be an argument." The news managers would get caught in the crossfire between industries, scientists and advocates all making conflicting claims about a subject they don't understand very well. In comparison, "Who Killed Nicole?" seems like an easy story to cover.

"If you want to be a total cynic," Tom Winship adds, "environmental stories run into the toughest lobbies that newspaper editors and publishers face - the real estate and development lobby." These local power brokers don't need the headache of pesky reporters finding endangered species or buried waste on their land.

All media are not created equal, of course. The top dozen or two newspapers in the country have adopted well to our age of CNN and computer networks, Winship says, playing the role of the "great explainer" in our rapid-fire society. The rest only grow more mediocre. And many don't even have full-time environmental reporters. Gregory Favre, executive editor of The Sacramento Bee and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, says that "at least 50 percent of our newspapers and 75 percent of our television stations do not have full-time environmental reporters. That's a shame."

But the public doesn't just follow the news, it is bombarded by ads, which should be a story in itself. "I have a five-year-old son. He thinks that Weyerhauser is a tree-growing company and Conoco is an aquarium," says John Echeverria, an attorney with the National Audubon Society. He wishes the press would cover the greenwashing in its own pages. "The public perception of environmental issues has changed more dramatically in the past 10 years because of changes in the advertising than because of anything environmental journalists are doing."

"There's a TV ad in which the dolphins are leaping, the seals are clapping, the animals are happy all because Du Pont has done such wonderful things for the environment," adds Jim Naureckis of the progressive media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). "I must have seen that ad 50 times, which is far more often than I've seen coverage of Du Pont's environmental record." And while you were stuck watching O.J. last fall, DU Pont's old CFCs continued to rise into the stratosphere to create the biggest hole yet over Antarctica.

Contact: Society of Environmental Journalists, 9425 Stenton Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19118/[phone].