One of the compelling subjects Michael Schacker tackles in A Spring without Bees is the perplexing way colony collapse disorder has been covered by the U.S. media.
Here’s a quote:
Rather than giving CCD the serious investigation that it deserves, the U.S. media sometimes has even presented the ongoing catastrophe as a joke or an oddball type of story.
And another:
In a syrupy tone of voice usually reserved for the birth of baby pandas, CNN newswoman Frederica Whitfield exclaimed, “Where have all the honey bees gone?” “No one knows” was the answer given in her report. In light of having just studied the history of the French IMD/honey bee controversy, watching the broadcast was a surreal moment. Nowhere had the media reported the true history of the insecticide battle in France, especially omitting the fact that the French bees came back in 2005. Colony collapse disorder is typically presented as a mystery in the U.S., a puzzle that no one on Earth can definitively give the answer to.
Hmm… There are clear reasons why those with money to lose would prefer CCD to stay shrouded in mystery. It’s less clear why the media, especially TV and video, haven’t done a better job exploding the mystery meme.
As a person with a foot in each world – beekeeping and filmmaking – this is especially interesting to me. Here are three reasons why I think TV media has so far failed to report the full story about pesticides and CCD.
THE MYSTERY IS SEDUCTIVE
There’s something about the CCD mystery story that’s… seductive. The idea that our honeybees are – poof – disappearing has a dark magic about it. It alludes to all the things that make us anxious about the environment while rendering us helpless.
SCIENTISTS ARE MORE CREDIBLE THAN BEEKEEPERS 
So far, the story U.S. scientists are telling about CCD (that it’s a tough-to-crack mystery with multiple causes) is different from the story some beekeepers are telling (that there’s a problem with the crops bees are foraging on and it looks like pesticides). Both speak from observation. But their conclusions are different. Whom to believe? My guess is that a soft spoken scientist riding the research train is going to sound more credible to a university trained filmmaker than an impassioned beekeeper. Both may be interviewed. But the scientist’s side gets more weight.
Why scientists & beekeepers aren’t quite matching up is another story… better told by Schacker in A Spring without Bees.
NO JOURNALISM DEGREE REQUIRED
Stories get told differently on TV than they do in print. (Filmmakers are more story-arc oriented than newspaper reporters are.) Documentary filmmakers may care about truth and approach the facts of a story with the same time and care as a newspaper reporter but arrive at the process with a different point of view and training.
So you throw those three things together… a culturally potent story told by a story-sensitive filmmaker with pro-scientist bias and you get…
Something less than probing.
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