Semester 2, Post 1

For my first blog post of the semester I went to High Country News for an article. After a little bit of scrolling I found an article that interests me as a recreationist. It was about Ryan Zinke being nominated for Secretary of the Interior and his conflicting environmental policies.

The author composed this article as a series of opinions about how Zinke performs his job and what people think about him. They interviewed people who had worked with him early on in his career and more recently. There was a specific focus on Zinke's claim that he is a "Teddy Roosevelt" Republican, a conservative with conservation ideas. The article thouroughly dissected this claim, examining actions that supported and opposed Zinke's idea of being a "Teddy Roosevelt" Republican.

I think that the "newsworthiness" of this article is very high, as Zinke has been nominated to head the Department of the Interior, which oversees all of America's federal lands and how they are managed. Zinke's nomination also has the potential to make or break the recent efforts to transfer Western federal lands into State control, an issue that Zinke quit a committee over, because he does not support the idea.

There was a pretty clear bias in this article, but that should be expected, as High Country News is an organization devoted to news regarding "the West" however, I think that this particular news organization does a great job of examining both sides of an issue and conducting the appropriate interviews for each.