Imagine my delight at seeing a front page article about this issue in the Sunday Arizona Republic just before Christmas—“A Fragile Oasis Is in Danger of Vanishing.” The article, a three page spread with photographs, was informative, well researched, and incisively written. Imagine my dismay and subsequent grimace when I immediately noticed, after reading the first paragraph in which Vermilion Flycatcher and its brilliant red color was mentioned, the accompanying photograph of a perched, flycatcher shaped bird was so grossly underexposed it had no color at all!
I have ranted in this column, occasionally over the years, about the lack of environmental content and education in our print media, especially since the environmental page itself was eliminated from the Republic in the late oughts. I and many others are happy to preach to the choir, but there’s nothing as effective as a major metropolitan print newspaper for raising awareness of non-birders and attracting recruits to the flock.
My first thought upon seeing the flycatcher photograph was that it was a black and white print, but then I noticed blue vignetting, the Arizona sky, at the corners of the image and knew the photo had been taken in color. My next thought, a hope really, was that a Vermilion Flycatcher, the radiant and iconic symbol of the Southwestern desert landscape, were it depicted without color, would be a clever, thinly disguised metaphor for the desiccation of our deserts and the degreening of the San Pedro corridor.
Yeah, I know. Wishful thinking, right? Noting all the typographical and grammatical errors in our print media nowadays, it’s apparent that the media giants like Gannet don’t want to pay salaries for meticulous editors, let alone creative content creators. I was not a journalism major, but I’ll bet there’s a section in one of the beginning courses that suggested if you mention a “brightly colored” red bird in the first sentence, then you’d look for a picture of a bright red bird to accompany the article. And, during the holiday season, for God’s sake! If not, why bother with a photograph at all?
Of course there was no metaphorical reference in the article or the photo caption to indicate anything other than lack of good journalism. A Vermilion Flycatcher highlighting an environmental article should be bright red. Period. Grab the readers’ attention with a smashing, eye catching visual. I was happy, of course, to see the San Pedro’s plight given exposure in the Republic, but the lack of attention to detail and creativity which characterizes pieces about birds and birders specifically, and the environment in general, shows a lack of respect for readers and their intelligence, and an underlying cynicism about the planet.
Whew! Alright, that was cathartic, and I feel a little better. If you missed the San Pedro article in the Sunday, December 22 edition of the Arizona Republic, please dig it up or google it, give it a read, and maybe even write them and let them know we’d appreciate more features like that.
Oh, and here’s an example of the kind of visual they should have used to grab the reader.