“You’re Doing a Heck of a Job, Brownie”
We recently established awards for comparing profiles in courage in environmental protection with lapses of cowardice (see: Testicular fortitude versus gonadal atrophy http://blog.nj.com/njv_bill_wolfe/
In a similar vein, today, we expand that approach to the quality of our environmental journalism – we will compare real investigative work with stenography.
Welcome to the first edition of the “Edward R. Murrow/George Orwell” versus the “Heck of a Job Brownie lapdgo stenographer”.
Murrow/Orwell
The first Murrow/Orwell goes to Jeff Pillets of the Bergen Record. Jeff was recognized as a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Encap fiasco. In typical Pillets fashion, more recently, he wrote a scathing expose Safety testing lax on new school sites http://www.northjersey.com/education/educationnews/Clifton_school_site_lacks_test_for_pesticides.html
Heck of a job Brownie/Lapdog stenographer
The lapdog stenographer award goes to Tom Hester, of the Star Ledger for today’s story Bond re-fi cuts cost of water, sewage projects http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-10/121333172350790.xml&coll=1
Since its not obvious, we have to provide a little background on this story, which is nothing more than stenography of a press release by the NJ Environmental Infrastructure Trust. (NJEIT)
Legislation is pending to reauthorize this year’s $400-$500 million NJEIT project funding cycle. The Trust ran into some turbulence during Monday’s Senate hearing, when certain inconvenient truths were told about the NJEIT and DEP failures at Encap – where DEP made a $212 million inadequately secured loan and taxpayers have lost at least $60 million due to bankruptcy filing.
You see, those failure have yet to be fixed and the Legislature is set to rubber stamp a new rtound of Trust funding that replicates the Encap problems (see: ENCAP DEBACLE LOOMS OVER LATEST NEW JERSEY WATER FUND PLAN — Impending Legislative Approval Fails to Address Root Causes of Smoldering Scandal http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1060
So obviously, to keep that story from emerging and divert attention, the spinmeisters at the NJ Environmental Infrastructure Trust and the Department of Environmental Protection ginned up some good news.
Tom swallowed the government propaganda hook line and sinker. His story provides no context whatsoever (curious given the pending legislation) or sources with a competing perspective – just NJEIT spin –
Just when they needed it – Heck of a job Tom!
Jeff Pillets being willing to ferret out the corruption is why he almost won the Pulitzer. Hester should pay attention to his example. While DEP is ushering the likes of Donald Trump out of employee’s sight to the Commissioner’s Office via the loading dock and freight elevator, the DEP “press office” is tasked with putting a smiley face on the latest sell-out to politically connected developers per Corzine’s instructions.