By Joe Blakely
The editors who resigned from the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post were courageous and right about what they did. With the information available they reasoned that Kamala Harris was the best candidate for president. The owners of these newspapers disagreed, and would not allow the editors to print their editorial endorsements.
Because of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, the grave danger of DDT was exposed. Journalists seized upon her book and presented her scientific arguments to the people in laymen’s language. Article upon article was written of the harm DDT was doing to our environment. Then the manufacturers fought back. Editors took the unbiased information from the journalists and the biased information from manufacturers and concluded, obviously, that the hazardous use of DDT was an imminent threat to all of us.
Two months after Carson’s published book in 1962, editor and journalist — and, later, governor — Tom McCall presented the horrors of Oregon’s polluted Willamette River in his famous television documentary “Pollution in Paradise.” McCall’s investigation revealed that the pulp and paper mills were discharging millions of gallons of sulfite wastes into the river on a daily basis. Untreated, this waste became what he described as “an oxygen-gulping, slime-making scourge. It destroys fish life, fouls fishing gear, and fishing boats. Sometimes it churns at the river’s bottom, forming into rafts that rise to the surface in sluggish, foul-smelling masses of filth.”
He also filmed sewage spewing from city disposal systems into the river. He discovered a river so polluted that it was too hazardous for people to swim in and too oxygen poor for returning Chinook salmon to survive.
After decades of inaction, McCall’s documentary motivated Oregonians to finally do something.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are “man-made chemical compounds containing carbon, chlorine, and fluorine atoms,” that are considered a major contributor to ozone depletion when released into the environment. Scientists and journalists who sounded the alarm put pressure on governments around the world to act.
Today, because of scientists and journalists, word has spread to the world that carbon dioxide is better stored in old-growth forests; better than Douglas fir seedlings newly planted in a forest clear cut. Scientists and journalists have also written on how certain plants and animals are dependent on old growth forests.
Scientists and journalists have written about how above ground atomic blasts expose nearby people to high levels of radiation. Such exposure causes cancer and cardiovascular disease, bringing on debilitating human health.
The reality of climate change is another phenomenon that is clearly espoused by unbiased journalists. Yet some skeptics still deny its existence. Editors clarify the threat to us, to inform us. They do not do this for power or greed, they do it to alert us of the potential dangers of a warming planet.
So, when Trump’s orations condemn journalists and newspaper editors for being the enemy, he is not doing it for the public good, he is doing it for fear he will lose the power and wealth he has. In other words, like the wealthy owners of oil companies, pesticide companies, timber companies, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, he greedily puts himself first over his country’s well being.