For the last five days
Appalachians, as well as others, knocked on the doors of congressmen and talked
to federal agency representatives and members of the Obama administration in an
annual event that is has become known as the End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington, which is sponsored by two organizations working to end mountaintop mining, Alliance for Appalachia and Appalachian Voices, and has been going on for eight years.
On
Tuesday, the Washington Post and the Seattle Post Intelligencer ran news
stories about activist groups petitioning the EPA to set more reasonable
conductivity standards, which are used to measure pollutants, for Appalachian
waters. Both papers devoted about 75 words to the subject and neither of them
mentioned mountaintop removal or the Week in Washington shindig.
Beside
these brief dispatches, there was no other news coverage of the campaign. There
was nothing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on the event, and no mention of it on
CNN. Along with all the Volvo-driving, wine-sipping, and brie-eating liberals,
I listen a lot to NPR, and I didn’t hear a mention of the Appalachian Week in
Washington. The New York Times had no story either.
There
were, admittedly, some headline grabbing stories this week. Three young women
thought to be missing in Cleveland for the last ten years were found imprisoned
in a suburban house. On Capitol Hill Congress continues to hammer out
immigration reform. There were also manufactured stories, like the GOP trying
to turn the Benghazi tragedy into a scandal that received front page attention in my local paper and plenty of time on television news, particularly Fox News.
But
all that the End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington received was a total
of 150 words, less than half of the length of this entire blog, for the efforts
of people trying to ameliorate the living conditions of Appalachians and keep
some of the ecosystem of the mountains intact.
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