Bill Dawson Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: When we left off, we were talking about some of the causes of air pollution and in particular, grandfathered industries.

I thought we might go to the flipside of things and talk about some of the effects of air pollution.

You'd written in the 90s about the increase in pediatric asthma and

then you'd also written a series called Living with Pollution about the maybe carcinogens and some of the other health effects from, from air toxics.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about those articles you wrote and the kind of reception that that those pieces might've gotten.

BD: Well, I could talk about the reception up front and dismiss that pretty quickly and say I didn't really notice a you know, a lot of reaction. I mean, I might've gotten some comment from a few people but it was sort of in the pre-internet days or before the internet was in its full flower that it is now with interactivity and reader response and so on.

So it was, it was not untypical, atypical at all that, you know, you might do a, a big effort on a subject and just not really hear a lot from people or not really see a lot of, a lot of impact.

But in answering your question more directly, I remember feeling somewhat frustrated, not frustrated, but somewhat like I was not capturing in my reporting the air pollution issues in, in enough dimension, enough dimensions and, and enough complexity.

I wasn't showing the human side of the issue, why is this a big deal.

I mean, its so much of, of my reporting was about issues and public policy discussions and lawsuits and legislation and so on. And a lot of that to cover and it's very important.

But I wanted to bring to the public a, a closer look at some of the human implications, the health and quality of life implications.

Also, it was just a kind of reporting I wanted to do some more of. I wanted to try my hand at some different kinds of stories and so on.

So there was a somewhat selfish motive, I guess, just for personal or professional satisfaction or fulfillment or trying my hand at something different.

But so with those complementary motives in mind, in the, in the mid 90's I undertook a couple of projects.

The asthma thing was decidedly smaller and of more limited scope than what I called my neighborhoods series, the Living with Pollution series that you mentioned.

I knew from my reading and reporting that there was an increase, a recorded increase in the number of places around the country in, in pediatric asthma and that there was some uncertainty and that they, within the medical community and public health community as to whether this was an actual increase

or whether health professionals, doctors were getting better at diagnosing asthma, whether they were looking for asthma in, in a more exacting or comprehensive way and therefore finding more cases.

And I wanted to kind of stretch a little bit and push the boundaries of the environmental beat and I realized that from my reading and my discussion with some experts and with a colleague, the medical reporter at the, at the Chronicle, that, that outdoor air pollution was not the be all and end all of the pediatric asthma story, far from it.

In fact, there was quite a bit of controversy as to the extent to which outdoor air pollution, which I wrote about as the environmental reporter, was a cause of or an aggravating factor in the incidence or the, the, the occurrence of asthma outbreaks and, or, or episodes, I guess I should say.

So I proposed doing, you know, a modest package, we called it as opposed to a series of collection of articles. I think it ran one Sunday over a couple pages inside the paper, started on the front page.

And interviewed doctors and, and health experts and so on and tried to convey some of the some detail about this, this fact, which was fairly well-known, that ther'd been this increase in Houston and other places, apparent increase in the numbers of pediatric asthma cases.

And tried to examine the possible, you know, things that were related to that.

One of the, one of the uncertainties, one of the pieces of the puzzle, if you will, had to do with the fact that in Houston and elsewhere around the country, outdoor air pollution had, had declined over the twenty-five years since the Clean Air Act went into effect.

Still had a long way to go in Houston to comply with the Ozone Standard and address some of the other issues. But there was no dispute by anybody that the air was cleaner in Houston in 1995, the outdoor air, than it had been in 1970.

So, this raised an interesting question that I, you know, certainly couldn't answer as a reporter in this modest package of articles, but I could talk to people who were experts about and that was how is it that were seeing more pediatric asthma if weve got less outdoor air pollution?

Does that mean that there's, we're finding more cases because we're looking more exactingly, we, being doctors and public health agencies and so on?

Or, you know, is it something in the indoor air?

If outdoor air pollution doesn't cause someone to become an asthmatic, which I think a lot of experts say, does it at least, what role does it play in triggering asthma attacks by people who have asthma?

And what role does indoor air pollution play, indoor air contaminants of different types?

Whether, do tighter buildings, more energy efficient buildings, trap indoor air pollutants and play some kind of role?

Do the sanitary conditions in, in indoor spaces where a number of inner-city children live, like roach or, or, or rat, you know, debris, the little flakes that come off of roaches or, you know, hairs or dander or whatever from rats?

Do, does this somehow have an allergic affect on, on children? Is this a reason why there's a lot of pediatric asthma being seen among inner-citypoor inner-city children?

Those were the kind of questions I tried to examine in, in that effort.

