New Mexico should provide journalists greater freedom to cover disasters

The Calf Canyon-Hermits Peak Fire burned 341,735 acres of Sangre de Cristo forest from early April to late June of last year, the most of any wildfire in state history. The natural disaster drew hundreds of print journalists and TV crews from around the state and country, including two staff members of our own. But in the thousands of photographs and videos that were taken — beautiful and illustrative as many of them were — only rarely did they capture the actual flames of the fire. Instead, there were many photos of firefighters unraveling hoses or clearing brush safely behind fire lines, victims sitting on cots in emergency shelters and, of course, a profusion of landscape shots featuring towering clouds of smoke.

But as Adria Malcolm told Geoffrey Plant for one of his front page stories this week, the absence of fire in last year’s images was merely symbolic of the larger issue journalists faced — lacking the access they needed to report completely on the disaster.

Malcolm might have pulled the bill before it was introduced because some outlets took issue with some of its language — which was in part penned by District 13 N.M. Sen. Bill O’Neill — but we think it was a good start, with some caveats. As a news organization, we think it’s admirable that one of our fellow journalists took the initiative to address this important issue, as other states — such as California and, more recently, Oregon — already have.

Some outlets criticized the bill for relieving government agencies responding to disasters from liability if a journalist allowed behind disaster zones is injured or killed, but we would disagree with them. Depending on the beat they cover, most journalists know they do a dangerous job, and so do the news outlets who employ them and carry liability insurance for that very reason. News outlets bear this responsibility in every other situation. Why not here?

The clauses that we think require more specificity pertain to the training journalists would have to receive to gain approval to gain access to, for example, a major wildfire, and to the authority the incident commanders on disasters would have to deny them that access.

We think the training journalists should go through ought to be rigorous, as sending a reporter into a disaster zone is serious business. Not only would thorough training ensure a journalists safety to a greater degree, but the training itself would be highly informative for the reporting itself. Natural disasters are highly complex, and so we think it would be a win-win for the state to create such a training program, specifically for journalists.

But once that high bar has been met, the language in this type of legislation should close any loopholes an incident commander could use to deny them the access they have worked for. As it stands in the draft legislation Malcolm helped create, there’s too much play for government agencies to do what they already do all too often: Keep journalists so far away from the disaster itself that their jobs become unreasonably difficult, nigh impossible, and readers trying to inform themselves about important disasters are left without the information they need.

We think Malcolm’s efforts to address this important issue are laudable. We hope she keeps at it and that we get something on the books in 2024.

Farewell, Robert Silver

These pages (A8 and A9) wouldn’t be what they are without writers like Robert Silver, and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends following his death Feb. 1.

Robert was a psychologist by trade, but when he moved to Taos, he shifted some of his focus to his writing, even penning a book about his struggle with Parkinson’s Disease, in the hope that he could impart some strength and wisdom to others who suffer from the same degenerative disorder.

We were grateful to also see his words here in our opinion pages, even if we (or you) didn’t always agree with the positions he took.