Title : THE TRUMP EFFECT: SHUTTING DOWN THE CHESAPEAKE BAY NEWSPAPER AND BAY CLEANUP
link : THE TRUMP EFFECT: SHUTTING DOWN THE CHESAPEAKE BAY NEWSPAPER AND BAY CLEANUP
THE TRUMP EFFECT: SHUTTING DOWN THE CHESAPEAKE BAY NEWSPAPER AND BAY CLEANUP
The EPA Killed This Newspaper’s Funding. Was It Something They Said?
By: Jacob Fenston
WAMU News
07 February 2018
NOTE: The Chesapeake Bay is one of America's national treasure and is the largest estuarine water body in the country. Back in the 1970's, the Bay had fallen on hard times. Pollution had virtually wiped out billions of dollars in annual harvests of crabs, oysters and fish. Then Congress got its act together and passed the Clean Water Act in 1972 - which Act Trump has targeted - which said:
"The objective of this Act is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters."
It wasn't until 1983 that the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania signed an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency, the "Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement," and cleanup of the Bay began in earnest. Since that time progress has been made in restoring the Bay's water but yields of crabs, oysters and fish are nowhere near historic levels. The Trump Administration has threatened to stop funding the Bay cleanup.
The Bay Journal, a monthly paper covering the Chesapeake Bay, isn’t the New York Times or CNN, and has so far avoided mention in the president’s Twitter feed. But the Bay Journal may be a casualty in the administration’s war on the media: the Journal recently lost its largest source of funding, in what its lawyers say was likely a violation of its First Amendment rights.
The Environmental Protection Agency is required under the Clean Water Act to inform the public about its massive Bay cleanup project. Since the 1980s, it’s been providing public information by funding the Bay Journal through competitive grants. The Journal’s $325,000 a year is a tiny fraction of the cleanup project’s $73 million budget.
These days, the Journal is the authority on all things Chesapeake — everything from the latest on the blue crab harvest, to the effect of climate change on the Bay.
“We get cited in the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun and other papers that see stuff in the Bay Journal and they pursue stories,” said editor Karl Blankenship, who has run the paper since 1991. “We’re important to shed light on issues that otherwise may not get coverage.”
Last July, Blankenship got confirmation from the EPA that the next grant payment was already being processed. Then, in August, Blankenship got a surprising email in his inbox:
The EPA had been funding the Journal for almost three decades, through Republicans and Democrats in the White House. Now came this short email, three sentences, cutting off funds in the middle of the current grant, with the only justification “a shift in priorities.”
‘The American public doesn’t believe the press’
For months, Blankenship and others at the paper could only speculate about why the grant was cancelled. They filed an appeal, and they filed freedom of information requests, without success.
Then, in January, Nick DiPasquale retired from his job at the EPA, and started talking to reporters about the Bay Journal grant.
“The decision to terminate funding was a violation of the grant requirements,” said DiPasquale. “That’s illegal.”
DiPasquale headed the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program in Annapolis. Over the summer, he’d been hearing rumors that the political folks at EPA headquarters in Washington were raising questions about the Bay Journal grant.
So in August, he set up a conference call with John Konkus, a new political appointee at EPA who’d been charged with reviewing grants. In the preceding months, the mostly apolitical Journal had published opinion pieces and reported stories critical of the White House — specifically, the president’s proposal to eliminate the EPA’s Bay cleanup program entirely.
Now, on the phone call, Konkus said the Journal “shouldn’t have weighed in” in those political matters, according to DiPasquale.
Then Konkus made what DiPasquale called “the most outrageous comment of all,” saying, “everybody knows the American public doesn’t believe the press.”
DiPasquale documented this conversation the next day in an email to others at the agency, calling it a “very disturbing call.” Another participant in the conference call confirmed DiPasquale’s account, replying to his email the same day, “I agree with Nick’s summary of the call.”
A week later, the short email went out, cancelling the grant.
Change of priorities, or retaliation?
The Bay Journal’s appeal argued the cancellation violated terms of the grant agreement. But Rich Kuhlman, who spent thirty years working on grants at the EPA, isn’t so sure.
He said it is highly unusual to have a political appointee making decisions on grants. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said.
But he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it, or with the termination of the Journal’s funding. He said a vague “shift in priorities” may be reason enough.“You have a new administration. You have new priorities. They have to change things. Otherwise, why vote?” he said. “Why bring in somebody new if they’re going to do the same thing the previous administration did?”
The Journal isn’t alone in losing its funding. The EPA under Trump has cancelled millions of dollars in competitive grants, some for political reasons, according to the Washington Post. But there is something that sets the Journal apart from other grant recipients.
As a media institution, it’s protected by the First Amendment against government retaliation for stories it has published. Josephine Morse, an attorney with the legal nonprofit Democracy Forward, is representing the Bay Journal. She said the conference call with John Konkus appears to fall afoul of the First Amendment.
“That kind of retaliatory conduct, based on the content of what was published by Bay Journal, specific articles that had weighed in on particular issues, that’s retaliatory conduct that strongly implicates the First Amendment.”
Lucy Dalglish, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said the Journal may have a case: “There’s some indication in the evidence that they’ve had their funding yanked because someone in the EPA didn’t like what they said.”
An uncertain future
These First Amendment issues may be one reason the grant decision caught the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including Maryland’s two senators, Democrats Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen. During an oversight hearing last week, they questioned EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt about the Bay Journal.Van Hollen quoted Nick DiPasquale’s words from an interview he did with E&E News, which first reported on the Konkus phone call.
“The retired head of the Bay Program, just earlier this month, said it was politics that killed the funding for the Bay Journal. Have you looked into this at all?”
Pruitt told Van Hollen and Cardin that yes, in fact, he had looked into it in preparation for the oversight hearing.
“I learned of that decision after the fact,” said Pruitt. “I think it was a decision that should not have been made in the way that it was. So it’s under reconsideration already.”
The EPA didn’t respond to emails or calls from WAMU about why exactly it is reconsidering the grant decision.
DiPasquale said he felt compelled to take a stand on this decision he felt wasn’t right.
“It was extremely wrong, as a matter of fact,” he said. And, he was in a position to say something without fearing for his career. “There are some of us, myself included, who are at retirement age, who are financially secure and see these things taking place and we have to respond. If these issues aren’t challenged then they will stand, and I think that’s extremely corrosive in terms of the way government should operate.”
The future of the Bay Journal is still in limbo. The EPA grant made up about 40 percent of the paper’s budget. They’ve been trying to make up the difference by raising more money from readers and trimming expenses.
“Unfortunately we’re a pretty lean operation and there’s not a whole lot of cost to cut, we discovered,” said editor Karl Blankenship.
The next EPA grant installment was supposed to arrive the first of this month.
NOTE: Forget the troubles the Bay Journal is having (but I do hope they win their legal battle!), the really important take away from the EPA's actions is why? Why would an Administration take action to re-pollute our rivers, lakes, streams and bays? It just makes no sense.
Take Care Everyone!
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