Why covering the environment is one of the most dangerous beats in journalism
According to one estimate, 40 reporters around the world died between 2005 and September 2016 because of their environmental reporting, writes Eric Freedman in this crossposting from The Conversation.
From the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi by Saudi agents to President Trump’s clashes with the White House press corps, attacks on reporters are in the news. This problem extends far beyond the politics beat, and world leaders aren’t the only threats.
At Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, we train students and professional journalists to report on what we view as the world’s most important beat. One hard fact is that those who cover it are at heightened risk of murder, arrest, assault, threats, self-exile, lawsuits and harassment.
In a recent study, I explored this problem through in-depth interviews with journalists on five continents, including impacts on their mental health and careers. I found that some of them were driven away from journalism by these experiences, while others became even more committed to their missions.
Creativity must always be an open book, it must have few restrictions or constraints beyond common decency. The Bechdel test is a politically motivated, one gender view of a supposed social problem.
If any group of people desires artistic social change, it is up to that group to work for the change by artistic merit and stealth and determined artistic input, and not by inventing restrictions to bias the art forms to their way of thinking.
Bechdel refers to two women talking about anything other than a man, she doesn’t bother to comment on two women talking about another woman of course, or acknowledge for a moment that the world is seldom in perfect balance, or that most men talk about women and most women talk about men at least some of the time.
How boring the world will become, if all artistic endeavour must meet the Bechdel test. Virginia Woolf was not only a magnificent artist, she was a literary breath of spring, and the person who altered the English Novel for all time, and she managed this entirely without the Bechdel test.