(Screenshot image taken from the YouTube account of 'Alison Morrow')
Of all the things that I could write a critique on, journalism is one of few pieces of work that make me contemplate and adjust my conceptual approach. I have to recognize that journalism has a distinctly different purpose than that of a cinematic film, or a sporting event, or even the work of someone like Jimmy Dore, whose content I would classify more as ‘infotainment’ than as true journalism. I view the primary objective of journalism as being one of simply informing its viewers/readers of important events that are taking place in the world, while also holding loftier, more idealistic aims of getting people to think more critically about certain issues and perhaps to ultimately alter their beliefs about said issues. Since journalism isn’t predicated around entertaining its viewers I have to consider judging it differently. I think one of the best ways to critique journalism is to comparatively assess two separate pieces on the same topic, since both pieces should have comparable goals in regards to the quality and saliency of the information that they wish to convey. For this essay I’ll be analyzing two videos on the topic of wildfires.
The first video is what you might call a ‘proper’ YouTube video published on Alison Morrow’s channel, titled ‘What’s REALLY causing catastrophic wildfires?’. Morrow is a former television journalist who spent 12 years working as a reporter. She spent 5 of those years working as an environmental journalist for a TV affiliate in Seattle, a position that she left in September of 2019 for greener pastures. Over the last several months Morrow’s YouTube channel has shown a sharp focus towards topics dealing with politics and the media and this video was published in the midst of this recent trend. The second video is a 6 minute clip published to the YouTube channel of PBS NewsHour, titled ‘California wildfires illustrate the consequences of climate change’. I suspect that this was pulled from a proper television program and simply reposted online to reach a broader audience. So there will be a YouTube vs. traditional TV dynamic in this critique.
If I were to judge both pieces on their artistic or cinematic merits, I would easily find favor with PBS’ NewsHour clip. Morrow’s video on the surface looks like something that was produced on a shoestring budget. The entire video consists of either Morrow talking in front a blank wall, or a split screen setup that shows both Morrow and her guest. If that wasn’t enough I found the editing and general arranging of her content to be somewhat awkward. The video constantly switched from the split screen staging to a shot of just Morrow and the information that you hear in sequential segments didn’t always flow in a manner that suggests there was an actual conversation between two different people. Most of the time I felt as if Morrow was simply introducing certain ideas, that her guest would then discuss in greater detail. Only once in the entire video do you ever hear Morrow speak while in the split screen staging. Personally I would have preferred to stage the guest in a full screen that he can call his own. If you’re not going to stage the content that you present as a back and forth dialogue, than I really don’t understand the use of a split screen, unless Morrow somehow thought it was important for us to see her listen attentively to her guest as they speak.
The NewsHour clip by contrast was far more intent to establish the danger of wildfires as a contextual backdrop to the discussion that they eventually hold with their guest. Not only does anchor Amna Nawaz give us a series of banal facts related to the heat wave and concurrent wildfires, but we get to see actual video footage of the fires themselves. This includes some incredible amateur shot footage of campsites tinted orange with nearby smoke and fires bursting alongside a road as a car drives through the conflagration. You also get person-in-the-forest interviews with campers and rescue units as they give their perspective on the crisis. All of this footage is shot really well, and competently arranged to effectively tell the story of what is happening in some of these forests. When the NewsHour clip transitions to the interview segment, here there’s clearly an interchange occurring between Nawaz and her guest. In addition to this, the split screen staging looked far better with both video feeds positioned within a modest graphic display. From a pure video production standpoint, the NewsHour clip is better, but once again this is journalism. As I alluded to earlier, the main purpose of either piece is not to enthrall you with its mastery of the cinematic form, and ultimately one shouldn’t judge journalism solely on its aesthetic qualities.
When considering the actual information that is provided in each video, I found Morrow’s work to be far more enlightening and thought-provoking. The first thing that Morrow gets absolutely correct is the guest that she invited to her channel to talk about this issue. In Morrow’s video, we’re presented with the perspective of Professor John Bailey who teaches at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry. Based on the commentary that Bailey provides he has spent a good portion of his life studying both forest health and forest management and is able to provide a lot of interesting insight into this particular issue. By contrast PBS NewsHour invited Leah Stokes on as a guest. While Stokes has had an interesting career working to shape public policy on climate change issues, ultimately she is a political scientist who doesn’t possess a great deal of comprehensive knowledge about forest science. When questions are posed that might require some familiarity with this specific, niche scientific discipline Stokes answered them less confidently than Bailey did. Consider Stokes’s comments when asked about the steps that people could take to mitigate the wildfire risk. Here she casually mentions things like home retrofitting, or creating fuel breaks, but doesn’t really discuss them with any real depth. There is no discussion of why they would be considered as a potential strategy, or how effective either are in limiting the wildfire risk. Stokes also doesn’t mention why fuel breaks are necessarily controversial. Bailey though talked about controlled burning as one of the more effective measures in fighting wildfires and offered logical, detailed reasons for why this tactic should be implemented. I can see in this that Morrow’s approach was to find a person who was extremely knowledgeable with the science at the very heart of this particular issue and then question them about the impact climate change has had on their area of expertise. The approach by NewsHour however was to find a climate change expert and then question them about how the current crisis has affected a specific scientific discipline that they may not be particularly well versed in. I prefer Morrow’s approach and in this case choosing one guest over the other shouldn’t have much impact on the overall political ramifications of the climate science debate, since both Stokes and Bailey expressed a firm belief in climate change with an unequivocal impact on wildfires.
