By Mark Blaine
Forest Magazine, Summer 2005

When it snows in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Frank Carroll can step outside of his U.S. Forest Service office and capture digital video of the flakes flying. Minutes later he can drop those images into a folder on a server at the Weather Channel in Atlanta where the network, hungry for up-to-date, on-the-scene weather images, can use them for regular updates of weather from around the country. Everybody wins: The station gets the footage it needs and the Forest Service gets a little plug.

Carroll, the Black Hills National Forest public information officer, says that often Forest Service employees are the only people on the scene of a news event and can bring back images that local stations and newspapers can’t get. Combine that with smaller, simpler, cheaper digital cameras and instantaneous computer hookups and suddenly a legion of Forest Service employees can add news gathering to their list of qualifications and responsibilities.

Pictures of falling snow are innocuous, but when the Forest Service aims its lenses at controversial topics, the agency’s decisions about what to photograph and how to describe news events can come under fire. Because tax dollars are paying for the camera and paying the person operating the camera, employees have a responsibility to the public. Understanding that responsibility, and its limitations, is at the heart of making critical news judgments—whether those decisions are made by trained journalists disseminating the news or by the public consuming it. In many ways technological advances such as websites and e-mail require readers and viewers to be far more critical of the sources of information. But today those news consumers, glutted with information, are having a harder time understanding where their news is coming from and why sourcing matters.

“Twenty years ago, the only people we could provide news to were news providers,” Carroll says. Now, the Forest Service itself is a news provider. Carroll chuckles when he asks, “Who’s gatekeeping on us?”

As long as the Forest Service describes and disseminates information about its policies and doesn’t stray into obvious self-promotion or promotion of any of its officials, the agency is doing its congressionally mandated job. Don’t expect objectivity or a fair treatment. Do expect slick, professionally produced work that increasingly appears in mainstream news media and on Forest Service websites.

Carroll sees it as the agency’s job to set the natural resources agenda. The Forest Service creates the management plans and articulates its intentions in technical language, and Carroll says it’s his job to make those plans clear to the public.

That the agency is a strong advocate for its own policies would come as no surprise to Gifford Pinchot, the founder of the Forest Service. He was one of the first in the growing federal bureaucracy to understand the power of publicizing his agency’s goals. Pinchot and the Forest Service were leaders among the executive-branch agencies in creating press bureaus and publicizing agency agendas. In fact, Pinchot played publicity hardball on a national level with members of Congress, and even a president whose natural resources agenda differed from his own. The latter episode got him fired, but he almost brought down President William H. Taft in the process, says Stephen Ponder, a media historian from the University of Oregon who has written about Pinchot, the Forest Service and the presidency.

The historical roots of the Forest Service’s use of publicity offer some perspective on the agency’s current use of public relations tactics. The Department of Agriculture was the first agency empowered to do publicity and disseminate technical information to the public, mostly farmers. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was the most prolific publisher of any agency. When Pinchot took over the Department of Forestry in 1898, the agency had no administrative authority over public lands, Ponder says. Its sole responsibility was to disseminate information promoting modern forestry practices, and Pinchot embraced the mission. He and President Theodore Roosevelt shared common interests in progressive management of natural resources and a talent for public promotion, and the two struck up a friendship when Roosevelt took office. One muckraker described Pinchot and Roosevelt as the “two most publicly talented men in American politics.” Pinchot created the first executive-branch press bureau in 1905 and used it to promote forestry and push his political agenda nationally. Other agencies followed suit, to the point that in 1913, Congress outlawed some types of publicity work by executive-branch agencies. Enough members of Congress had been stung by the growing power of government public relations people, and they felt a need to limit the practice.

Today, the Forest Service and individual forests maintain websites and report on work in the field and within the agency. But what gets reported varies widely from forest to forest. The Black Hills National Forest sent out more than 100 print press releases last year, Carroll says. It also produced video and radio news releases and maintains a photo archive. The neighboring Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming listed only a few print news releases per month—mostly meeting announcements. Carroll is working on long-form video stories for the Black Hills National Forest that aren’t intended for distribution to local television stations but will be featured on the forest’s website. He also shoots images and clips that many stations have picked up and used when they needed video of wildland firefighting and other Forest Service activities. Sometimes that video has even moved out of its supporting role in a newscast and become the main news. Because it’s from a government agency, Carroll says, it is legitimate and thus more easily accepted by television news directors. But he says the Black Hills National Forest is scrupulous about labeling the video, so that stations are clear about the source.

Government agencies aren’t required to be objective or fair in their reporting, and one-sided news reports from the government don’t constitute propaganda, according to a September 2004 report from the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative agency. There’s a difference between promotion of the agency or an agency official and promotion of agency policy. The former is illegal; the latter is mandated for many agencies—particularly the Department of Agriculture, the agency in charge of the Forest Service.

