LIVING SCARED : Dose of Skepticism Enters Coverage on Environment : Bias: Sympathetic early stories were spurred by an effort to “save the Earth.” As the profession matures, reporting is more contrarian.

John Stossel has come a long way since his days as a young consumer reporter for KGW-TV in Portland, Ore., in the early 1970s.

In those days, he says, “we consumer reporters approached it from the bias that on the one hand is business, which is greedy and has an ulterior motive and will distort the data, and on the other hand is the noble environmental group, which has no motive other than to help the public.”

“I’m embarrassed to say that it took me years to realize that their data were often soft, if not absurd, and that they had their own venal motives . . . to get on TV, to get famous, to get more grant money.”

Three months ago, Stossel shared his discovery with 16 million television viewers nationwide. He produced an ABC News special--”Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?”--in which he argued that media reports and political posturing suggesting that “there’s danger everywhere and it’s all getting worse . . . just isn’t true.”

Stossel is part of a backlash, a revisionist or contrarian movement among a growing number of journalists who believe that the media have needlessly alarmed the American public with biased coverage of many environmental and other risk issues.

“It seems to me the environmental groups . . . tend to get a sympathetic hearing from the press,” says Nicholas Wade, science and health editor of the the New York Times, “whereas the industry side, you’re skeptical of them right from the start.”

Sympathetic coverage of the environmental movement in its early days in the 1970s was probably almost inevitable, given the confluence of the media’s perennial desire for both simple news and bad news, and the emotional identification that many reporters felt with the environmental movement. To them, “saving the Earth” was not the sort of partisan political or ideological issue they had been trained to avoid taking sides on; it was a nonpartisan effort to make life better for everyone.

Many journalists who write about the environment acknowledge that their colleagues have tended to write from a pro-environmentalist standpoint, to make common cause with environmental activists, forging a bond that led to “a difficulty for environmental journalists to objectively cover the environmental groups,” in the words of Richard Stone, a writer for Science magazine.

Standards for environment writers and others who write about risk issues have improved considerably in recent years.

“There’s more context now, more precision . . . an increasing sophistication about magnitudes of risk,” says Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

To Boyce Rensberger, longtime science writer for the Washington Post, this represents a coming of age for environmental journalism, the same sort of transformation he saw take place with science writers a decade or more ago, when they began to “write stories with a more skeptical tone.”

Early science writers were inexperienced and prone to believe whatever scientists told them, Rensberger and others say. In the case of environmental reporting, the unchallenged sources were often environmental activists and their scientists. This resulted in what Frank Clifford, an environment reporter for the Los Angeles Times, calls a “one-sided debate.”

“We didn’t believe the industry scientists because we were conditioned not to trust them,” Clifford says.

Not surprisingly, stories on the environment have often been written with “an unquestioning, alarmist spin,” in Rensberger’s words.

Despite recent improvements, many journalists worry that the alarmist spin continues in some quarters--and may be getting worse in some ways. They say that increasing competition for readers’ and viewers’ time--and the attention-getting impact of tabloid media--are forcing reporters to oversimplify their stories and play up conflict, drama, emotion and doomsday scenarios even more.

“The media are becoming less capable of dealing with an increasingly complex world,” if only because the space and time that most editors and news directors make available for the average story is much less than it was 10 years ago, says Diane Dumanoski, the longtime science and environment reporter for the Boston Globe, who is on leave to write a book on the impact that artificial chemicals have on fetal development.

Moreover, as Casey Bukro, environment reporter for the Chicago Tribune says: “There are still environmental activists working for the mainstream media.”

On the other hand, Rensberger, Keith Schneider of the New York Times and Gregg Easterbrook of Newsweek have, in a sense, become the de facto leaders of the-sky-is-NOT-falling movement.

Last year, Rensberger wrote:

“After nearly a decade of headlines and hand-wringing about erosion of the Earth’s protective ozone layer, the problem appears to be well on the way to solution . . . (with scientists unable to) find any solid evidence that serious harm was or is being done.”

Some journalists criticized that story. Sharon Begley, a senior writer who covers science and the environment for Newsweek, said it represented “somewhat twisted logic.”

Rensberger has also challenged the traditional environmentalist view on global warming--the greenhouse effect, the phenomenon by which a significant rise in the Earth’s temperature, caused by modern man, is thought by many to be causing irreversible changes that will severely disrupt human life, causing flooding, famine and mass relocation.

Most scientists seem to agree that there is some sort of greenhouse effect, but they do not agree on what has caused it, whether it is unprecedented and what impact it will have.

Rensberger has written that the changes measured to date in the environment are “no bigger than those the Earth has undergone in recent centuries through entirely natural processes.” Computer models that are “the chief basis for forecasts of blood and doom are flawed,” Rensberger wrote in 1992. Seldom, he said, has an issue “risen to the top of the international political agenda while the facts of the matter remained so uncertain.”

Rensberger was criticized by some colleagues for this story, too, but he strongly defends his work and he has his supporters--among them Easterbrook, who wrote a similar story in Newsweek.

Indeed, Easterbrook argues that rather than continuing to sound alarms, journalists and environmentalists should recognize that environmental protection “is one public policy and technology area where programs are successful, (where there is) something to be optimistic about.”

Environmentalism, he says--not the public schools or the criminal justice system--is the true “triumph of liberalism” in our society.