Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has reintroduced a bill that would establish a limited federal protection for journalists when prosecutor and courts seek to compel them to disclose their confidential sources. A similar measure died on the Senate floor at the end of the last Congress.
The event, co-sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists and other groups, is free and open to the public (RSVP). Panelists include: Curtis Brainard, Columbia Journalism Review science editor; Joseph A. Davis, (SEJ) WatchDog editor; Felice Freyer, Association of Health Care Journalists; Darren Samuelsohn, Politico’s senior energy/environment reporter; and Clothilde Le Coz, Reporters Without Borders energy/environment reporter.
"'There's a long tradition of people who don't like a particular message turning to attack the person delivering the message,' former Vice President Al Gore just said on NPR's Talk of the Nation."
SEJ President Carolyn Whetzel offers a belated “thank you’’ to the late David Stolberg and all the original founding members of our organization. SEJ members owe them all a deep debt of gratitude. Thanks to their vision and leadership, SEJ remains a vital resource for working journalists and journalism educators.
"Central Basin Water District pays for positive stories by a firm that Google considers a news site. Officials call it innovation, but open government advocates fear it blurs the line between news and publicity."
"Five years after the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore returns to the world stage with an updated slide show. Can his message be any more successful this time around?"
"The White House is under pressure from two democratic senators to release a list of chemicals the Environmental Protection Agency says could endanger human health or the environment. This so-called chemicals of concern list would include eight phthalates, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and bisphenol A."
"The chemical industry has attempted to block release of EPA’s proposed list over the past year.
After the 9/11 attacks, government and industry warned that chemical plants were a prime terrorist target that could kill thousands of Americans. They moved quickly to make it harder for the public to know how large a threat the plants posed to nearby communities. But a decade later, the nation has yet to adopt a comprehensive anti-terrorism program for chemical plants.
"The editor of the journal Remote Sensing resigned [Friday], saying in an editorial that his journal never should have published a controversial paper in July that challenged the reliability of climate models used to forecast global warming. The paper, by Roy Spencer and William Braswell of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, proposed that climate researchers have likely made a fundamental error by overestimating the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse-gas pollution."
