Curious Divide: I feel like I'm missing something. I keep seeing a heavy flow of environmental stories in the media. At the same time, the presidential candidates seem to be avoiding environmental issues as if they were toxic.

 

In my local paper this morning, I saw three interesting issue-oriented stories on environmental topics. (I'm starting to feel like a dinosaur on my block. Even though, like many people, I keep consuming more and more news via the Internet and less and less from printed sources, I still subscribe to my town's slowly-wasting-away newspamphlet, the Plain Dealer. This is mainly because my sons love to pore over the sports section, and it pleases me to see them reading instead of zombieing out on video games.)

 

One of these stories in this morning's paper talked about plastic shopping bags. Another pertained to compact fluorescent lights. And the third was a report about the CEO of a big manufacturer speaking out in favor of a proposed federal cap on carbon emissions.

 

Meanwhile, to test the other half of my theory, I just now did a Google News search for the terms "presidential campaign" + "environmental" + "green." (Google News compiles items from 4,500 news sources and updates them continuously.) In the past week, there have been a grand total of six stories that contain those keywords. And all six mention environmental issues in the context of the presidential campaign only in passing.

 

So why the disconnect? Why do journalists evidently think their readers are deeply attuned to environmental issues, while Hillary, Barack and John think voters couldn't care less about such issues? Whose finger is more on the pulse of the way Americans feel about the environment? Who's missing the boat here?

 

1+1+1 = Infinity: Speaking of missing the boat, here's an item from our Math-Challenged Journalists Department: Bloomberg.com ran a story last week about the challenges Sen. John McCain faces to keep his campaign in the spotlight now that he's sewn up the GOP presidential nomination.

 

The story contains this intriguing sentence: "Behind the scenes, McCain and his strategists also are working to bolster his economic, health care and environmental stances because they want him to project a stronger command of both topics."

 

I think Bloomberg.com needs to do some behind-the-scenes work to project a stronger command of arithmetic.

 

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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