There are also corporate interests because I’m on the board of directors for the World Wildlife Fund and I was on the board of Conservation International, and on our boards are leaders of really big companies like Walmart and Coca-Cola are their heads, their CEOs, have been on our boards.
I see that corporations, big corporations, while some of them do horrible things, some of them also are doing wonderful things which don’t make the front page. When there was the Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska, you can bet that made the front page. When Chevron was managing its oil field in Papua New Guinea in a utterly rigorous way, better than any national park I’ve ever been in, that certainly did not make the front page because it wasn’t a good picture.
Naturally. Journalists are terrible people who hate to say anything nice about anyone.
The old adage ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ still applies to a lot of journalism, and not just bodies. It is a given that only drama sells newspapers, and if you can see fault (or rather, be told of faults) you can become a journalist.
While many media organisations, in our age when information can be so easily obtained and so quickly, have become focused on opinion rather than facts (believing, sometimes wrongly, they are opinion-shapers and therefore ‘good’) the fact is all media needs shock and awe. There aren’t great stories in people being sensible and careful and even respectful of nature, at least according to the excitable people who now inhabit journalism.
As for saying anything nice, that is always reserved for their political heroes, commercial press releases and of course, obituaries. From the latter you can see no bad person ever died.