The Living with Pollution series was a much larger and more time-consuming piece of investigative or explanatory, I guess, journalism, both.

I wanted to try to get beyond the bureaucratic discussions, the legal and scientific concentration of so much of what I wrote about with regard to air pollution

and try to do some, for want of a better word, feature stories, profiles of neighborhoods and portraits of the lives that people live in those communities or neighborhoods where people live day-to-day with much worse air pollution than many parts of the Houston area experience.

I spent a fair amount of time doing some initial research while doing other stories for the Chronicle, carrying out other duties and so on, trying to find the right neighborhoods.

And by the right neighborhoods, I mean, a series of, a collection of neighborhoods that would be interesting,

that would pose different demographic qualities that would, that would involve hopefully different pollution issues and so there would be some so, some variety in the portraits of these different neighborhoods.

And ended up spending a lot of time over a number of weeks with the tremendous assistance of a colleague, the Chronicle photographer, Carlos Rios, who's just a wonderful journalist.

And, oh was not just a photographer on the project, it was like having a second reporter on the project because I'd be talking to some people here and he'd be down the street talking to some more people and come back to me and say, hey, you got to go talk to these people in this house down the street, they got a good story to tell.

You know, he'd be staking pictures and gathering, gathering information and interview prospects at the same time.

So, whatever qualities the, the series may have had, would not have been there if it hadnt been for my collaboration with Carlos on the thing but it was an effort, the, the name of the series, I guess, says it all, what to tell what it's like to live with air pollution as a fairly constant aspect of one's life.

And then the communities that I ended up concentrating on were either near or immediately adjacent to or downwind from, you know, major pollution sources in the, on, on the industrial, east side of town.

And I got I got a, a, a, a, somewhat gratifying response to that. It was not a lot of people, but a number of people, including some other journalists in a couple of other cities told me that they, they thought it was a, I'd done a good job.

And the people in one of the neighborhoods thanked me for, you know, their civic association gave me a little, little certificate of thanks for having directed attention to their, to their issues in their neighborhood and thanked me for the fact that a, a news organization didn't just write about crime or, or the negative, you know, aspects of, of life in their community and put them in a bad light.

It showed them, I hoped, in a, a little bit more, a little bit more depth and, and, you know, as, as people who had, in many instances, fairly difficult lives and had a lot of things to think about and worry about economic problems and, and all sorts of other things

and, and how they either coped with or tried to deal with or tried to push back against what they perceived as health and quality of life burdens on, on their communities, health impacts and quality of life burdens, I guess I should say.

So it was, like I said, an, an effort to present to the public more information than I thought I had successfully done in the past and in a, in a comprehensive and, fairly comprehensive, and I hoped in depth way,

a, a look at, you know, what these, what these issues were about and what they meant for the people on the receiving end of some of the air pollution.

DT: I had a question about when you're presenting these stories,

you've talked about a number of them from air toxics to ozone to the grandfathered issues, global warming.

How do you in the first place, pick your topics?

And, secondly, how do you pick your sources for those topics in a way that you feel gets closer to the truth and does good service to the community?

BD: Well, picking the topics is not, was not a difficult task, I guess.

The agenda was sort of set in a way by, by congress and the Clean Air Act when it designated certain major air pollutants as the ones of primary concern for the nation as a whole, based on a whole body of scientific research, which had gone on, a long history of research.

And ozone was one of those, and Houston was a major violator of the Ozone Standard with legal governmental obligations to clean up the air here.

The state had those obligations to clean up the air, come up with a plan to clean up the air, reduce ozone sufficiently.

And air toxics were also in the, you know, in, in the Act because of concerns which scientists and others had raised and, and were enshrined in the Act as a regulatory program.

So, I mean, I didn't pick the, the issues. It was sort of like the, the issues were just there and obvious to cover.

Houston was a bad violator of the Ozone Standard and there were a lot of complaints about other kinds of chemical air pollution and so on. And, you know, it was a major public policy debate in a number of, at a number of levels.

And my job as a news reporter was, in a sense, not that difficult because the problems were there, the issues were there, I just had to decide how to cover them.

I didnt decide how to, you know, well, will I write about ozone, well, no, I think Ill write about this air pollutant over here,

even though Houston doesn't have a major deadline and face major economic sanctions if it doesnt come up with a plan to meet the deadline or if the state doesn't come up with a plan to meet the deadline. I meanand

DT: Well maybe the more difficult question was not so much picking which criteria pollutant or which toxic to focus on,

but rather what's your angle, you know, what, what is the, what is the problem, what is the source that you believe in, that you go to to explain that problem?

