Activist says San Antonio Report failed to correct reporting errors on Brackenridge Park tree plan
Sanford Nowlin
Environmental advocates gather in Brackenridge Park after the city agreed to delay a project that would fell dozens of trees there.
Controversy continues to circle around the city of San Antonio’s plan to cut down more than 100 trees in Brackenridge Park to rebuild an aging wall.
Late last month, Assistant City Manager David McCary apologized to activists for claiming that the tree-cutting proposal was not in part also a plan to chase off migratory birds who roost in the park.
The fight over the trees has also led to a dustup over how local media is reporting on the plan. In late February, Robert Rivard, founder of the San Antonio Report and former editor-in-chief of the San Antonio Express-News, published an opinion piece arguing that “disinformation” is responsible for delaying the implementation of the city plan.
In the article, Rivard expressed disbelief that city officials hadn’t removed ribbons and other signage from endangered trees and opined that “good work is being lost in the noise of protest.” The claims rankled activists working to save the trees.
A week-and-a-half later, Deceleration News — an environmental blog co-run by former Current editor and Sierra Club organizer Greg Harman — tweeted that it had requested a series of corrections on Rivard’s piece.
The five corrections Deceleration News requested ranged from Rivard’s characterization of plans for a new events center at the site to the scope of the bird population targeted for removal. In the end, San Antonio Report editors made just one.
To Harman’s mind, four of the five requested corrections pointed out factual errors in the story, not instances where his opinion differed from Rivard’s. For example, he pointed out that Rivard said some of the trees scheduled for removal aren’t native, yet a permit request for the project states that all the trees are native.
“The Report does really important work,” Harman said in an interview with the Current. “There’s good journalists there. But I felt like at a moment where we knew the city was manipulating the public by spreading untruths and we needed journalists to step in and hold them accountable and dig in on the story, he was taking shots at the activists.”
The single correction, noted at the bottom of the article, reads “Correction: This column has been updated to correctly state that the trees are being measured by diameter, not girth.”
The San Antonio Report didn’t provide a public rationale for why it declined to make the other corrections, which were supported by video, public records and past reporting supplied by Harman. Deceleration News also maintains that the spirit of the column violated the San Antonio Report’s policy against “doing harm.”
“This is something I’ve seen that is very, very common, where Bob writes about things like, ‘activists are to blame for stuff,'” Harman said. “When, in fact, the job of an activist is to decry an injustice. That’s it. After that, the community’s conscience needs to kick into gear and decide what’s right and what’s wrong … I thought the tone of it was offensive.”
San Antonio Report Editor-in-Chief Leigh Munsil said the site reviewed each of Harman’s requests before making its final decision to issue just a single correction.
“We are always happy to engage with readers on our reported content, as well as our opinion columns,” Munsil wrote in an email to the Current. “We gave the full request on this column a fair hearing, and it led to the correction we ended up approving.”
Harman said he’s unconvinced by the Report’s explanations for why staff neglected to make the rest of the corrections or address the tone of the column.
“That all felt protective of Bob in a way that I think hurts the brand of the outlet, to be frank,” he added.
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