DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

Sometimes the news of a local area can be covered better by someone from outside. It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does. The 1990s scandal involving Nevada District Court Judge Jerry Whitehead of Reno, for instance, was covered better by the Las Vegas Review Journal than by Whitehead's hometown newspaper.

This is called parachuting in, and it has a long history in journalism.

In December, the New York Times ran a front page story on the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998, which continued and refined a quarter-century old program of allowing public lands in Nevada to be sold off to feed urban growth while generating funds to save environmentally sensitive lands. The Act is a lineal descendent of Public Law 96-586, also known as the 1980 Santini/Burton Act, under which money from sales of federal land in Southern Nevada was used for preservation and protection of the Lake Tahoe basin.

The 1998 Act has generated huge amounts of money, far more than had been predicted when the act and its predecessors were enacted. The Times found the money is being used for projects that have only a remote connection to anything environmentally sensitive, such as parking lots and sporting complexes.

Nevada journalism reacted to the Times piece in parochial fashion, as we so often do when we're scooped by outsiders. Columnist Jon Ralston used the debate tactic of "When the facts are against you, change the subject." He came up with this so's-your-mother response to the Times: "Here's a better fairness question for the enviros at the Times: Why should taxpayers in a state without any nuclear plants have to accept waste?" Jon learns a lot from the politicians he covers.

Columnist Erin Neff was on more solid ground when she pointed out a Times paragraph that uses emotionally loaded language to taint perfectly legitimate legislation as a slush fund. The Times paragraph reads, "Because of a stipulation created by the Nevada legislators, the money has not been deposited into the general federal treasury, but rather put in a special treasury account to be spent almost exclusively in Nevada on a something-for-everyone collection of projects." The Times never explains why this is bad, though the tone of the piece casts it in negative tones. Actually, in the sense of the money being returned to Nevada, the law is working the way it's supposed to. Far from being improper, if it were handled otherwise, it would be illegal.

But Neff also portrays Nevada as a high tax state, which it isn't, and never addresses one of the Times article's serious charges, that the federal law is being used to foster sprawl in Las Vegas.

The Columbia Journalism Review, a trade magazine that polices the conduct of journalists, ran a rather good piece on the dispute that said the Times was on solid ground. CJR pointed out that Nevada is a high tax state only when federal taxes are added. In terms of the taxes the state imposes on its own citizens, Nevada is one of the lowest-taxed states, relying heavily on federal grants and largesse instead of paying its bills itself.

The Times article is not without flaws. The biggest is that nowhere in its 3,695 words does it substantiate its claim that the law is supposed to be used for "conservation" purposes. It simply says it but never quotes the law, only quotes an environmentalist to that effect. Given the skepticism of the public toward journalists (the Times has repeatedly claimed the money from the tobacco settlements was supposed to go toward health care, which is not true), this seems a rather large deficiency.

CJR didn't make that mistake. It quoted the law directly. And the quotation is useful, because the law actually goes further than merely requiring the funds to be used on "conservation" (the Times' term). Conservation and environmentalism are not the same thing. Conservation refers to some projects that disturb the land and waste resources. What the law requires is spending not on conservation but "for the acquisition of environmentally sensitive lands in the State of Nevada."

Not addressed by anyone in Nevada is a perfectly legitimate argument made by the Times. The unexpectedly high returns from the land sales ($3 BILLION so far) makes it reasonable for Congress to reassess whether all that money should go to Nevada, and if so whether it is being used as required. Why hasn't it been reassessed? It's a question that journalists should be asking.

Generally, the Times article is one that should have been done first by a Las Vegas newspaper. Failing that, Nevadans owe the Times a debt for raising questions that local journalists did not.