BD: Well, you want to go to credible sources. You dont want to go to people who you have reason to think or believe or suspect or, you know, telling you something that's not factually accurate.

On the other hand, environmental battles are so wrapped up in politics and the political and legal process on a, on a continuing and institutionalized basis that there is, you know, a, a readymade set of, cast of characters which presents itself to a reporter,

who are out there butting heads in public forums, in the courtroom, in the halls of the legislature or trying to get city hall or county government to do something.

Or, and, you know, you assess who the significant players are in a debate like that, whos playing a role.

Not every environmental group has a major commitment to engage in the air quality issue, for instance.

A given environmental group's, advocacy group's mission may go more to habitat and wildlife or quality of life broadly or parks or forests or, or whatever.

So that limits your, your field of possibilities right there.

And on the other side, you know, the business and industry leaders have spokesmen and organizations, coalitions and so on, that they put forward.

And, I guess, in a way, I'm kind of dodging your question, but it's, you say, the Sierra Club, for instance, just picking a, a hypothetical, is the major environmental group active on a certain issue, in a certain location.

And they have staff, they have professional staff, they have volunteers who have an organization of the, the, the Houston Sierra Club has a, a leader, has a, you know, committee chairs for different committees.

And you might go to the chair of the Air Quality Committee to get a, a statement from the Sierra Club on something.

You might go to the, the chair of the Environmental Committee for some industry organization to get a statement.

These are people with, who have risen through the ranks, if you will, within their organizations and have been vetted as serious and, you know, studious and credible people within those organizations.

So the fact that the environmental arena had such a, a broad set of institutional players, institutional interest groups on many of the major issues makes it somewhat easier for a reporter.

Now how do you pick which people in a community, in a neighborhood to go interview about what it's like to live in a neighborhood? Well, thats a much more difficult undertaking.

I would say you just start kind of talking to people, talking to people who have been active on an issue in a neighborhood. If, if theres an ad hoc committee, which has been formed or a, a committee within the Civic Club in a neighborhood or something.

Theres going to be some people who are more interested in and active on an issue than others and thats a, a way of entry into discussions with people in a neighborhood, for instance. Or you just talk to people.

One thing leads to another. Someone tells you, oh, this woman down the street had some concerns about a cancer cluster in her neighborhood or, or whatever, and you might want to go talk to her.

And you go find out, turns out, she, you know, had, had an unsuccessful set of conversations with state officials about having an epidemiological study done.

So that makes her a, a potential interview subject right there because she's got some concern about some potential problems and has had some experience with the, the, the bureaucracy in, in, in trying to, to get to the bottom of those problems.

DT: Well, I, I can see how there, there are so many different sources that you could possibly go to and so many angles that you could take.

And as a reporter, you want to be as impartial and balanced as possible but, you know, given that it, that, that, that environmental concerns are usually battled out, like you said, in sort of adversarial approach,

somebody is going to win and somebody's going to lose and, and in the end, somebody's going to be decided to have the balance of truth on their side.

How do you address that reality and yet try to respect thethe sort of traditions of your profession that, and you, you're trying to provide a balanced venue for all sides to be heard?

BD: Well, to start with, I'm not sure I agree that the people who win a battle necessarily have more truth on their side.

I mean, the political, the political arena doesn't always operate that way.

On the other hand, the truth broadly defined is a big ole thing and I'm not sure that mainstream journalism as I worked in it,

which is to say, as a news reporter most of whose stories were pretty short, daily stories, event driven stories responding to reporting on a development or an event in an issue.

There's so many challenges in trying to just get the facts together, the basic facts of an event that, that youre reporting on, that happened that day, an announcement by the mayor, a, a vote in a legislative committee, a lawsuit filed by an environmental group for instance.

Its pretty challenging just to try to assemble some basic, hopefully, factual information on, for a daily news story.

And those daily news stories were most, were most made up the body of, the great body of what I did as a newspaper reporter, that's challenging in itself.

Then you have other complications like, can you get a guy on the other side of the issue on the line, is it for a comment, is, is he in meetings or so on.

If you can't get him or if he's out of town or away at a funeral or whatever, who, who's the other best person you can get from that side of the issue who's being accused of something, for instance.

And, and then the whole, the whole institutional history of mainstream journalism, newspaper journalism in the United States has led to a, a set of protocols about, as you say, fairness and, you know, impartiality and not taking sides on issues and so on.

And all of that, I guess, adds up to my belief that daily newspaper journalism is more than anything else about snapshots of reality.

And those snapshots you try to make as, as true, as accurate and, you know, hopefully as fair as you can at a given time.

