So, here’s the deal. Reading through this coverage, one is tempted to substitute environmental or climate change references for all of the securities references. Try it:

“Mary Schapiro, America’s new top cop for the securities industry [substitute Lisa Jackson, America’s new top cop for protecting the environment. Get it?] said the current mass culling of journalists’ jobs is a concern because it could reduce the number of leads that regulators as they seek to crack down on nefarious behavior.

“It’s an absolute worry for me because I think financial [environmental] journalists have in many cases been the sources of some really important enforcement cases and really important discovery of practices and products that regulators should be profoundly concerned about,” the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission [EPA Administrator]” said in Washington on Tuesday.

“But for journalists having been dogged and determined and really pursuing some of those things, they might not be known to the regulators or they might not be known for a long time,” she said.

“… Investigative journalism actually would be a pretty interesting skill set for us to have. We’ve talked about financial [environmental] analysis, we’ve talked about forensic accounting [climate science communications] being skill sets that we really need – understanding of complex trading, strategies, and systems …. ”

Change a few words, and it could just as well have been a top environmental manager. It wasn’t in this case, but it could have been. And likely will be not too far down the road ….”