The brave journalists of the old-fashioned media

It’s not easy being a journalist in a paid job in corporate print, TV or radio media. You have to toe the corporate line. It’s best to be writing on a specialised topic where you’re likely to not offend the powerful. Cooking, gardening, sport – are good, though even in them, hazardous aspects can arise – like race, religion, gender, sexuality.

But when it comes to environment, current affairs, politics, business – the prudent journalist needs to tread warily, lest he/she loses the job.

This is an awful pity. Although writers have always had to be careful about offending business owners and governments, it hasn’t always been as dangerous as it is now. And for us, the “consumers of media”, the advantages of “mainstream” media are great. There is funding to enable strong investigative journalism. There is fact-checking, meaning that the readers/viewers, listeners, can have confidence in the facts of the story. Heck! the editors even check grammar and spelling (well, mostly). And these are the reasons why I still like “mainstream” media.

And so, as I’m pondering on journalists and their contributions to society, I am very aware of those journalists who, still hanging on to their corporate-controlled jobs, manage to sneak in, or even state boldly, some unwelcome realities.

Nowhere is the media’s craven subservience to the powerful more obvious than in journalism’s coverage of the nuclear industry. Any day at all, if you bother to search “nuclear” on Google News, there will be a stream of articles describing the nuclear industry in positive terms, even with breathless enthusiasm.

I think that the nuclear lobby has done a fine job in teaching the world that no-one but nuclear industry experts can possibly understand nuclear issues – so journalists find it easiest and prudent to just regurgitate nuclear industry handouts. (Heaven forfend that we should fall for the message of a Dr Helen Caldicott – explaining that nuclear power is just an expensive way to boil water. Albert Einstein thought the same thing).

It’s not a Russia-China versus the West thing, as ALL these powerful governments are enthusiasts for nuclear power. So the critics of nuclear power are not “Left” or “Right”: they are simply critics of nuclear power.

So, in this climate of journalists playing safe, and not upsetting government or industry, I have to admire those who stay on in their media jobs, try not to offend, but communicate the facts, and manage to include some negative aspects of nuclear power.

Here’s one example, although he did not last long in his job in Russia. Vladimir Slivyak, a patriotic Russian, taught at the Moscow School of Economics. And that was alright for a while. But the coal and nuclear industries are highly treasured in Russia, and Slivyak wrote powerful articles, criticising them. You can’t get away with attacking Russian government policies for long, and the government eventually classified him as a foreign agent, and he had to emigrate to Germany.  Silvyak is an unfailing critic of bad environmental policies of whatever government, so, now in the West, he continues to expose bad nuclear policies of the European countries, particularly France, and their continued dependence on Russian uranium.

It should be easier for writers in the West, with our famed “freedom of speech, freedom of the press”, but it’s not, really. Fearful not only of the disapproval of authorities, but also of showing their ignorance of matters nuclear, journalists find the publicity handouts and worthy utterances of nuclear experts to be the safest bet for informing the public. Hence, even if they do have their doubts, the vast majority of journalists practise self-censorship on those doubts.

Once a writer has become known as an opponent of the nuclear industry, he or she becomes not only unemployable in the mainstream media, but is widely disparaged as an eccentric, a ratbag, a communist tool, or like Dr Helen Caldicott: “hysterical” “crazy”. It doesn’t matter if, like Arnie Gunderson, they’re a nuclear engineer – they’re still a crank and not to be trusted.

So, the admirable skill, is to be able to write authoritatively on nuclear matters, and still sneak in those damning questions, those subtle criticisms. Physicist Dr Edwin Lyman managed this for a long time, actually advising the nuclear industry and USA Government on safety matters. But in more recent years, he’s gone a bit too definite in his views on nuclear unsafety:

“Be wary of new ‘smaller’ kinds of nuclear power plants“, with the result that nuclear expert Dr Al Scott and others have judged Lyman to be extreme in his views.

My favourite journalist within this narrow category of “staying inside media respecatabilia” is a Canadian data journalist. I hesitate to name him – I’d hate to cast a gloom on his career. He writes for the Globe and Mail, and his articles are not anti-nuclear. They’re factual, but he’s inclined to point out things like:

“In a January report, the International Energy Agency said costs must come down; Small Modular Reactors  need to reach US$4.5-million per megawatt by 2040 to enjoy rapid uptake, far less than Ontario Power Generation (OPG)’s estimated costs.”

“… the commissioners heard concerns from intervenors that GE-Hitachi hadn’t yet finished designing the reactor, raising questions about how its safety could be analyzed properly.”

His series on Canada’ s nuclear developments are detailed, and certainly not opposing the industry. It’s just that his facts on the need for taxpayer support, on fuel supply problems and costs, on the comparative economics of renewable energy – these facts are not encouraging for nuclear power.

I ponder that these kinds of critics, just gnawing away at the edges of the nuclear industry’s gospel, might be more effective opponents of that industry than the many articulate and impressive anti-nuclear activists. A subtle “Trojan horse” style of journalism?

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