And those snapshots then, perhaps, in accumulation over a period of time add up to something more closely approximating the truth, as you say.

But a, a, a given snewspaper article, I think, is asked to carry too great a burden if you ask that story to, to convey, you know, some larger truth about something.

That's one of the reasons that I wanted to do more in depth reporting and because the more angles you can take on something, the more aspects of an issue you can convey,

as with the stories I talked about trying to portray the lives that people live who deal with air pollution and the, the impacts that they have.

That was an effort, in part, to, to provide a more well-rounded portrait of the larger truth, as you put it.

It's not just an, a battle between competing interests, experts who work for industry or an environmental group or.

There's also scientists and other researchers who are doing research, whose work doesn't readily fit into a kind of one side or the other side kind of understanding of an issue.

And there are people whose lives are affected, who don't know a lot about the issue, but know that something bothers them and they have problems and they want to do something about it and heres how they're being impacted.

I think all of those things add up ultimately to a, a, a broader portrait of the truth of an issue than any one newspaper article can do, which is a kind of round about way of evading your question, I guess. I dont know.

DT: Well, maybe if, if we can just try this one more time and see if, if theres a way to get your experience with dealing with hurtles to getting at the truth, if that even exists in anything more than a rhetorical sense.

The environmental information often it becomes a, a, a mess of, of statistics or a battle between experts with very similar resumes.

How would you plow through reems of data that can be manipulated to provide different statistical outcomes?

Or how do you balance the testimony and comments from experts that may work for industry or they may work for a nonprofit public interest group?

How do you get through these different or (?) course obstacles to, to finding something that is worth delivering to the public that will be somewhat accurate and, and thorough?

BD: Well, I didn't really do an awful lot, probably should've done more, but I really didn't do an awful lot of independent analysis of statistics. I, I simply didnt have that luxury.

I'm, I'm not a statistician and there were always demands for more stories, you know.

There's certain productivity that's expected of a reporter and, and that expectation didn't, at least, allow the kind of, you know, study of the statistical pros and cons perhaps that the, the public deserves or would like to see.

I know some reporters do that. I, I didnt get to or undertake doing a lot of that kind of thing.

As you say, so many of these things have pros and cons.

There's a body of statistics and its interpretedthat body of statistics is interpreted in different ways by different people.

And to try to do the best and truest snapshot of reality that I could do would often involve the sort of clichéd, perhaps, or predictable quotation of people who had different interpretations of those statistics.

Now that was not always the case. I mean, sometimes you could, you know, if, if a number is above a federal health standard, it's above a federal health standard, you don't need to, to, to do much statistical analysis.

You can, you can compare how great a, a violation of the standard that is with some other violation of the standard somewhere else, in another city or something to get some kind of easily understandable portrayal of, of how serious a problem is.

I mean, the, where it gets more complicated is where there's not a standard or where there, where there's debate over where the standard should be.

And these kind of questions that you, you ask have been, you know, around forever and will continue to be around forever, especially a lot of, a lot of discussion over the years about journalists two-sided portrayal of the science of climate change.

A lot of advocates and some scientists, a, a number of prominent scientists have criticized mainstream journalism, news reporters, news organizations for adhering to too rigid a balance in trying to convey the different opinions about research on global warming,

what that research means, what a given study means, what a given set of studies means for hurricane intensity or sea level rise or melting of, you know, the ice sheet in Greenland or whatever aspect theyre looking at.

Science is rarely, science rarely deals in absolute certainty.

I think it never does, in fact, from what I understand of science.

And new research sheds new light on things and different scientists have different interpretations and some scientists are funded by one side and others by another and some of them, most of them aren't funded by one, you know, group with a, a particular role in a, in a fight.

So, the, the evolution, perhaps, of the way that mainstream journalism has treated the climate change issue may shed some light on your question.

There's been a movement just over the last couple of years that's been notable by many people who look closely at, at coverage of climate change.

There's been a movement away from this kind of talking heads paradigm, if you will, as the consensus or agreement, consensus is a, a, a word that's, whose meaning is debated and so I won't use that.

But the, the, the broader professional agreement among scientists about interpretation of, of climate change research has, has grown in recent years,

as manifested by the firmer and firmer statements by the intergovernmental panel on climate change and the reports that they've come out with every five or six years, including a set of major update reports just last year in 2007.

As the, as the scientific community has coalesced around firmer interpretations, firmer conclusions, statements with greater certainty from likely to very likely on a certain question, for instance, with specific definitions of those words in their reports.

