By IPS Correspondents
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 19 2002 (IPS)

The 1992 Earth Summit triggered a surge in media reporting on the environment but television journalists say they still find it difficult to sustain coverage of sustainable development.

Come August, when governments and environmentalists convene in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, many broadcasters will confront once more a problem they say has dogged them for the past decade: how to communicate to the public a concept that is so broad and abstract.

“How do you sell this esoteric message?” asks Barbara Pyle, a former vice president at U.S.-based Turner Broadcasting and founder of the ‘Earth Matters’ show on Cable News Network (CNN).

Part of the problem, as Pyle sees it, is that in Johannesburg as in Rio de Janeiro ten years ago, delegates likely will “produce yet another document” rather than focus on action. How, she asks, are journalists – let alone the public – supposed to be enthused by “dealing with the same issues again?”

The answer, it seems to some, lies in how journalists see their role and in the predilections of the markets they serve.

Simone Duarte, of Brazil’s Globo TV, says journalists have social responsibilities. If the occasion so demands, she feels she must educate her audience rather than simply “dumbing down” to the lowest common denominator.

“If you are just going to tell people the stories they already know, what is the purpose of journalism?” asks Duarte, the New York bureau chief of Latin America’s largest broadcaster.

Others frown upon Duarte’s argument, seeing in it a call to advocate and preach, not to inform. “If something sounded too preachy, it would not go on the networks,” says Tim Hirsch, senior environmental correspondent of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

That would depend on the network. Jim Laurie, vice president of news and current affairs at Star TV in China, says public demand determines the priorities – and different publics want different things.

If development issues find an audience in countries like India and China, he says, then this is because the markets there so desire. India and China are Star’s biggest markets.

The situation is quite different in the United States, however, where environmental and development issues are not considered major sellers and where commercial-driven networks compete fiercely for domestic market share. “The intense competition means you are dealing with what sells,” says Laurie. Despite the proliferation of cable channels in recent years, most U.S. viewers still get their news from three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC, he adds.

And although people increasingly rely on the Internet for their news, an estimated 80 percent of the U.S. public gets its information on environmental issues from television.

Regardless of market conditions or the personal missions of media workers, the concept of ‘sustainable development’, much like the term itself, remains unwieldy.

“Sustainable development is a broad umbrella phrase,” says Laurie. “We have to break it down to little stories. News becomes saleable when we see people.”

Pyle says she used the term “sustainable development” at first because it was the language of the United Nations. Then, she found that it wasn’t working and she started focusing on the people. “The audience has to relate to the people they see on television and care about them,” she says.

Even so, and even in countries, like South Africa, that grapple with often contentious development issues daily, such coverage does not get into news bulletins on a busy day, says Snuki Zikalala, executive director of news at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, host broadcaster of the Johannesburg conference.

The trick for broadcasters and print journalists alike – to say nothing of the diplomats and technocrats working the summit – will be to muster the attentiveness, energy, and imagination to make a case that their audiences will find compelling.

This will be no mean feat. “It’s much easier to cover fire,” says Pyle. The sentiment might resonate with diplomats charged with negotiating something as diffuse and far-reaching as the principles and means by which nations tend and share the earth now and for future generations while extracting, creating, and distributing surplus from it.

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