The report found that the Forest Service’s use of a public relations firm to help write a brochure and produce B-roll video to promote its revised and controversial Sierra Nevada Forest Plan wasn’t illegal, even though it was one-sided. According to the report, the intent was to reverse a “generally negative, distrustful tone” about the plan by stating the plan’s benefits and creating, in the agency’s words, “a favorable public atmosphere for the [Sierra plan] by presenting early and accurate messages and quick and direct responses to those who oppose it.” The Forest Service is under no legal obligation to offer opposing opinions, the report said.

The report cites the 1913 effort to limit government agencies’ public relations, using the debate from that time to give perspective to the “Forests with a Future” campaign conflict in California. The Government Accountability Office found that lawmakers nearly a century ago intended to preserve the ability of executive branch agencies “to disseminate agency products and information about agency policies.” Because the “Forests with a Future” campaign promoted Forest Service policy and not specific officials, it fell within the guidelines described in the 1913 congressional debate, the report concluded.

The report is clear that its intent is not to comment on the policies that the Forest Service is pursuing in Sierra Nevada national forests, but to address instead the legality of the agency’s efforts to promote that policy. Ponder is careful to make a similar distinction when he talks about the historical roots of current Forest Service publicity work: Is it the publicity or the policy that’s causing the controversy?

In the case of the Sierra plan, it’s easy to blame publicity—the brochure, the video clips, the PowerPoint presentations—and neglect the root of the problem: disagreement about how much logging should be allowed in the national forests of the Sierra Nevada.

Blaming publicity may be dangerous because it ignores another problem—the news decisions of local and national media. Perhaps it’s a problem with the filter and not necessarily with the information, Ponder and others say.

“You use the media that are available to you,” Ponder says. Despite technological changes, the issues remain the same and news organizations bear much of the responsibility for the current confusion. “There are still gatekeepers and the decision still rests with those gatekeepers,” Ponder says.

It may be easier for non-journalists like Carroll to provide images and stories to mainstream media, but basic journalistic issues of legitimacy, transparency and news judgment remain. It does no good to put all of the responsibility on publicity and ignore bad decisions by journalists.

“There’s definitely blame to go around,” says Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy. “On both sides there’s a responsibility that’s not being fully met.” The problem has been exacerbated by the recent concentration of media outlets. Print is less of a problem, Farsetta says, and what seems to be most at issue now is the use of video news releases.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, spending on outside public relations firms more than doubled from the Clinton administration to the second Bush administration. Newsday reported in February 2005 that several executive-branch agencies have hired hundreds of new public relations employees in an effort to keep the federal agencies that are part of the current Bush administration on message. Topping the list was the Defense Department, but right behind it was the Department of Agriculture and within that, the Forest Service. Agriculture, with its long history of publicity work, increased its public relations staff by 15.5 percent, compared to a 6 percent growth last year in the entire federal workforce, according to statistics from the Office of Personnel Management. Agriculture also has the largest video production department in the federal bureaucracy. It produces mostly Department of Agriculture work, but it also hires itself out to other agencies.

The director of communication for the Forest Service, George Lennon, in an interview with Newsday, attributed the increase in public relations staff in the Forest Service—nationally there are more than 300 staffers—to the Sierra Nevada plan controversy. The agency’s annual war on fire also consumes public relations resources with daily media briefings, websites updating the progress of firefighting efforts, and staff time devoted to guiding reporters around the fire lines.

More public relations staff might mean that there are more people out in the field gathering information, but it also means that there are more people working to coordinate, unify and present the agency’s public messages.

What those messages become depends a lot on who sends them out, who filters them and who reads them. It comes back to what sources the audience trusts and how skeptical the audience is. Carroll doesn’t see a problem, arguing that government information is reliable and that it’s in the best interest of Forest Service public information officers to present the news that they’ve gathered as truthfully as possible.

“The day we get caught trying to snow somebody is the day we’re done in this game,” Carroll says. He faces some resistance from local news affiliates. One station makes a point of not running anything that the Black Hills National Forest has to offer—until the forest is the only supplier of a dramatic film. The news director has no choice but to use it because the reporters aren’t there, Carroll says.

Carroll still doesn’t see much of a problem with that. “They’ll use the compelling photo that walks in the door.” If it happens to be a Forest Service photo, so be it. To do anything less is a disservice to the audience. “The public should demand that the government be as transparent as possible,” Carroll says.

Any information is better than no information, says Carroll. “It’s easy to be underserved by the government,” he says. “We just won’t tell you what we’re doing.”

Silence, however, may not be the problem.

Forest Magazine | FSEEE