Ray Ring

Senior Editor

A leading NewsBiz observer, Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post, shares my high regard for investigative journalism — and my concern for the future of such endeavors.

Kurtz writes that investigative journalists working for newspapers and TV networks:

… May lack subpoena power and eavesdropping authority, (but) they often crack these cases ahead of the cops.

Kurtz lists some of the recent important revelations by investigative journalists. They include the San Diego Union-Tribune forcing the resignation and conviction of corrupt Rep. Randy Cunningham, and the Washington Post’s expose of sleazy lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his pet congressmen.

Kurtz sees many traditional news ops cutting staff and newsgathering, to maximize profits for corporate execs and stockholders, and he worries that it will undermine investigative journalism. He points to recent layoffs at many good newspapers, including the West’s leading daily, the Los Angeles Times: (Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The Center for Public Integrity — tough journalists operating as a nonprofit in DC — dig deeper into the libertarian effort to end land-use regulations in many states. And … guess what?

The Center discovers more scofflaw behavior.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Under a headline, “Drilling the heart out of the West,” an editorial in the Idaho Falls Post-Register does the math:

In the past five years, the Bush administration has leased 35 million acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling — the equivalent of 15 Yellowstone National Parks.

The outraged editor, J. Robb Brady, seethes onward:

It’s wrecking the West. It’s violating the law — courts have held the government ignored the National Environmental Policy Act’s requirement to weigh environmental consequences of the leases.

Recommendation: Take a look at two forms of film documentary that expose an aspect of the wreckage — the drilling for coalbed methane in the Rockies. You won’t be able to turn away or forget. The images haunt.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Set the environmental issues aside for a moment … Thinking that coal can propel local economies in parts of the West that lack the latte trades?

Many people seem to believe it, judging by the dozens of new coal mines and coal-fired power plants proposed or under construction. We’re in the midst of the first big coal push since the existing plants and mines began in the 1970s-early ’80s.

Tom Power, a Princeton-educated economist who runs that department at the University of Montana, has a well-grounded counterpoint.

Power, in a commentary for public radio, debunks the notion that solid economies can be built on coal:

If you look at counties across the US that have specialized in coal mining over the last two decades … and compare their unemployment rates with the average in the state where the coal mining is located, you find unemployment rates in the coal mining counties 50 percent above the state average.

.. Average incomes are lower and the growth of employment, income, and population are dramatically slower …

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

If you’re a broadbander — hooked to the ‘Net with fast-tech such as DSL or cable or wireless — invest a few minutes viewing a Western video podcast that’s beautiful yet chilling.

It’s National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, narrating his show of photos of natural-gas development in the Rockies … relevant, even if you live farther afield — a quick take on our nation’s appetite for energy consuming our public lands.

… and finds it on the Columbia River. Wired Magazine reports that when Google needed new property to house the servers that provide its search directories, maps, email and contextual advertising services to the world, it couldn’t relocate to just any place. It needed certain specific things to be successful:

1) access to fat data pipelines and
2) access to cheap electricity.

Despite having a virtual presence on your computer, a search engine company has physical demands that are extraordinary. Google’s server farms burn through electricity for everything from data processing to cooling fans. According to Wired, the current power demand of our major search engines roughly equals the amount of electricity burned by Las Vegas, and that amount is only expected to grow.

The article speculates that Google may be the leading edge of a wave of online corporations hunting for cheap electricity solutions. Just as Google located itself next to The Dalles Dam on the Columbia, others may follow, perhaps leapfrogging up river chains in search of new cheap hydropower, or else turning to nukes (or maybe just cheap cheap coal?) to satisfy their energy requirements.

One thing is certain: the power will be coming from somewhere, and it won’t be virtual. Within a few years, the biggest enemy of salmon could turn out to be a “post-industrial” company that has just as much of a hunger for cheap power as the aluminum industry.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Want more evidence of the poor condition of U.S. journalism — and of how a few scribes still manage to do good work despite the system’s odds against?

The Poynter Institute, a leading journalism think tank, has an analysis of how one of the biggest stories making recent headlines was ignored by some prominent journalists for months. It’s the story of Republican Rep. Mark Foley’s sexual interest in teenagers who served as Congressional pages … and, how Republican leadership, along with journalists, apparently looked the other way.

Poynter even has a link to a PDF download of four of Foley’s e-mails — the e-mails that ABC-TV news veteran Brian Ross used as a digging tool to unearth the untold story.

And what did other nicely credentialed journalists do when they got ahold of the same e-mails? Poynter reports:

One after another, they swept the e-mails off their desks and moved on.

