There has been a great
deal of finger pointing going on ever since Freedom Industries leaked toxic
chemicals into the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia and poisoned the
water for 300,000 West Virginians. Folks have rightly excoriated the coal mining industry and the industry’s political enablers, both Democratic and GOP.
West Virginians themselves have even received some of the blame for the toxic
water. (I’ll have more to say about this in a later post.)
As
so much of what I like to blog about here is the way we think about the
environment and why we think about it the way we do, my interest is first
directed to the press. It just baffles me that the news outlets have treated
this story with such an amazing lack of interest or engagement.
The
Charleston Gazette, the newspaper based in Charleston where the spill occurred,
has of course published a number of stories on the spill, with updates
continuing to come in for the last two weeks. Other papers have not shown as
much interest. The story has been largely absent from the pages of my local
paper, the San Diego UT. And as I noted in a previous blog, the Sunday talking
heads have been silent on the subject of the chemical spill in the Elk River.
The
Los Angeles Times has only printed eight stories on the spill since the news of the 4-mathylcyclohexane methanol leaking into the Elk River first broke16 days ago. In comparison, from March 20th
2012, when the story broke out to the national press, till March 31st
2012, eleven days in all, the Times published 20 articles about the shooting of
Travon Martin by George Zimmerman. The next month the paper published 30
articles about Zimmerman and Martin and published 207 articles in all about the
killing and trial.[i] It’s true
that, as the police initially released Zimmerman, the story pointed up the
problems of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. Why, though, would this story get
so much more attention from the Times?
Newspapers
and broadcast news tell us about new highways being built, local crimes
committed, who won an Oscar, strife in Syria, and the latest sports scores.
These are all things we want to be informed about, and we get to read about
them in the paper or hear about them on the radio news. But by their coverage,
as well as the lack of coverage, the folks who put together the newspapers,
Internet news sources, and television news also give us an indication as to how
important something is. You could sum up this phenomenon by a simple intuitive
graph. More important means more stories.
It seems that, for
whatever reason, the press has decided that a major chemical spill in West
Virginia is important, but only so important.
[i] I used Proquest searches to find this
information. I concentrated on the Los Angeles Times because its database of
stories is readily available in my access to Proquest. I’d be interested if
anybody finds differing search results.
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