Two stories this weekend, one from the Washington Post and the other from the Daily Caller, demonstrate the two ways to report on the colorful characters often found at protests. One way is to tell the subjects’ story with dignity and respect, providing important context while still playing up the oddball characters to keep things interesting. The other is the “point and laugh” style, which mocks protesters to generate clicks, while being devoid of any real insight.
You can guess which outlet went with which style.
The Washington Post beckoned readers with the enticing odd-couple headline for Gregory Schneider’s story, “The Baptists and the yogis join to fight a pipeline.” It’s a cheeky and enticing description of what turns out to be a relatively blatant example of environmental racism. The protest revolves around the small Virginia community of Union Hill, founded by freed slaves after the Civil War, and Yogaville, a yoga retreat founded in 1979.
As part of the (troubled) Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Dominion Energy is planning on putting a compressor station in the area. A common enemy has made friends of Yogaville’s Swami Dayananda and Rev. Paul Wilson, who “calls himself an evangelical, apostolic, Pentecostal preacher who believes the Bible is the literal word of God.” In the face of Dominion’s planned pollution, the two have formed an unlikely, or at least uncommon, bond between their spiritual communities.
Despite claiming to “have a profound respect” for these two communities, FERC’s 800-page environmental impact statement finds that the impact on the community isn’t an issue. FERC made that determination based on Dominion’s claim that the town “does not exhibit a cultural landscape” to be disturbed. But Schnieder describes exactly that, how the landscape around the proposed compressor station includes hundreds of old, unmarked graves, where “generations of slaves and their descendants lay forgotten under a thick carpet of leaves.”
The report even describes how African American populations are more susceptible to asthma stemming from the various pollutants the compressor station could emit, before writing off Union Hill as being too small to matter, based on what locals contend is a dramatically incorrect population count that completely mischaracterizes the community.
The respect and nuance in Schneieder’s coverage is a stark contrast to the story by the Daily Caller’s “energy investigator,” Jason Hopkins, who went to Louisiana for a story on the Bayou Bridge Pipeline protests. The headline on Sunday when the piece was published read: “Trash, Tween Novels And A Man In A Dress: That’s What We Found On Our Journey To An Anti-Pipeline Camp In The Middle Of The Swamp.”
The focus of Hopkins’ dismissive story is a man named Babyface, whose red dress is apparently a headline-worthy descriptor for a story about people who are putting their lives on the line to stop a pipeline which would carry a product that’s changing the global climate.
Aside from the transphobic-clickbaiting about Babyface’s decision to wear a dress (which probably provides some nice circulation in a hot swamp in the middle of summer), Hopkins’ smirking description that “several ‘Twilight’ novels were lying around” and his complaining about the “sweltering heat with no Wi-Fi,” there isn’t much in the way of actual reporting in the story. That’s possibly because Babyface is “a little wary about telling [his] story” because he doesn’t trust reporters.
And that was a smart call judging by Hopkins’ biased coverage. In addition to doing his best to parrot the industry’s talking points, Hopkins also falsely claims that it’s “out-of-state protesters” who “have continued to hinder construction by almost any means possible.”
Yet just three paragraphs later, Hopkins contradicts himself by naming three local groups, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, 350 New Orleans and the L’eau Est La Vie Camp, who have been involved in the “litany of illegal actions” by protesters fighting the pipeline’s construction.
For all the downsides of living in a swamp with no Wi-Fi, at least Babyface won’t be subjected to Hopkins’ sad excuse for reporting.
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