Last winter, 3,000 vacationing Americans were deprived of drinking water and functioning bathrooms when an unexpected fire aboard a Carnival cruise ship in the Caribbean left it with almost no power. The deprivation and unsanitary conditions dragged on for almost a week and forcing a handful of people to be emergency airlifted off the ship for medical reasons. This was a legitimate news story, no doubt, but thanks to cable news’s sudden infatuation with it, it blew up into a full-blown media phenomenon—the “poop cruise.” As the ship limped back to port, no major newspaper or TV news network could resist the pull of covering it, none more so than CNN, which churned out an unbelievable 758 broadcast minutes—more than twelve full hours—to “poop cruise” coverage on the voyage’s final day.
Last Thursday, 100 times as many Americans lost access to clean, safe water for drinking, cooking, and bathing in West Virginia when a 7,500-gallon spill of a hazardous chemical using for coal processing contaminated the Elk River and the region’s water supply. Lacking water, the state capital effectively shut down, leaving Charleston’s streets ominously empty, like in some dystopian future. As the ordeal stretched into a new workweek, still no date had been given for when residents might be able to trust what comes out of their faucets again. This too is a news story, a big one, in fact. But with a few exceptions (among them, Al Jazeera America), it has been shrugged off by the major newspapers and mostly ignored by the broadcast and cable news TV networks. CNN, contra their “poop cruise” saturation coverage, has devoted around thirty minutes—a mere half-hour—to the water crisis over the past several days.
So, what’s behind this disproportionate journalistic response? Why the disconnect about focusing on what really matters? I’d submit that a lot of the mainstream media’s latent biases are lurking in this story, forming an almost perfect storm of national press apathy to West Virginia’s plight. And it’s instructive to unpack how they work.
To be fair, one has to look at the lack of coverage of the spill and subsequent water crisis in the context of the news events surrounding it. It’s pretty easy to identify the major stories grabbing the attention of the pundits and filling up most of the news hole the past few days—Chris Christie’s bridge-closure scandal and, yes, the Golden Globes. That these stories are rooted in Los Angeles and the New York metro area may seem like a coincidence, but it’s not. A vast majority of the national press lives in New York, LA, and Washington, DC. These journalists know what they see and hear, and this effect has been magnified of late, as almost every major news organization has uprooted most, if not all, of its local bureaus across the country. As a result, unquestionable confirmation and proximity biases, which have unmistakable class undertones, drive mainstream media editorial decision-making.
For instance, it’s no accident that Wall Street Journal reporters started poking around the Christie Bridgegate scandal not long after a few Journal editors got stuck in the Fort Lee traffic on their way into work. One wonders what kind of wall-to-wall coverage that same size chemical spill might have enjoyed if it had shut down the water in a tony neighborhood like Georgetown or the Upper East Side. Similarly, if you were looking to NBC News for an update Sunday night on the hundreds of thousands of poor and middle-class people suffering in West Virginia, you were out of luck. That’s because NBC chose to forego that evening’s national newscast to instead spend the 6:00 hour covering rich celebrities arriving at the Golden Globes. (In an ironic twist, a minor pipe leak occurred on the red carpet, which likely received more cumulative media attention than the spill in West Virginia.)
Now, one could argue the spill’s impact on West Virginia had been well mitigated by Sunday night. And that’s true. (Although that doesn’t mean the ongoing water embargo wasn’t newsworthy). By all accounts, the FEMA response has been swift and substantial, helping to avoid an even larger public health emergency and possible loss of life. But it also reveals the media’s reductive, reactive nature, which is marked by being more caught up in the immediate response to man-made or natural disasters than their systemic causes.
There was a similar obtuseness in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, where the coverage all too often focused simply on "rebuilding" rather than asking tougher questions about the long-term impact of climate change on coastal communities. And sometimes the press doesn’t even stick around long enough to miss the point. For example, last spring, the deadly fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, pried big-time media folks like Anderson Cooper out of their studios for a day or two. But the Boston bombing story proved too good to give up, and before anyone had figured out what ignited the blast, the national press had lost interest and moved on.
Similarly, a competent government response to disaster can actually cause the press to overlook or badly misread the potential dangers averted. How else to explain these outrageously tone-deaf sentences, stuck in the middle of an otherwise well-reported Washington Post story on West Virginia from Sunday?
Even if this does not turn out to be a public health disaster, the water crisis has provided a reminder of why the Kanawha River Valley is sometimes called Chemical Valley.
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