THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408050021
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
In my 20 years as a professional in the communications business, I have worked with journalists and editors representing some of the most respected publications in the world. I believed good editors do their homework and strive to maintain a level of fairness. A couple of your editorials (``Environmental agenda,'' July 3; ``The Great Disney swamp,'' May 16) make me wonder if there's a new trend.
I serve as a volunteer member of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Hampton Roads Advisory Committee, representing my company, a multibillion-dollar international corporation. Your gross characterizations of CBF as a ``pressure group'' that offers ``scorched-economy regulatory regimes'' and your careless lumping of CBF and its corporate members into loosely defined ``green groups'' and ``no growthers'' is a personal affront. No one I've seen at CBF, or in my company, which has seriously active concerns about environmental quality, fits your calloused descriptions. Have bigotry and self-appointed righteousness taken over the editorial pages of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star?
Saying CBF is just another ``green group'' is no different from saying all Christians are radical, right-wing fundamentalists. Standing up for property rights allowing property owners to do whatever they wish is no different from advocating having no laws or enforcement, but letting pure citizen rights prevail.
Without such groups as CBF, the Environmental Protection Agency and resulting clean-air acts and related regulations about conservation, clean rivers, bays and waters, Lake Michigan would still be dead, the Hudson on fire, and stripped bass in the Chesapeake gone the way of the oyster. There wouldn't even be a Department of Environmental Quality for your friend Peter Schmidt to find a job directing.
Please take some time to educate yourself about the history and work of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. You'll find an organization that helps achieve environmental goals by conciliatory negotiations between conflicting groups rather than by pressure tactics; an organization respected on all sides for its fair and open-minded approach; a group that cares about responsible growth and that our economy is going to be in even bigger trouble if we do not restore the Bay, fast.
Please do your homework like any respected journalist does and leave blatant prejudice to the uneducated bigots of the world, who should never be labeled journalists.
DAVID H. MOODY
Chesapeake, Aug. 1, 1994 by CNB