Way back, even farther back than the Way Back Machine can find things on the internet, I absorbed lessons from journalism elders on how to accurately craft a story around what I found in my reporting.
But four decades into applying those lessons, I’ve learned that selecting what facts or elements to omit from a story can sometimes be more important. Bad choices can upset a necessary balance in a story and impede the public’s trust in our work.
I was reminded of the importance of this journalistic standard as I read about a federal judge’s ruling in Nevada that chided government wranglers for not completing required environmental reviews of their management of wild horse populations on western-state grasslands. Dozens of horses died last year during government roundups, adding volume to public complaints that federal control of wild horses needs a reset.
News of that court ruling precedes an imminent administrative decision by federal officials that’s expected to ensure a home for some 200 wild horses in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The horses were slated for relocation, which triggered a storm of protest and a promise by one lawmaker that the government would find a way to let the horses roam free.
These decisions follow decades of fierce debate over how best to manage populations of the iconic wild animal.
The Uninvited
Why are these horse tales relevant to my admonishment about making careful journalistic decisions?
Over several months, many viewers have brought to our attention an episode of a program that originally aired in 2023. “Human Footprint: Strangers in Paradise” remains viewable online, for PBS Passport members in particular. It is an engaging report about animals considered invasive and troublesome in different parts of the United States. The program looked at pythons in Florida, wild pigs in Hawaii, carp in the Midwest, and wild horses in the West. The episode was delivered by the charismatic host, biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, and supported by producers who are also biologists.
The segment on Burmese pythons seemed spot-on, playing up the “yikes!” factor and showing how large and widespread the voracious reptiles have become in Florida. The wild pig segment displayed how humans have adapted to the ubiquitous oinkers, now commonly found roasting low and slow at Hawaii luaus. But Asian carp are too bony to have a market in the food business, so they have taken over rivers like the one in Illinois featured in the episode.
The stories underscore the show’s laudable premise: Invasive species are generally bad for their new environments. But it’s not their fault that they’re there. We did it. Whether it was bringing carp from Asia to clean up Midwest sewage ponds, or pythons to make a buck for pet stores in Florida, we humans moved the species from their native Point A to their unfamiliar Point B.
We take “a closer look at why (the invasive species) are there in the first place,” Campbell-Staton says in the show’s introduction.
The show goes on to bravely focus on how we now manage – or mismanage – problems that we created.
I say “bravely” because when you call some species “rapacious” and cite them as bad for their new environments, you’re courting blowback from fans of a particular beast. For example, I would have joined a howl of protest if the show had featured the feral parrots of San Francisco. Yes, they’re invasive descendants of former household pets and squawk endlessly around Coit Tower and Dolores Park. But goodness, they add flavor to The City. My appreciation of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales Of The City” soared higher when he described the birds that I often viewed with wonder. An award-winning documentary on the flocks was an emotional journey for those of us who’ve left our hearts in San Francisco.
This is where the wild horses come in.
The “Human Footprint” segment on free-roaming mustangs launched substantial protests from viewers, journalists, researchers and biologists. They believe the segment’s narrative was driven by errors and biased reporting.
I looked into those claims but found that there are no errors of fact in the narrative. And I’ve hesitated to write about the episode, in part because the viewers’ claims and the show producer’s explanations seemed to revolve around perspective and not correctable facts.
But time has added to my own perspective. I’ve viewed past PBS documentaries on North American horses and read more about untamed horses and their place in this nation’s history and its public lands, including “Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth and Future of the Mustang,” by the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist David Philipps, who is a key character in the controversial segment.
After much reading, and viewing – and reviewing - of “Human Footprint,” I believe the segment indeed fails the audience. Yet my reasons for calling it a failure won’t satisfy the most vocal of critics.
My concern is not so much what was said or shown. I’m disappointed by what was left out. Important material and context are missing – information that I believe could have deepened the understanding of an important symbol of our rich and diverse national identity.
The entire episode attempted to show that conscientious humans – biologists, government regulators and independent researchers – work hard to contain populations of non-native species and protect native plants and animals.
A horse, of course
The wild horse segment stumbled out of the gate.
The show rightly says horses are almost as iconic to the “American spirit” of freedom and independence as bald eagles. But then it portrays them as rapacious and out-of-control.
The contradiction deserves a deeper, contextualized discussion.
Biologists and government regulators are right in pointing out that today’s wild horses are not native to North America. Yet most viewers are probably loath to see them as dangerous invaders whose populations must be heartlessly controlled. That point is lightly touched in the segment’s narration.
Defenders of wild horses have bigger bones to pick: They’re convinced the show wildly inflates the wild horse population in the United States to justify claims of widespread damage to their environments. They argue that the episode’s overall assertion – that damage done to grasslands by untamed horses is outsized – is unsupported.
If the horse numbers are inflated, the damage they cause is overstated.
But there’s a problem with that argument.
