The Scariest Water News You Might Have Missed
What Happens When Your Tap Water is Poisoned and Nobody Tells You.
Every year, we have a tradition of writing about something eerie or frightening for Halloween. A-woooooo!
See some of our past posts, if you dare….
This year, we’re talking about “news deserts,” and how they may impact your ability to learn about local water or environmental contamination.
Some of our most-read stories are ones that feature local communities dealing with boil water notices, strange-colored water, or simply no water coming out of their taps at all.
It’s become increasingly common to deal with these types of water problems. One of the goals of this newsletter is to help community members connect and get the resources and tools they need to fight for safe, clean drinking water.
So, let’s talk about the media and how it can impact your knowledge of local drinking water.
Journalism is essential to democracy.
Whether you’re a news junkie or a media avoider, local news stories play a big part in how, we the people, stay informed and learn about how to participate in our civic life.
One of the biggest democracy killers right now is that many people don’t have a clue about what’s going on in their own backyard. You can’t show up, you can’t speak up, you can’t fight for clean water, if you don’t know what your own city council is doing or what corporations might be dumping your water supply.
Local news isn’t some nice-to-have, it’s the only way regular people stand a chance.
We are in the midst of a local news crisis, according to a new report on the state of local news released this month. The number of local news deserts in the U.S. jumped to record levels this year.
news desert: a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.
~UNC School of Media & Journalism Center for Innovation & Sustainability
About 50 million Americans (or 1 in 7 people) have limited-to-no access to local news. Twenty years ago, there were about 150 counties considered news desert. Today, that number has climbed to 213 counties that have zero locally-based news sources. Additionally, 1,524 counties have only one local news source remaining, usually a weekly newspaper.
This rise coincides with an increase in newspaper closures, occurring at a rate of more than two per week. Most of the closures came at smaller, independently owned newspapers, signaling an increase in long-time family publishers surrendering to economic pressures, according to the report.
“This report highlights the historic transformation in local news,” said Tim Franklin, professor at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University “The questions are what will the local news ecosystem look like in a few years, and will parts of the U.S. be left behind?”
The report also noted that digital-only local news sources are growing, providing pathways for new journalism, but those sites don’t come close to replacing the number of newspapers we have lost.
Plus, digital news providers tend to be concentrated in metro areas, leaving vast swaths of the country with little to no access to local news.
Local News & the Environment
What troubles me is how local environmental journalism can help expose huge issues like government failure, corporate misdeeds, or public health concerns, which all work to drive policy change.
For example, we know at the national level that millions of communities have been exposed to contaminated water.
In August, the U.S. EPA released its ninth round of public water system testing data for PFAS chemicals, also known as “forever chemicals.” The agency’s Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, or UCMR 5, requires water systems to do the testing.
The UCMR 5 data revealed 3,309 sites with detectable levels of PFAS, based on test results from about 75 percent of the community water systems that will be tested under the rule. This brings the total known number of PFAS-contaminated sites to 9,552.
The new data, along with reporting from states and other sources, confirm 172 million people in communities throughout the U.S. have drinking water that has tested positive for PFAS.
That’s a ton of communities that could do more in-depth reporting to help track down the source of that PFAS or help communities understand the impact these toxic chemicals might have on drinking water.
I fear that most communities will not find out about PFAS until more strict enforcement actions take hold in the coming years.
Dan Kennedy, co-author of What Works In Community News, regularly talks about the importance of local news in reporting on environmental contamination.
In the 1980s, he was one of several reporters at The Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn, Massachusetts, who covered drinking water pollution and its possible link to childhood leukemia in that community. Without that pioneering work, the story may have faded away. That story was also made famous by the book and movie A Civil Action, which led to environmental studies that helped us understand the impact of exposure to both TCE and PCE.
Another famous example comes from Flint, Michigan. Local Michigan outlets including The Flint Journal, Michigan Radio, and local TV affiliates aggressively covered the water contamination story from the beginning, according to analysis from Media Matters for America, while national media was slow to realize the impact and didn’t focus closely on the story until Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency in January 2016.