But as that has happened, I think journalists have followed suit and have begun portraying climate, the discussion of climate science less as a one expert on this side of the table, another expert on this side of the table butting heads and disagreeing with seemingly equal claim to an accurate interpretation.

So one way that journalists have traditionally tried to walk through the mine field that you're talking about is to try to pay attention to the people who are the experts,

who are the scientists, who have studied the matter, who have devoted their careers to it, who haven't just dabbled in it, but who have published peer reviewed studies and see where the, the, the, the, the weight of scientific opinion is on an issue.

That's one way that journalists decide how to, how to portray the scientific disagreements.

And, and I think that's happened on climate change, as it happened, and this is not original thought on my part, but a number of people made this observation, as it happened on the question of smoking andand lung cancer.

Once upon a time, news accounts of, I understand, I was pretty young at the time and not paying real close attention to these articles and reports,

but once upon a time, I understand the, you know, there was a, a, a general practice by the news media to portray the question of smoking and lung cancer as a debate, if you will, a pretty two-sided debate with, with arguments on the two sides, battling it out.

Over a period of time, through a series of events and conclusions theyou know, I don't remember or even know about or, you know, are, are irrelevant to our discussion here, the scientific, the body of scientific opinion coalesced around a strong conclusion that smoking causes lung cancer.

It's not just apparently correlated with, you know, a greater risk of lung cancer, but it causes lung cancer.

Now there's a few people out there who probably still dispute that, but you won't find them in, in news articles.

You know, you'd, you, you'd be hard-pressed to find a news article today that, that treats the question of smoking and lung cancer as an evenhanded debate.

Now I think a legitimate criticism of journalism and journalists is that they cling to the talking, the, the, the battling experts paradigm on these scientific disagreements longer than they should.

There's a, there's a sort of inertia, if you will, I think, on the part of journalists to and journalism in general, to, to continue to portray a scientific debate or a scientific disagreement on a certain statistical or other research question more as a debate then it still is in the scientific community.

And I don't know what all the reasons are for that.

The, the basic approach to covering public debates of mainstream journalism has been, you know, sort of the political model.

We've got two parties in this country and, you know, you're not going to find a mainstream reporter covering a particular political race who's probably, who's going to give, you know, ten times as much attention to what one party says as the other party says in a debate story.

So there's that tendency to approach, probably unwarranted tendency in many cases, to approach the coverage of other kinds of public debates among scientists and the people who use scientific data

to make political points, to treat them in the same way that you treat a, a partisan political debate in the middle of a, of a, of an election campaign, for instance.

Another reason that journalists may have in the past tended to cling too much to the on the one hand, on the other hand kind of portrayal of a scientific, statistical, whatever, disagreement

is the, you know, fact that in, in, in many cases a lot of reporters who are called upon to cover these issues, dont have any kind of scientific or statistical expertise.

I, I, I didnt have a, a science background or a statistical background as a reporter; it was kind of on the job training, if you will.

I picked it up as I went along and, and, and I hope I, I, you know, learned enough along the way to do a better and better job as I went along.

But a, a lot of news organizations dont have the luxury of assigning somebody fulltime to be an environmental reporter or a science reporter even today,

the smaller ones especially and, you know, TV stations, which have relatively small news staffs and so on.

So, you're going to have somebody go out and cover one of these stories who really doesn't have the kind of academic credentials and expertise or even on the job learning experience to, to make a, you know, a valid judgment about where the bulk of scientific thinking or evidence is on something.

And, and oftentimes you dont have the time to, to, to try to figure that out.

You're on a, on a deadline, you know, you don't have time to, to review scientific literature or, you know, delve into the, into the, you know, the body of evidence which is out there, more readily available now on the internet than it once was.

But before the internet, I mean, how are you going to do that?

You can, you can drive down to the medical school, maybe, and get the medical librarian to help you start looking up some Journal articles or something.

But probably not going to get very far in, in finding enough to, you know, come up with a very good judgment on that until before your deadline later in the day.

So, and then there's a lot of good, good criticism that can be leveled at, at journalists and journalism for, for not, you know, trying to reach conclusions more, I guess,

or to, to draw conclusions more from the body of evidence that's out there.

And that, that is done, I mean, you know, especially when a reporter has the, however I should say it, but when a reporter has the, the luxury and I'll call it that, of, of devoting enough time and attention to a subject that they can feel that they're reaching a, a, a valid, you know, kind of conclusion

that the body of scientific, the bulk of scientific opinion seems to be on one side of an issue or the other.

But in the absence of being able to do that, you know, the tendency is to fall back on the, on the age-old, you know, reporting method of saying, well, you know, this is fight.

