How Eco-Activists Bought Friendly Coverage in the New York Times

Over the summer the New York Times ran a story attacking Chilean salmon farmers, who together export almost two-thirds of the product Americans eat each year. I’ve been a part of that industry for decades, so I knew the story was full of errors and distortions. But something else about it struck my eye: a short, mysterious note tacked on at the end saying that a group called Earth Journalism Network (EJN) had “supported” the reporting.

I wanted to understand what that meant, so my colleagues and I did a little digging. We were shocked to learn that not only had EJN paid the authors of the piece, but their network of deep-pocket donors had also given money to most of the “expert” sources quoted in it. That same network had been sponsoring attacks against Chilean salmon for decades, and seemed to have had a hand in the entire New York Times hit job from inspiration to publication.

It started when EJN’s executive director, James Fahn, tapped two aspiring journalists from a class he was teaching at UC Berkeley, where Fahn says he instructs students on “how to research, frame, pitch and produce stories.” After getting the two young women interested in the seemingly obscure topic of salmon aquaculture, EJN paid for them to travel to Chile where they met with sources who had also been paid and who, as luck would have it, shared EJN’s views. Some time later, a third contributor became attached—surprise, surprise, he also had ties to EJN—and the piece found its way into print.

The Times might call all this “support”, but a better word is corruption, since it violates basic journalism principles of objectivity and independence.

Indeed, in a presentation to donors, Fahn openly bragged about EJN’s “collaboration with the New York Times,” where the group has landed four different stories in just the last year. “We decided early to focus on…seeding quality reporting in the…national and international media,” Fahn explained. “This ensures that the media outlets view us as a partner and supporter.”   

If the Times once considered itself above such tawdry partnerships, those days are over. “[N]ews outlets that declined to work with us in the past are now quite open to collaboration,” Fahn wrote. 

That’s an understatement. According to research from the group Media Impact Funders, activist dollars flowing into journalism almost quadrupled between 2009 and 2017, to the tune of about $2 billion.

For newsrooms increasingly strapped for cash, there’s an obvious rationale for the change of heart. And donor motives are equally apparent, as the American Press Institute discovered when it surveyed them. More than half said they were trying to influence public policy by giving cash to journalists. What about ethical guardrails? “A good deal of the protection of journalistic independence … is left to good intentions,” API concluded.

It turns out that even-handed reporting is not among those intentions. As former New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin explained after he too went on a paid trip with EJN, “focusing on disputes masks established knowledge,” and gives in to “the distorting power of journalistic balance.”

What about the distorting power of cash money?  

In educating myself about this issue I came across a good line from Columbia Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann, in a discussion of the “church-state” metaphor journalists often use “to describe the protection of editorial purpose from commercial intervention.”  

“The implication,” Lemann writes, “is that shortly after God decided to separate the land and the water and to divide humans into male and female, He set journalists apart from their sources of financial support.”   

For its part, the NYT public relations department told us the authors of the piece “have no affiliation with EJN and this piece was reported and edited entirely independently under NYT’s editorial direction without any contact with EJN.” 

But the basic facts—which our industry have posted publicly online and I’ve summarized here—say otherwise.

If papers like the Times can’t even be honest about the extent of their financial ties to activist groups, why should readers believe them about anything else?  

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Ricardo Garcia Holtz is the Chairman of Chilean Salmon Council USA