As for the political aspect of the climate change issue, this was the one segment in Morrow’s video that I thought was rather weak. Here Bailey didn’t speak with the same degree of assurance, and if I where to be honest someone like Stokes would have done a better job addressing this aspect given her background. I’m also not entirely sold on Morrow’s opening notion that such topics quickly get mired in purely political spats. Stokes didn’t go out of her way to suggest that climate change was the only cause for wildfires and apart from maybe her final comments nothing that she stated was politically divisive. I wouldn’t say that discussions of natural disasters are necessarily over-politicized, but I do think that there is certainly a collective who feel very strongly about reducing fossil fuel emissions in order to combat global warming, and whose beliefs are so firmly held that they must exploit every possible opportunity to advance their agenda. Such exploitation has lead to a condition in the media, whereby every dramatic natural environmental event must involve some connection to climate change, no matter how tenuous, in order for their message to be heard. This is the procedure that I see being executed when watching the NewsHour clip.
Watching both videos does highlight the one pervasive danger that is generated whenever the media succumbs to this agenda. It ultimately drowns out and subverts more probing, more nuanced, more complex discussions of such natural events that offer a deeper understanding of them. This is very apparent when you consider the detail in which Bailey talks about wildfires. Bailey mentions all the factors that contribute to the magnitude of a wildfire; topography (which is never really discussed in any discernable level of detail), weather, and fuel (which in this case refers to the presence of combustible material found in forests). Stokes largely only talks about the role that climate plays in this equation. In regards to the fuel factor Stokes only makes a mild point about ‘dying vegetation’. And even then her point ignores the notion that dead biomatter can be removed or rearranged by forest management or that living matter can still act as fuel for a wildfire. Even when Bailey discusses the climate aspect he does so in greater detail, citing the air temperature, wind speed, fuel moisture, and the length of the fire season as factors which impact a wildfire. Stokes largely focuses on the heat and arid conditions as factors and never once mentions the impact of wind speed which basic intuition would suggest plays a large role in how far a fire spreads over a landscape. Bailey goes even further by suggesting that the factors that impact a wildfire are not uniformly pertinent and can vary greatly from one wildfire to the next. In some cases fires may be predominantly climate-driven, while in other cases their development is supported primarily by the high concentration of fuels. Stokes meanwhile solely points the finger at climatic factors and at one point even states that “climate change is the real culprit behind what we’re seeing right now”.
In regards to their overall journalistic qualities, Morrow’s piece is better. For one she asked better questions of her guest and was able to induce better commentary into the discussion. Nawaz’s questions were relatively soft and nowhere near as probing as Morrow’s. In addition to this, at one point Nawaz actually posed the following question, which I’ll post verbatim:
We should mention too California’s fire record goes back to 1932, but the 10 biggest fires on record there have all happened after 2000, should we expect that trend to continue?
Now let me just state that it’s fairly obvious what Nawaz is attempting to ask here, but nonetheless this question was so awkward and poorly framed that it’s staggering to consider that it was constructed by people who practice journalism as a professional trade. First, the year 2000 was twenty years ago, so this question really doesn’t convey how urgent or imminent the threat may be. Second, I’m not quite sure how one is even supposed to answer the question. Perhaps one valid response might go something like: ‘Well yes, I expect that large fires occurring after the year 2000 is something that will continue to happen into the distant future.’
All kidding aside the larger issue with Nawaz’s work was its distinct lack of intellectual curiosity, which is conveyed by the succinctness of the segment. Nawaz only posed 4 questions to her guest with no real overarching theme to her questions beyond its topic. Morrow’s video on the other hand was intellectually curious enough to distinguish itself ideologically. Perhaps the most ideological dissident aspect of Morrow’s video was the notion that wildfires could actually be a good thing, with Morrow at one point pondering what a ‘healthy fire’ would look like. Nothing in the NewsHour clip would suggest that wildfires could be a good thing, and this includes everything that is seen in its first two minutes. The notion that wildfires are a nuisance to our world order can be seen in the image of a firefighter standing in front of a gray cloud of smoke that is seen just above Nawaz’s left shoulder. It is seen in the video footage of the blazes. It is seen in the graphic of California littered with red and orange flame icons. It is seen in the amateur shot video that shows how close the fires are encroaching onto people’s activities. It is seen in the graceful vertical pan shot of a military chopper airlifting campers to safety. It is heard in Nawaz’s description of the fires as ‘raging infernos’. I also found Morrow’s video open-minded enough to suggest actionable solutions in order to co-exist with fire.
In this they mention that the fuel aspect of the equation is where humans can exercise the greatest amount of control in order to reduce the intensity of wildfires. Such a notion is obviously not mentioned in the NewsHour clip, where the climate aspect is considered to be the prime suspect. Thus the only specific solution that you encounter here is reducing fossil fuel emissions. Now, I’m not trying to state that we shouldn’t be trying to reduce fossil fuel emissions, but the connection between such emissions and the intensity of wildfires is not explicitly expressed. As a solution it doesn’t carry the same intuitive, direct practicality as say ‘removing dead undergrowth’, or ‘trimming the lower branches on trees’.
The disparity in solutions found in both videos I think is evident of their divergent agendas. Morrow’s video comes across as a straightforward attempt to inform her viewers of the complex nuances of the wildfire issue and she achieves this in a very logical, approachable manner that was truly stimulating. It was an excellent piece of journalism. By contrast the NewsHour piece lacked the investigative depth to be as engrossing. It seemed to exist to offer another platform on which climate change activism could continue to make its case to the general public. While I truly believe that there are some good intentions behind this crusade, at some point I think we need to question its effects on our current state of journalism. Should we allow this movement to essentially hijack the spaces where we desire to see quality, open-minded, thought-provoking journalism? I can’t imagine many organizations whose purpose is so noble and righteous as to make this permissible.