Filed under: Business columns, Political | Tags: CAFO, Clean Water Act, concentrated animal feeding operations, Environmental Integrity Project, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, feedlot pollution, media relations, National Pork Producers Council, public relations, water pollution
A public relations person’s dream is to be able to dictate to the media how their articles are written, so that the image and reputation they’re trying to establish for their employer is the only story-line out there. In the case of this story from the Associated Press, they had partial success that leads to a confusing story.
The headline reads, “EPA curbs factory farm pollution,” which sounds great. Everybody is in favor of curbing pollution from factories, so that’s a real winner of a headline. But the story lead (the first sentence) contradicts the headline by noting that the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “pollution control” guidelines allow factory farm operators to decide for themselves if they need to apply for pollution discharge permit from the government.
Then, the second sentence quotes EPA as saying they have a “zero discharge standard,” and require discharge management plans from the factory farm operations that prevent “excessive” pollution runoff. So the question is, if zero pollution is the standard, why does the plan only have to prevent excessive pollution?
Further into the story, we hear from environmentalists who say that this new regulatory setup is a recipe for disaster, in that it sets up factory farm operations as their own monitors. Then, we come to the money quote from the National Pork Producers, calling the new regulation “tough but fair.”
When it comes to public relations on contentious issues, you generally want to go for a consensus of some sort. If both sides are equally pleased or equally displeased, you’ve probably done a fine job. Like both sides of a union-management spat; if they both come away from an agreement saying, “Well, we didn’t get everything we wanted, but we can live with it,” then you’ve obviously been fair. But with this EPA situation, you have the polluters saying they’re happy about being able to regulate themselves, the regulator saying they’re happy the polluters can regulate themselves, and the environmentalists saying we’ve just put the fox in charge of the chicken house.
That’s not good practice, and therefore, you can’t make good PR out of it, even if you manage to slip a positive headline past the editors.
