Public

By Mark Schapiro
Chelsea Green Publishing, $22.95

Reviewed by Susan Moran

In the quagmire of the Iraq war, the United States has lost credibility as a world leader. In Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products, investigative journalist Mark Schapiro offers another version of the erosion of American leadership. In this case, it's how the U.S. government has gone from one whose environmental laws and regulations were once a model for other nations to one whose standards have fallen so far below those of even some developing nations.

 By CASEY McNERTHNEY

Every story has moments that get left out in the retelling. Sometimes those moments are what reporters remember most, but have a hard time describing in a print news story.

Because of the Internet, those moments—both in images and audio—now can be shared with the readers.

The inflections in a source's voice, the photos that help explain, the odds and ends you collect that would normally be buried on your desk – those now have a place in an online slideshow.

 By JAN KNIGHT

 The Internet has transformednewsaboutoil spills by providing accounts that rivet global attention and go beyond official versions of the disasters, a recent study suggests.

Specifically, environmental groups' increasingly sophisticated Internet use has expanded the ways in which oil spills are framed. Via their websites, email and blogs, the groups have interrupted official efforts to control information about the spills and mobilized local and international action, according to the study.

 By BILL DAWSON

Lisa Margonelli is an Oakland, Calif.-based freelance journalist, a fellow of the NewAmerica Foundation, and the author of Oil on the Brain, a book that describes "petroleum's long, strange trip to your tank."

Margonelli has written for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Business 2.0, Discover and Jane. She was a recipient of a Sundance Institute Fellowship and an excellence in journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists.

Edited By MIKE MANSUR

Jim Handman and Pat Senson, producers with CBC Radio's weekly science progra, "Quirks & Quarks," have won the 2007 ScienceWritingAward from the American Institute of Physics. It is the second time the team from Q&Q has won the prestigious prize. The program has been a runner-up in the SEJ Awards three times.

By BILL KOVARIK

In 2006, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth dominated The New York Times best seller list. But in 2007, Glenn Beck's swaggering rebuttal, An Inconvenient Book, topped the same list with the idea that climate change is "the greatest scam in history."

While Beck's book has little chance of outselling Gore's book over the long run, the paradox illustrates a larger problem in the environmental publishing industry: serious science is a hard sell.

By TIM WHEELER

Have the news media become bored with global warming already? It was one of the top news stories of 2007, thanks in large part to the Nobel-winning labors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former Vice President Al Gore. But as presidential contenders slogged through the snowy caucuses and primaries in their quest for the White House, the topic barely registered in news coverage of the campaigns. It almost never came up in televised debates.