You've got one side saying one thing, you've got another side saying another thing, they've both got experts, Ill quote the two experts. Andand

DT: Well, this has been really helpful to sort of understand the, the difficulties that you have in dealing with things that can be very polarized and partisan

both in the kind of subjects that you choose or, or the kind of sources that you have to use and, and the kind of descriptions of a problem you might take.

I'm just curious if you could talk about some of the ways that, the controversial topics like environmental issues get dealt with within a news organization.

You know, how, how does the reporting end deal with thethe opinion page

or how does, how do the journalists deal with the editorial staff

or, you know, how does the reporting side deal with the advertising side of a newspaper business

when you, you've got a topic like, you know, environmental issue that, you know, can becan be controversial?

BD: Well, I can only speak from or primarily speak from my experience, I mean, I guess I could provide some anecdotal things I've heard from other reporters,

but I'd prefer not to do that because, you know, I don't remember the details well enough.

And, and, you know, I, no anecdotes come readily to mind, but, but I do know what I did and what experiences I had and so I'll speak to that.

And most of my life as an environmental reporter, reporter covering environmental issues, was at the Houston Chronicle, as you said, for seventeen years.

And I'll, that's where I was the environment writer, I did some environmental reporting at some other papers but I was not the environmental reporter at those papers in any kind of formal definition of the word.

So Ill just talk about the Chronicle, if you dont mind, because that's the bulk of my experience, by far.

I was never really told what to cover at the Chronicle,

at least in my years there, the Chronicle was on the spectrum of reporter driven paper to editor driven paper and there's no newspaper thats totally on one side or the other of that spectrum.

Its all kind of shades of grey in between.

But I found, at least in my experience, that, you know, it was up to me to decide what to cover.

They had hired me to cover the environment and I told them what I thought I should be covering.

That doesn't mean to say that I didn't get an assignment from time to time,

usually because some event was upcoming or some press release had come in from an environmental group and an editor had gotten the press release before it came to me and decided they thought I should do a story on that subject, you know, and, fine, Ill do a story on that subject.

But by and large, it was up to me to decide what to cover.

And I believe, I, I cannot remember a single instance in my seventeen years at the Chronicle where I was ever told not to cover a story.

More often it was I wasn't covering, producing enough stories on something which was, you know, a constant source of low-grade tension and disagreement.

I wanted to be spending more time on an in depth story and they wanted me to be cranking out more daily stories to put in the newspaper, you know. But that's just a professional difference of opinion.

DT: Did you ever find that, that you could cover an issue but it would be buried in the newspaper or, you know, be below the crease or in section E?

BD: Oh yeah, yeah, every reporter thinks his stuff is, you know, ought to be on the top of the front page everyday.

I mean, I'm being facetious there but, you know, certainly you, you often think that your stories are more important than the, than the display they get, but that's just part of the, part of the process.

There's a lot of different articles competing every day, not only produced by the local staff, but by the wire services and, you know, by events in the world, which, which lead to news stories, unexpectedly at five oclock in the afternoon.

If they suddenly have to decide to wedge into the front page somehow at the last minute and pushes another story, a good story off of the front page.

So, yeah, certainly that happened and I, you know, frequently thought my stories weren't getting as good attention or good display as they should have in many cases.

I'll have to say in other cases that sometimes they gave them a more prominent display than I thought they deserved.

And I found myself sometimes saying, this isn't really that significant a development yet.

I think youre maybe hyping this or something.

But there, there was this give and take that went on and on balance some,

I think the people that I worked for at the Chronicle over the seventeen years that I was there, began to, and I say on balance, you know, averaged out that I was getting better display with stories than I had the beginning.

I don't know what the reason for that was, maybe the environment, maybe I was writing better stories. I think, I, I hope I was.

DT: Did, did you ever find that, that the reporting you were doing diverged from what the editorial page, the opinionand

BD: Oh, I can answer that question easily. I, I didnt read the editorials, so I don't know whether it diverged from it or not.

Now that's an over, overstatement of the fact, I occasionally read an editorial in the Chronicle.

But at an earlier newspaper job I had decided that, it was in Little Rock, if I recall correctly, that there were two newspapers at the time, there was the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat.

The Gazette had an editorial stance which was kind of moderate, liberal, it's in the southern sense of the term.

And the Democrat was on the conservative side, editorially, on the editorial page, I mean.

That had been manifested in the 1950s during the Little Rock desegregation crisis in some ways that a lot of people still remembered and still were aggravated by in Little Rock when I went to work there in 1978.

So twenty years give or take after the fact, it was still very much a, a, a, you know, a sensitive issue in Little Rock how thehow the newspapers hadhad treated thatthat crisis.

