The Media___________

By TOM LITTLEWOOD

Explaining energy pricing: an unmet demand

THE "FLY-UP" in home heating bills that was not expected until 1985, when the prices of newly discovered sources of natural gas are to be fully deregulated, came early to Illinois. This winter's unhappy combination of prolonged bad weather and big fuel rate increases left elected public officials everywhere with a severe case of the shivering shakes. By winter's end, consumers were frustrated and rebellious.

Voters who rely on the news media to make informed judgments about that is going on can be forgiven their confusion. On the one hand, we are told that regulated prices of gas sold across state lines are far too low, in relation to world prices of oil, and if the market is only permitted to "work," producers will flood us with gas and — wonder of wonders! — prices might even come down someday. On the other hand, we hear tell that the villainous big oil companies who do much of the drilling for gas are "withholding" vast supplies until prices soar still higher.

It is not that the media are not paying attention. They are. The problem is that energy policy is so complicated, so interrelated, so subject to different interpretations. How can a newspaper staff in Illinois possibly piece together what is happening in so many different places — in the gas fields of Oklahoma, where producers may or may not be drilling depending on the price control category to which they belong; in the offices of the pipeline companies that may or may not be owned by the same people who are doing the drilling (who may or may not be one of the major oil companies); and finally with your local utility, which buys from the transmission company and is regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission, which permits some but not other costs to be "passed through" automatically, and which calculates a fair return for investors by formulas that ordinary folks cannot possibly understand.

Illinois editors with whom I talked about this agreed that the news system does not do a very good job of explaining energy pricing and regulation through the maze that begins at the wellhead and leads to the gas company bill in your mailbox.

"It does boggle the mind," said Harold Liston, editor and editorial writer for the Bloomington Pantograph. "There's a whole gamut of energy economics that is a mystery to journalists [and is] reflected in the vagueness of their reporting. The man in the street is confused about how and why prices go up — and so am I."

"It's true that many utility rate cases are so complicated that Milton Friedman [the University of Chicago economist] couldn't make sense of them," added Tom Driscoll of the Peoria Journal Star. "Both sides have their expert witnesses and their methods of accounting."

At the state government level, some of the best reporting of the state regulatory apparatus has been done by William Lambrecht, Springfield correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "The problem is having enough time to do it," he said. "It's not something that can be done in an afternoon or two afternoons. There are so many sources of information, a morass of statistics, and the conflicting opinions of so many people who have a stake in the proceedings . . . you can't be expected to write daily legislative stories and do this kind of reporting too."

It is this smear of conflicting perceptions that makes the task so difficult, according to Tom Blount of the Decatur Herald and Review. "It's terribly difficult to understand," he said. "You can quote all the people on all sides and come up with conflicting information that only compounds the public confusion."

To have any hope of clarifying the subject, a news organization would probably need to coordinate the investigations of reporters in Houston and Washington and Springfield as well as in Decatur. The Herald and Review's only source of such "special order" reporting in Washington is the States News Service, a struggling, understaffed local news operation that Blount says cannot begin to make that kind of contribution. The Lee newspaper chain, of which the Decatur paper is part, has put aside the possibility of opening its own Washington bureau, at least until the economy improves. And even then Blount is not convinced that a mere three-reporter bureau for 19 papers in eight states, the plan that was under consideration, would be worth the expense.

What about television? Although Bill Moyers prepared an excellent report for the CBS Evening News on the Alaskan natural gas pipeline financing controversy late last year, the picture medium is not usually well suited for this type of story. More common is the film clip of demonstrators parading in front of the gas company offices followed by 15 seconds of self-serving comment from the commerce commission chairman with a big stack of files on his desk giving him an authoritative air.

Jefferson said self-government can work as long as the people have the information upon which to act. We can only hope that the intersection of technology and economics has not already become so complex and so muddled that journalism is incapable of unboggling the mind and sifting through the contradictions.

Editor's Note: Later this year Illinois Issues will publish an article on energy economics by Jim Krohe Jr., which will, we believe, cast some light on the subject.

April 1982/Illinois Issues/37