By the Way Department: Ross broke the story on a blog, and now, looking ahead to the November elections, it may provide the tipping point, costing the Republican Party its majority control of the House of Representatives. Ross’s original blog post was 356 words, and from that little, it grew.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

A great mind, Edward O. Wilson, came to my town, Bozeman, Montana, last week. He gave a talk attended by more than 2,000 people. It amounted to a warning.

Wilson, author of more than two dozen books and winner of two Pulitzer prizes, is the foremost evolutionary biologist of our time. Gray-haired, hawk-faced, retired from Harvard, he’s roaming around to tell us that our planet is on the verge of a mass extinction of species.

Note: If you don’t need my summation, just scroll down to access my compilation of Wilson’s podcasts, where you can hear and view him in audio and video clips. It’s a good long-term, animated library.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Santa Fe, New Mexico, has become a fertile ground for socioeconomic experiments. The capital city of turquoise jewelry and coyote sculptures, for instance, requires that sizable companies pay the country’s highest minimum wage — $9.50 an hour, scheduled to rise to $10.50 an hour in 2008.

Now Santa Fe’s city council considers a particularly assertive strategy on the housing issue. We all know the lament of real-estate prices propelled upward by investors and those wealthy enough to buy multiple homes for enjoyment. Those with ordinary incomes struggle to buy in. Communities make tiny efforts to provide affordable homes, typically by combining subsidies with charges on developers. The results are like droplets of water flung into a hot wind.

Santa Fe’s city councilors are using the T-word. Meaning, they’re talking about asking voters to approve a new — gasp! — tax. It would be a sales tax of 1 percent on real estate that goes for more than $319,000. A few other cities, such as Aspen, Colorado, do it. Like them, Santa Fe would funnel the money into programs to provide affordable housing.

Sounds pretty good to me, taxing those who can afford it and whose housing appetites help create the problem.

Just how bad is the housing issue in Santa Fe? The New Mexican reports, the city may structure the tax so that it does not apply to sales of cemetery plots. Guess that means, a home for a dead body in Santa Fe can run more than $319K?

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Whether you hated her or liked her, Helen Chenoweth-Hage was a political titan, representing a brand of Western extremism. Her sudden death on October 2, in a Nevada car crash, inspires reflection.

She only served a few years as an Idaho congressman, from 1995 to 2001. She pushed no noteworthy new laws. She grew famous — or infamous — not for accomplishments, but for her rightwing, anti-government elbow-swinging.

She said secret agents in black helicopters enforce the Endangered Species Act. She insisted, Idaho salmon need no protection, because we can buy canned or frozen salmon from other places, so there’s no shortage. When her extramarital affair was revealed, she said she’d talked to God, and God forgave her.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

I guess even the Internet is not infinite. Its apparently unbounded free speech has limits.

We’re discovering that in cases such as, Google’s decision to censor its searches within China to please the Chinese government.

Now comes the revelation that bloggers are getting sued by people they write about, for libel and invasion of privacy.

USA Today reports the first case of a blogger known to have lost a libel suit. That blogger, a self-described “muckraker,” has been ordered to pay $50,000 to a guy he alleged was corrupt.

USA Today sums up the trend with some shocking yet amusing language:

In the past two years, more than 50 lawsuits stemming from postings on blogs and website message boards have been filed across the nation.

… The lawsuits are challenging a mind-set that has long surrounded blogging: that most bloggers essentially are “judgment-proof” because they — unlike traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television outlets — often are ordinary citizens who don’t have a lot of money. Recent lawsuits … have been aimed not just at cash awards but also at silencing (the bloggers).

… Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association, which has 1,000 members, says the recent wave of lawsuits means that bloggers should bone up on libel law. “It hasn’t happened yet, but soon, there will be a blogger who is successfully sued and who loses his home,” he says. “That will be the shot heard round the blogosphere.”

Egads. The shot heard round the blogosphere. Guess that’s where I’m sitting as I type this, somewhere within the said sphere, keeping my head down when I hear loud noises.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

My two previous posts on elk farms selling “canned hunts” have provoked the most comments of anything this blog has done to date. That’s probably because the angles include manipulation of wildlife for profits, hunter ethics and political wrestling. So, dear readers, another update:

Rex Rammell, the Idaho guy who ran the canned-hunt operation where up to 160 domesticated elk escaped into the wild, near Yellowstone National Park, has been arrested. It’s alleged that he obstructed state wildlife agents who were tracking down some escapees and executing them.

Rammell has used the crisis as a platform for his angry, anti-government views. He’s also bailed out, selling his operation to a Californian.

Various Idaho politicians, concerned that the domesticated elk might contaminate wild elk with disease or questionable genes, vow they’ll try to ban such operations in Idaho, as neighboring states have done.

(Read on …)