I didn't find there at the Arkansas Democrat, even though I worked for the paper that was known as the conservative paper on its editorial pages, I didn't find that that political view of the editorial writers spilled over into my news assignments or what I was allowed to cover at all.

But I began to get a little bit annoyed, somewhat amused and a little bit annoyed sometimes that I would encounter people on different stories in Little Rock and probably didn't happen more than a few times, but it was enough to kind of make an impression on me.

They'd say, oh you work for the Democrat, I bet you're going to write a conservative story.

I'd say, well, to tell you the truth, I dont read the editorials, so I don't know whether my articles going to, you know, in any way parallel or complement or anything, what the editorial writers are writing.

And so I sort of made it my personal policy to steer away from reading the editorials in the newspapers where I worked so I could never be accused of trying to adjust my news reporting to what the editorial position was of the newspaper.

DT: Okay, lets stop here for just a moment.

You, you've talked a little bit about the environmental journalism at, at four different newspapers I believe and your, your recent career is, is, balances some reporting in journalism

but also includes some teaching, where you're, you're currently aa lecturer ofat Rice University and are teaching a course called Environmental Battles of the Twenty-First Century, Houston as a Microcosm.

And I'd be curious if, how that experience has helped you both gel what you're interest and concerns about the environment might be

and also get some sort of exposure to what the next generation of kids might be thinking about these same topics.

BD: Well, Ill be glad to talk about that.

When I left the Chronicle in 2001, I, I left for a, a job in Washington with a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative reporting organization called The Center For Public Integrity and ended up working there for a, a couple of years covering environmental and some related issues.

I said covering, doing larger investigative type reports on those issues, not really covering the news in any classic sense of the word.

But as, as is the case with a lot of nonprofits and a lot of for-profit news organizations, they ran into somesome finana, financial situation and have had some cutbacks over the years in staff and one of those happened in 2003 and the grant that funded my position ran out.

And, as it turned out, my family had not moved to Washington for various reasons and I had worked for them largely from Houston.

And so I found myself in 2003 faced with the necessity of figuring out how to, how to make a living

and decided I wanted to try my hand at, you know, creating kind of a hybrid livelihood for myself doing some freelance journalism and other, you know, kind of writing that might be, you know, compatible with the, the work of a journalist,

not advocacy work for anyone or anything, but not public relations for anybody or anything like that.

But, but I, I had the idea also of, you know, I know that, I knew that a number of people who worked in journalism and had worked in journalism used the body of information that they had gathered over the years to, to hopefully good effect by by teaching.

And often times that's teaching journalism, you know, teaching new journalists, (?) not something that appealed to me particularly.

And I'm still figuring out how to be a journalist myself a lot of the time, I'm not sure I'm, you know, ready to try to teach other people how to do it.

But I, it occurred to me that I, over seventeen years at the Chronicle and before then and, and after then, I had really learned a lot about, a lot of environmental issues, particularly as they play out here in Houston and the upper Texas coast and the broader region around us here.

So I hatched the idea of approaching the people who run, ran the Environmental Studies Program at Rice an interdisciplinary program there, with a proposal to teach an issues course which I called Environmental Battles of the Twenty-First Century, Houston as a Microcosm.

And I went into talk to them about this proposal and they liked the idea and they hired me to, on a part-time basis, to, to teach this undergraduate course. And of, I'm in the fourth year doing it now.

I've taught it one semester per year for the last four years.

And it's been, it's been an interesting experience because it's been, I guess, a lot more work than I thought it was going to be.

I thought, I thought the, you know, you get the lectures pretty much in place the first year and then just kind of coast after that.

But the way I've done the course has been to really customize my discussions of the different issues I talk about each year to bring things up-to-date.

So it's required a lot of, kind of, reporting, if you will, kind of journalistic work to at least read and update myself on what's been going on in some areas

that I might not have been paying as close attention to in the proceeding months as I would've been as a reporter at the Chronicle assigned to cover those issues.

It's, it's been an interesting experience meeting with students and getting to know them.

The interest in the class has grown over the four years.

The class was announced late in the term at Rice, in the middle of the year I think, the first year I taught it and perhaps as a result of that or perhaps because of other factors, only a, only a few students signed up.

I don't remember, there were six or eight students, I think, kind of a modest seminar size course.

And there were a few more students the next year and a few more the next year and last year the third year, I think there were sixteen or eighteen students, something like that.

And I was shocked this year when I walked into the larger classroom they had me assigned to and there was this large group of students there in the forty plus range.

And other students came in and asked if they could add the course even though it was, you know, getting to be too late to add it and so on.

