Standing Rock & