New York Times

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has made the world safe for corporate political speech, it's worth asking why plainclothes police officers are allowed to arrest an environmental activist for expressing his political views.

This outrageous tale comes to Dateline Earth from Jim Dwyer's About New York column in The New York Times, although it's apparently been raising hackles in the Big Apple for some time now.

Dwyer relates how Edward Kerry Sullivan was outside his Staten Island apartment building one night last summer when two undercover cops approached, arrested and cuffed him and whisked him off to the pokey.

Sullivan's "crime"? In letters about three inches high, he wrote "The Jerk" on an election poster for local pol James P. Molinaro. (A poster that would turn out to be itself illegally posted.) 

Now, let's admit that this isn't strictly an environmental story. But juxstaposed with the Citizens United campaign-finance ruling from the Supreme Court last week, it certainly seems worth noting. Folks, this is stunning.

And it's about an environmental advocate.

The tweet from New York Times reporter Andy Revkin caught my eye right away:

Hacked climate emails all the rage w/ skeptics tonite, including at least 1 email to some journo Revkin > http://j.mp/41MPbs #climate #agw

I quickly looked at the post on the climate-change-skeptic blog The Air Vent that was first to unleash the e-mails. Unfortunately, the blogger chose to eliminate the scientists' names, replacing them with initials because, the blogger says, "I need to understand the legal ramifications of making some of the emails public." (Ya think?! More on that in a minute.) Not knowing who the authors were, I concluded this stuff was unintelligible. "Wt gives?" I asked my Twitter posse.

Well, Revkin and Washington Post reporter Julia Eilperin were soon out with stories explaining that the pirated e-mails of some pretty prominent climate scientists show them in a less-than-flattering light.

So far I've just barely perused the 62 megabytes lifted from the server of the University of East Anglia. But many climate skeptics decrying the e-mails say they're proof of a conspiracy to defraud the public.

You wouldn't guess it from a late-Friday Google News search, but in my book, this qualifies as big news: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency promised today to redouble its efforts to  enforce the Clean Water Act.

The EPA's announcement today comes in reaction to an excellent New York Times series that we've paid homage to before, and which documented how polluters have systematically violated the Clean Water Act for decades, often with little or no retribution.

What's really significant is that agency is promising to go after some of the most prolific sources of stormwater, including city streets and feedlots.  We've been harping on this topic for years now, and it's great to get the heft of the NYT into the picture. The paper reports EPA is likely to go after "mining companies, large livestock farms, municipal wastewater treatment plants and construction companies that operate sites where polluted stormwater has run into nearby lakes and rivers." About time.

Here's what EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson had to say in the agency's press release:

Updating our efforts under the Clean Water Act will promote innovative solutions for 21st century water challenges, build stronger ties between EPA, state, and local actions, and provide the transparency the public rightfully expects.

It should be pointed out that reporters had documented parts of this story before the Times. Yours truly, along with Lisa Stiffler, Lise Olsen and others at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, did that in the Puget Sound region earlier this decade.

It's true that the mainstream media has plenty to apologize for, having flubbed reporting on Iraq and the financial crisis and for its tortoise-like pace in moving into the modern age of interactive journalism. (For an interesting take on that last part, and more, see Dan Gillmor's worthwhile "Eleven Things I'd Do If I Ran A News Organization." No anniversary stories or top 10 lists, for starters.)

But this week brings a powerful reminder of what the MSM can do that isn't generally possible in other quarters -- and in this case, the MSM is explicitly trying to empower citizen journalists and fellow scribes to run further with the story.

I'm speaking, of course, about the powerful package that ran this week in The New York Times on lax enforcement of our country's water-pollution rules. It's the latest installment in a series called "Toxic Waters."

Charles Duhigg's story starts with a woman whose kids got scabs and rashes and had teeth enamel eaten away by polluted drinking water. She lives just 17 miles from the state Capitol in West Virginia:

Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.

“How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?” said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state’s largest banks.  “How is this still happening today?”

The Times wore out a lot of virtual shoe leather on this project, filing public-records requests with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and with all 50 states.