There can be genuine problems with running an environmental campaign year after year. Since you can’t harp on the same tune all the time, there is a morbid tendency among campaigners to innovate. At times, certain innovative measures can even be bizarre, or just downright stupid.
So it was with the largest British water company, Thames Water’s study that was launched during the World Water Week on August 25. The peg of the press release issued by the company was, “A third of UK women leave the shower running while shaving their legs, wasting around 50bn litres of water a year – enough to supply London for 25 days.”
That was as innovative as they could get, and the choice of the target was an exercise in environmental brainlessness.
By doing so, the company not only made women the prime problem area of the water conservation issue, but also made a singularly bad example of a select aspect of women’s activities.
While it might be true that women indeed end up wasting as much water, the twist in the tale added by the company creates an unfortunate bias in the minds of readers. It appears as though women alone are responsible for water wastage by indulging in shower-shaving. Not so, if the same press release in fact is to anything to go by – for almost one in four leaves the tap running when brushing one’s teeth, accounting for around 120bn litres of water wasted per year.
So much for finding news pegs just because you need one.
The story was splashed all across UK, and the Press Trust of India (PTI), which makes a living by picking up such "offbeat/lifestyle"stories from the British media, faithfully reproduced the news item. This, in turn, was carried by a number of Indian news outlets. That’s how biases flow.
If water conservation can be about practicing what you preach, Thames Water would be a sorry hypocrite. The company lost as much as 669.9 million litres of water a day (you read it right, a day) – equal to 32 per cent of the total that it delivered – through leaks in 2009-10 alone, according to British water industry regulator Ofwat.
The press release had its leaks, but these were not plugged by any of the media outlets which carried the story simply because it made for a catchy read.
Press release journalism, if one needs to be told again, clearly has its pitfalls. And if the women who waste water by shaving under the shower are portrayed to be idiots, we surely know that lazy journalists are bigger ones.
