On Thursday, March 23rd, executive deputy secretary of the PA Department of Environmental Protection, John Hines, hit send on an unanticipated and regressive email memo ordering all Pennsylvania gas inspectors to stop issuing violations against drillers without prior approval from political appointee Michael Krancer.

The dramatic policy change will effectively suppress "Notice of Violations" (NOV) issuances and shift enforcement actions from professional inspectors to Governor Corbett's appointee DEP Secretary Michael Krancer. In the past two years, Pennsylvania DEP has issued more than 1600 violations to drillers in the Marcellus Shale, more than 1000 of which were identified "Most likely to harm the environment". Concentrating enforcement responsibilities and authority in senior level administrators cannot serve to protect the air and water; rather, it makes our environment less safe as these few administrators cannot keep pace with the gas boom.

For several years, gas drilling in PA has been ratcheting up and the DEP budget has been shrinking. Now operating with 60% of the funds the Ridge administration (yr 2000) spent, the agency should be providing inspectors the freedom to do their jobs as trained professionals without politically appointed administrators duplicating the work or, as many fear, giving industry a free pass.

Lately I have noticed a lot of false equivalence in the media. What's crazier still is the way they are often touted as something to be proud of. As though the cliché phrase “there are two sides to every story” were a golden rule for newscasters to live by. I think that we need to push back on this idea.

In the 1800s newspapers were extremely partisan and not particularly credible. According to E.J. Dionne Jr.'s marvelous book They Only Look Dead, “Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries American journalism went from one coherent purpose, partisanship, to another, 'objectivity'” (Dionne, 237). Newspapers before the 1900s were simply extensions of the local party apparatus that spoke to the party's base, and the profession of journalism wasn't taken too seriously.

Then, during the Progressive Era, newspapers decided that objectivity might be a better business model. By pursuing “objectivity,” the new newspaper conglomerates could sell one paper to all political persuasions, thereby boosting profits, and journalists could garner respect for their profession. Of course, this completely changed the way we think about newspapers and media, it changed our expectations for their products, and it changed journalists.