Kennedy: bad reporting, politics and greed threaten the environment

By DAVID HULSE

LACKAWAXEN, PA — The Bush Administration and corporate greed have put the environment at great risk today, but Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says the press is the most culpable party.

Kennedy, a Westchester environmental attorney and son of the late New York senator, spoke on June 11 before the annual international conference of the Riverkeeper organization, held this year in the Upper Delaware. Kennedy helped found the movement in 1988, when he became involved with the creation of the first riverkeeper organization on the Hudson River. He remains a member of its board of directors.

Speaking at the picnic pavilion of the Lackawaxen Fire House on Saturday evening, Kennedy blamed the Bush Administration for some 400 rollbacks in environmental law, rollbacks that directly benefit the major corporations from which Bush has taken campaign donations. In part, the result has been incursions into wilderness areas and the deterioration of air quality rules governing power plant emissions.

“I have three sons with asthma who breathe the air from those same power plants,” he said.

Those same plants have contributed to increased toxic mercury levels in game fish to the point that it is no longer safe to eat all species in 48 of the 50 states.

“Every year, when I buy my New York fishing license and read about the streams with restricted catches, I say to myself, ‘That son of a bitch, George Bush,’” he said.

Few people seem to know about these problems because the media is not reporting about it, he said. “People hear about these things but they don’t connect them to Bush,” Kennedy said. “The press hasn’t connected the dots.

“It’s not that the people aren’t interested, it’s that the press isn’t informing them,” he said. Kennedy said the “the venal, negligent, lazy press … is broken today,” and that the situation stems from President Ronald Reagan’s 1988 decision to veto a law codifying the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting. The doctrine formerly required local control of the media and demanded that the media, as guardians of the airwaves, report on issues of public import. Network news operations were costly and seldom moneymakers, but if they failed to carry out the doctrine’s mandates, they were subject to legal action and the removal of their licenses.

The “big lie” in the nation is that the media is liberal, Kennedy said. “There is no liberal media in this country today,” he said.

Kennedy charged that since 1988 six multinational corporations have gained control of most of the television and radio stations in the United States and the loss of the fairness doctrine has meant that the television networks no longer have any requirement to benefit the public interest, “only the shareholders.”

“I like corporations, but they shouldn’t be running our country,” he said.

“The networks have since gotten rid of their investigative reporters and we get gossip and entertainment programming,” he said. Kennedy charged that a cabal of corporate media, right-wing “think-tank” people and administration political operatives meet weekly to decide what that week’s “talking points” will be in the news.

“If they decide that Bush’s tax plan is bold, then a half-hour later millions of Americans will hear ‘bold, bold, bold.’ If they decide that John Kerry is a flip-flopper, then the nation hears ‘flip-flopper.’ That’s where it comes from,” he said.

Kennedy said that right-wing political views have become dominant in the American media, in part because they are easier to market.

“There is a demand for progressive talk, but right-wing revenues are easier to get,” he said. Big advertisers like automakers and oil companies don’t have to worry about their advertising dollars funding news critical of their activities.

The result is “a huge information deficit, which is directly from the failure of the press,” Kennedy said.

He said the situation threatens the entire country. “If you don’t have an informed public, you don’t have a democracy for long…. If they’re not informed they’ll sell their souls to the first one who offers them a $300 tax break,” Kennedy said.

Delaware Riverkeeper Maya VanRossun, who organized the event said the organization has licensed 137 riverkeepers worldwide. Last weekend’s conference included many of those, including representatives from Russia, South America, Mexico, Australia and Canada.

Kennedy on the Upper Delaware

LACKAWAXEN, PA — While he says he has always opposed inter-basin transfers of water, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sees no other alternative for supplying New York City with drinking water.

New York City dams control Delaware River headwaters for drinking water supplies and do not provide direct flood control protection, an issue that has recently gained new attention after two major floods—September 2004 and April 2005.

Kennedy, a long-time advocate for the city’s water supply, said he does not believe the Hudson River would be a practical source for city drinking water, even with modern filtration technology.

Kennedy saw numerous problems with using the Hudson River to supply the city.

“The Hudson’s water would be very low quality and the costs of filtration would quadruple water rates in the city. It would cripple poor neighborhoods,” he said. “I don’t think it could be done,” he said.