Informing the Informers
Earlier this week I presented at the GreenBizCafe on the topic ‘Green Business and the Media’. The premise of my talk was to advise green business owners on how to pitch their business to interest the media and increase their chances of coverage. The talk was partly self-serving as I am sick to death of getting press releases about green initiatives that are really pedestrian (ie everyone’s doing it) or not really green at all (ie faking it).
The ‘faking it’ one concerned me the most, so part of my talk was devoted to greenwashing, the term that describes false claims about eco-friendliness. (For a good guide on greenwashing, see Terrachoice’s ‘Six Sins of Greenwashing‘). Being in a room full of green business owners, it occurred to me that greenwashing was something they were already familiar with, but perhaps others—such as the media themselves—were not.
As a journalist, when I don’t know something, I do some research and speak to people who do know something. I have a background in conservation and understand enough about biology and chemistry to know when something doesn’t smell right. Sadly, this isn’t always the case in the media and I often see a lot of column inches devoted to ‘green’ things that aren’t really green at all, if only writers could see through the PR spin.
My colleagues who specialise in writing about the environment know what to look for and know how to qualify any green claim, but in the general media there’s a great disparity between the writers who are spin savvy and those who just regurgitate some weak green claim in the hope that it makes them seem on the pulse about environmental issues.
I don’t want to name names, but the publications I’m thinking of tend to be consumer-oriented, emphasising things like “it’s environmentally friendly because it’s made of organic cotton” when the real issue is that the t-shirt has been airfreighted from Belgium.
I’m sure this happens for other subjects as well, not just the environment, and has only come to my attention because of my own knowledge and an increase in environmentally focused articles, but it brings me to question: what else are the informers misinformed about?
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