And it's for, some have added and some have dropped, I think it's forty something students now, I'm not sure of the exact number.

But that's a, a, a lot bigger group of students than I've had the last three years and I don't know what that speaks to exactly.

I think it probably is an indicator of the fact that the environment's a hot topic right now.

I think it has something to do with the, the greater attention that's been given to climate change over the last couple of years

and the greater attention that the news media and business community and political figures have been giving to giving to climate change and the whole constellation of associated issues,

energy and green building and conservation and hybrid cars and, you know, everything under the sun that seems to be exploding right now.

So I think that, that's been interesting to notice and the students, I have them, I have them write a weekly a, a short weekly response paper each week, just two or three, four hundred words.

Just a kind of a blog post or a journal entry almost on, on what they read and what we discussed the previous week, often what I talked about or a guest speaker would come in and talk about.

And I've been impressed and heartened by the fact that there's so much interest in these issues

and, and, you know, a growing understanding on a part of a lot of the students that these are, these are important concerns that are going to be with them as they get older and move out into the work world after college and so on.

And that the, I'm, I'm impressed by their ability to grasp sort of the complexity and multidimensional aspect of these issues.

One of, one of the things I try to do at the beginning of each semester is to ask them to keep in mind a few themes which run through a lot of environmental issues and help tie them together.

And they seem to seem to warm to that, that way of looking at environmental issues.

For instance, you know, energy and energy concerns and debate over how tohow to develop or explore for or use energy or conserve energy.

How energy at large is such a major part of so many environmental issues, whether it's air quality or global warming or, you know, the way we develop our cities or what kind of development patterns we have, what kind of transportation systems we have, ultimately link back to energy in a lot of ways.

And other things I, I, I want, oh, another one of the things I try to tell them is that I want them to, what my mission in the class is to help make them environmentally literate if they want to continue paying attention to these issues.

It's sort of a citizenship class in a way because I, I want to give them some basic knowledge of issues, how they interrelate

and also some tools for keeping up with those issues, often online tools for, you know, keeping up with a lot of news coverage at the same time through news sites that aggregate news coverage or summarize stories from a lot of different sources or whatever.

So that's one of the missions in the class.

Another thing I tell them as one of other themes is that they, it's interesting to see them reflect upon in some of their writings through the semester is that Environmental Battles, the title of the course,

I should digress and say I was going to call it Environmental Issues of the Twenty-First Century, but a, a Rice professor told me no, call it Environmental Battles, that'll make it much more interesting to the students and you'll get more participation that way.

So I, I went for the flashier name of the course and it was a good suggestion.

That one of the things that they have to remember through these environmental battles that they're paying attention to in the class and beyond is that there really are battles.

They're examples of different value systems and different values in play on the part of different members of the public.

Some people put a greater premium on having environmental risks at a level this low rather than here.

Other people don't put as much of a premium on that.

They have different values.

And so, I try to get them to understand that, you know, that these, those, those competing values translate into political battles in the, you know, in the political arena, in the courts and so on. (misc.)

DT: Bill, you talked to us about your role as a, as a reporter and a journalist and, and just recently about your work as, as a teacher.

And I was hoping that you could put on another hat and just talk about yourself as an individual or as a citizen and how these environmental matters, I guess, sort of translate some sort of meaning to you.

BD: Well, one of the topics I talk about in the, in the class, specifically with regard to, to the climate issue but it, but it applies in other areas as well, is the question of equity.

It plays out in a lot of ways in, in the environmental arena.

Environmental justice is one manifestation, other people who have an unfair burden of pollution in their lives than other people do simply by virtue of living close to an industry or whatever.

And I tried to capture some of that in the series that I talked about other earlier, the Living with Pollution series.

Another way that the equity subject plays out in environmental issues and I want the students to think about is whats called Intergenerational Equity, how climate and these other issues, conservation issues are about the legacy, the world which were creating for future generations.

And I guess that goes to the broader subject of sustainability and whether youre living in a way today that will provide, you know, a decent livelihood and a clean and sustainable economy forfor future generations.

And those are things that concern me as a citizen.

I mean, I, I believe in fairness.

I believe in, you know, trying to make progress where progress can be made.

And, you know, it disturbs me that, you know, some people don't, don't live lives that are as, as of as high quality as other people's lives are.

And so this, equity issues are of concern to me personally.

And the idea that the world that I grew up in may, is changing in ways that, you know, future generations would perhaps consider bad.

And , you know, a, a changed climate, a, a, a depletion of, of green space, a, a, a, a decreaseand [End of reel 2418] [End of Interview with Bill Dawson]