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FlyersEarth Journalism Network Goes Behind China’s Headlines
China is a front-page story these days not just for its rapid growth, but also for its environmental disasters. Now Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (EJN) is helping Chinese journalists to dig deeper into the stories beneath the headlines. Launched just this year, EJN’s China projects have already helped Chinese readers get a better picture of the impact the country is having on its neighbors. For example, a story in the China Daily, written by one of the EJNsupported participants at an environmental training course on the Mekong River, revealed how China is damaging the river’s fragile ecology by blasting rapids in its efforts to improve navigation on the river. EJN ACTIVITIES AIM TO IMPROVE ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTINGEJN has undertaken several activities to improve the quality and quantity of environmental reporting in China:
EJN’s goal in China is to help the media give more prominence to environmental stories and support it in uncovering the root causes of the country’s environmental crisis. Toward this end, it will hold three more journalism training workshops in China over the coming year, one on environmental law and two on pollution. TRAINING WORKSHOP SUPPORTS BOLD ACTION BY JOURNALISTS
These activities will build on EJN’s recent participation in a training workshop organized by the Capital Youth Journalists’ Association (CYJA), whose patron is Pan Yue, the vice-minister of the State Environmental Protection Association and the country’s most well-known and outspoken green official. In a ringing two-hour speech to the workshop’s 30 journalists, Pan Yue urged journalists to be bold in uncovering Chinese environmental catastrophes. EJN brought in Strieker, who serves as EJN’s lead TV trainer and runs his own non-profit production house, the Environment News Trust, to deliver the keynote speech. Strieker had two main messages for Chinese media: he urged that environmental stories become part of regular, mainstream news programming in addition to niche environmental media; and he encouraged journalists to look beyond the environmental disasters that make good headlines, and report on the less-noticed, often more profound changes that China’s environment is undergoing. “When people look back a hundred years from now, these incremental changes – climate change, the loss of biodiversity, changing consumption patterns – will be the stories they identify as most crucial,” Strieker told the journalists. Upon seeing some of the news clips Strieker has produced for CNN about the Three Gorges Dam, Liu Jianqiang, a journalist with Southern Weekend, commented, “It’s amazing how Gary can tell a full story in just three minutes. It takes us half an hour.” REPORTS FROM CHINA TO REACH INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCE
Strieker plans to return to China in January to produce reports for his Assignment: Earth series that will appear on Al- Jazeera, Yahoo.com and elsewhere. With Internews’ help, he is also keen to pursue a partnership with CCTV to produce environmental reports to be shown on Chinese TV and internationally. Fahn gave talks to the CYJA workshop and to the students at CUC as well. In addition to explaining what makes the environment a fun and unique journalistic beat, he provided techniques for sourcing, and emphasized how the poor suffer the most from environmental problems. “If government officials are really concerned with reducing poverty, then they can’t just put off environmental protection, but should integrate it with development to make growth sustainable,” Fahn explained. As a case in point, he cited the effort of Pan Yue and other Chinese environmental officials to weight GDP growth with green indicators to more accurately reflect the pace of progress. FAHN’S ADDRESS CITES GLOBAL EFFECTS OF POLLUTION
Fahn also commented on the increasingly severe impact that China’s development is having on the rest of the world. Southeast Asia’s environment in particular has been damaged by Chinese pollution, dams and logging activities. Even the US is feeling the effects; between a quarter and a third of California’s air pollution is attributed to Chinese sources. Fahn delivered similar messages when he gave his speech to the Environmental Journalism Salon, a monthly gathering of media and NGO personnel who meet to learn about green issues. EJN aims to carry out further activities with the Salon, which has become a kind of informal institution in Beijing and is now expanding to 18 other cities in China. Following that talk, Fahn was invited to write an article for the China Daily, entitled “Nation May Look South for Green Lessons.” Unfortunately several passages in the original article commenting on the damage China’s development is causing were removed by the paper’s editors – reflecting the fundamental challenge that Chinese journalists still face. Perhaps this explains why the Chinese journalists who attended the Mekong course, along with reporters from the other five riparian countries, were surprised to hear Thai villagers living along the river complain about China’s actions. ACTIVE AGENDA FOR EJN IN CHINA INCLUDES WORKSHOPS & PARTNERSHIPSOver the next year, EJN is also planning to:
“We really appreciate the help EJN was able to provide to our journalists,” said CYJA’s Sonia Li, “and hope we can work together again.” SPONSORSThe activities of the Earth Journalism Network have been funded by the Marisla Foundation, the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Financial Services, the Philanthropy Workshop West Alumni Fund of the Tides Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. EJN is a program of Internews Network and has a strategic partnership with the non-profit television production company Environment News Trust, headed by veteran environmental journalist Gary Strieker. |
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