Moyers saves the planet

When retired television journalist Bill Moyers, long a fixture on the Public Broadcasting System in the United States, received an award from Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, he probably thought it safe to reveal his true feelings. He was in a friendly setting — not in viny Cambridge, but in swanky New York — where he was being lionized by the award event’s hostess, the actress Meryl Streep, for “highlighting how changes in the environment affect our health and our daily lives,” and by the Center’s director, Eric Chivian, who said Moyers’s “work on the environment successfully makes strong connections between human health and the well being of the Earth’s ecosystems.”

Surely nobody in attendance would object if he put some hurt on the wicked earth-destroyers of the current Bush and late Reagan administrations. “The delusional is no longer marginal,” said Moyers. “It has come in from the fringe to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.”

And that theology, warned Moyers, is a set of commandments for environmental degradation. Those horrifying fundamentalists that prop up the Republican administration — apart from welcoming war in the Middle East as a sign of the forthcoming Judgment — are convinced that we need not take care of our environment, because the End is nigh.

(“I can see in the look on your faces just how hard it is for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility,” Moyers said in his speech. There’s wisdom in that observation.)

One of Moyers’s examples came from an article in the online journal Grist by Glenn Scherer, entitled “The godly must be crazy.” Scherer quoted James Watt, the original Secretary of the Interior in Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, as having said “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.” For Scherer, those words meant that Watt — who was reviled by the green crowd for having advocated a balance between use and preservation — believed it was not necessary to conserve natural resources, because Christ was on His way.

Trouble was, Watt never said that. Not in the Congress, where Scherer’s article and Moyers’s speech put him. Not anywhere else either, at least not within microphone range. And it’s clear from Watt’s record — for those who bestir themselves enough to check it — that he never believed any such thing.

The themes in Moyers’s speech and Scherer’s article found their way out to the daily press. Blaine Harden in Washington Post and Alexander Zaitchik in the alternative New York Press both repeated the phony quote, while several papers picked up a version of Moyers’s speech that appeared under his byline on the web site AlterNet. And it was in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune of Jan. 30 that James Watt saw himself quoted saying something absurd.

He protested: Grist issued a correction on Feb. 4. The Post corrected its article two days later. The Star-Tribune took nine days, but had the decency to give Watt a column to rebut Moyers’s charges.

Moyers himself apologized, saying of the untraceable remarks “despite their widespread currency, I should have checked their accuracy before using them. . . . I also told [Watt] that I continue to find his policies as Secretary of the Interior abysmally at odds with what I, as well as other Christians, understand to be our obligation to be stewards of the earth.”

We apologize often enough ourselves that we know how to do it: and you don’t finish with a cheap shot like that, or assert the “widespread currency” of something you have good reason to believe is false. Shame, Mr. Moyers.

So what does this tell us in the mining industry? Mostly that the establishment press and its copycats in the “alternative” media have a fixed idea of the good guys and bad guys on any issue relevant to the environment. And there are no prizes for guessing which hat they are fitting us for.

The facts will matter little if they get in the way of a good rake through the muck. A man with 30 Emmys for television news was that loose with the facts, all in aid of his vision of saving the planet. Others will be just as loose, and they will hurl misquotes, religion, ideology, and every other brick they can find.

So the truth becomes important: and the industry’s case needs to be made over the heads of the bigots to people themselves. Let’s hope we can find a way to do it.