The government can prove that horses cause some damage to western rangelands. That finding does not simply become untrue if the opposition points out that there are not as many horses as the government says there are. It would only change the per capita – or per equus? – damage done.
The argument then shifts to how the federal government came to conclude that the environmental damage in question is the fault of the horses, to any degree.
(Maybe, just maybe, the damage we are seeing has other contributors besides horses. Read on.)
The government’s reasonable concerns have been tested over time. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has engaged pro-horse groups since the 1960s and has refined its control measures. Even the controversial practice of rounding up wild horses by close-in helicopters – called “gathers” – exists because the government was able to show a previous generation of horse advocates that it was the most efficient and least lethal measure. The roundups, however, do cause numerous horse deaths each year – a fact not stated in the “Human Footprint” episode.
A horse history
“Human Footprint” accurately explains that wild horses that today gallop over grasslands or along our mid-Atlantic shores are genetic cousins of a species that evolved, thrived, and then disappeared from North America thousands of years ago. But that does not mean today’s wild horse is “invasive.”
Horses were reintroduced to the Americas by European explorers. Many escaped or were abandoned and quickly became central to the folkways of indigenous people. Their centuries-long role in culture and economy in the Americas is also revered by Latinos and Blacks, who pioneered and expanded cowboy culture well before the West was “won.”
The show correctly states that uncontrolled horse populations can adversely affect sensitive grasslands in parts of the nation’s open spaces. It describes one promising control method – birth control pills – but then drops it as not nearly enough to prevent damage to native grasslands and the taxpayers’ expense of managing feral horses and burros.
This is all valid reporting on elements of a long debate over wild horse management.
However, I suspect the show’s producers will be displeased that what I find wrong with the episode is not its facts, but how they’re presented – or, not presented.
It is not my role to dictate production or tell reporters how to do their jobs. But sometimes I believe I must – on behalf of viewers.
For example, I would have added cattle to the discussion. Wild horses share some western lands with commercial livestock. However, the “Human Footprint” segment says nothing about the threat posed to native grasslands by vast herds of grazing cattle and sheep. Are they not invasive? To many people, these mammals are as unwelcome on some lands as carp are in some rivers.
It’s about the numbers
The persistent controversy around the show’s horse segment pivots around numbers.
Campbell-Staton opens the story by saying the BLM takes some 20,000 horses off open grasslands each year, or “about 10% of the wild horse population.” That would mean a U.S. wild horse population of around 200,000. That’s an exaggerated count, say critics and their allied researchers. They point to surveys from the same BLM that list an unclaimed horse population at around 23,000.
The numbers cited by critics are solid – but limited to unclaimed horses on land governed by the BLM, mostly in western states. The show’s producers insisted their much larger population number is an empirically driven estimate of wild horses on all U.S. lands: BLM-monitored, in adoption corrals, on federal and state parks, tribal lands and private ranches. Good point, but that critical bit of methodology is not in the episode.
I considered both sides of the wild horse debate. I also discovered past public TV shows dedicated to horses. I’m concluding that everyone is right, somewhat. And you know what that means: In our winner-take-all society, if everyone is judged to be right in a debate, then no one is happy.
My ultimate problem with the segment is its sin of omission. There needs to be an explanation of how its numbers were gathered. Even after I spoke with the show’s producers and pointed this out, and heard a reasonable justification for reporting a larger wild horse population, there has been no change to the show’s narration, no text card added to the documentary explaining the methodology, or any explainer on the segment’s website. This is an easy fix that hasn’t been made.
The segment, I believe, also glosses over the opposition to the current management of wild horses from a large number of regular PBS viewers. The judge in a Nevada federal court has legitimized some of that opposition. In a conversation, the show’s producers told me they had filmed an interview with one critic of government horse management, but then left it out of the final cut because they deemed the arguments incorrect.
By leaving out that voice, the show downplays the controversy around government management of wild horses.
And if the argument against including every voice in a debate is time constraints on television, then my opening point takes greater importance: The producers found time to linger, a lot, on dramatic western landscapes and horses running free in slow motion. And they devoted some incongruous seconds humanizing a biologist by talking about her love of Wordle. These were subjective choices of what to include in the story, and what to leave out.
I remain convinced that if, at least on their website, producers explain the numbers they used, add a more contextual history of wild horses, and give voice to critics, the segment can finally succeed. Until they do, they leave an incomplete picture that plays up the value of just one voice in a multidimensional story.
I am not a purist in the ongoing controversy over objectivity in journalism, especially when it comes to documentaries. After all, there’s a wonderful PBS show called “POV” that examines events and controversies from a particular point of view. But I am a purist on trust and credibility. Even documentaries produced from a particular perspective must be thorough, include proper context, and attempt to display the important dimensions of an issue.
Ignoring credible arguments and context can diminish the value of an otherwise important work of journalism.
Daniel J. Macy, senior associate in the office of the PBS Public Editor, contributed to this article.