Summary
Contents
This is the first book on environmental journalism in South Asia. It provides an important benchmark for journalism in the region as well as an excellent source of material for the future evolution of environmental journalism. This is a collection of essays by prominent Indian and South Asian environmental journalists. Apart from essays from India, there are contributions from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Maldives. The essays examine this specialization of journalism both historically and in the present.
This Separate Category
This Separate Category
One of the greatest disservice we have done to the cause of environmental protection is to invent a separate category of reporting called ‘environmental journalism’.
Just as ‘development journalism’ at one point became synonymous with sponsored reporting because it was mostly practised by lazy hacks on sponsored junkets, so it has happened with ‘environmental journalism’. It ghettoised reporting on a subject that should have been linked to politics, economics and development. Somehow, ‘environmental journalism’ almost became another name for ‘envelopmental journalism’.
Journalists should report, not fund-raise to set up organisations specialising on flavour-of-the-month issues like gender, environment, human rights, HIV, etc. These issues are important in their own right, not because some donor finds them important and is willing to cough up ...