How A Veteran Learned About Contamination
Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Ensminger is the picture of a patriot. He grew up on a small, rural farm outside of Hershey, Pennsylvania, and joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1970, as soon as he finished high school.
Jerry spent more than 24 years serving his country, retiring in 1994 as a master sergeant. On the drill field, he trained more than 2,000 new recruits. He still believes in the Marine Corps motto “Semper fidelis,” a Latin phrase meaning “always faithful.”
If his name sounds familiar, it’s because his name and face have become synonymous with the fight for justice for the families of Camp Lejeune.
Jerry had 4 children, all born during his military career, but his daughter Janey was the only child who was conceived, carried, and born while his family lived at the U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. Located in Jacksonville, North Carolina, it is the largest marine base on the East Coast, supporting a population of more than 100,000 marines, their families, and civilian employees.
Jerry’s life was forever altered when Janey was diagnosed with lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, a type of childhood cancer. Each year in the U.S. about 3,000 children are diagnosed with ALL.
Janey died on September 24, 1985, at the age of nine. Like any parent, Jerry was grief- stricken, but he couldn’t shake the nagging question “Why?” He researched both sides of his and Janey’s mother’s family for a history of childhood leukemia and not one case existed.
He didn’t understand how this unspeakable tragedy had hit his family. The American Cancer Society states on its website that most childhood leukemias are not linked to any known genetic causes.
He found an answer in 1997, more than 10 years after he lost his daughter. Jerry, who was now retired and living in North Carolina, was making himself dinner while watching the local news when the television reporter said, “The contaminants found in the water at Camp Lejeune have been linked in scientific literature to birth defects and childhood cancers.”
Jerry dropped his plate of food and said it felt like someone had just hit him on the head with a two-by-four.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a federal public health agency, completed a public health assessment (PHA) of drinking water at the base and concluded that the people living and working at the base were exposed to “contaminants of concern” in their drinking water from 1953 through 1987.
The chemicals included trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), dichloroethylene (DCE), vinyl chloride, and benzene.
His local news had covered the story, and it helped jumpstart a journey for justice, not just for his family but the hundreds of thousands of other families impacted. Imagine if he had missed that important information.
Federal funding cuts to public broadcasting could make this problem worse.
The media report also included an analysis of a timely issue: the impact of the federal defunding of public broadcasting on local news deserts.
Nearly 300 public radio stations and more than 100 public television stations are producing local reporting. In nine counties, public radio is the sole news source, making those areas especially vulnerable to becoming news deserts in coming months.
Congress’ decision to cut funding for public broadcasting has put 245 public broadcasting grantees in rural communities at risk of going off the air, The New York Times reported.
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and laid the foundation for dispersing taxpayer funds to support public broadcasters nationwide.
Every state has at least one public broadcaster, but the dynamics of how these are distributed differ from the distribution of other outlets in the news ecosystem. Alaska, for instance, with its low population density and vast expanses of rugged terrain, has the most public broadcasting stations of any state. It is closely followed by California, with Colorado, New York and Texas rounding out the top five.
Already, federal funding cuts have taken their toll, with layoffs announced by several outlets, including PBS North Carolina and KUNC in Colorado. While no station has closed this year as a result of the recissions, several stations face that possibility; NPR CEO Katherine Maher estimates that as many as 70 to 80 could disappear. At least one station, New Jersey PBS, has announced it will shut down next summer.
What does this lack of information in our media landscape mean for the future?
Declining voter turnout?
Increased spread of misinformation?
Less accountability for those in office?
More corporate pollution and less enforcement?
And to top it all off, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin warned that the agency will have to furlough up to 89 percent of its more than 12,000-person workforce if the government shutdown lasts beyond this week.
Zeldin told reporters at the EPA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, on Tuesday that 4,000 employees have already been furloughed, which have stalled some significant projects, including the Brownfields Program to clean up land contaminated by pollutants or other hazardous substances.
It’s a scary future indeed.
Want to vent about a local news outlet that closed near you? Keep the conversation going in the comments below.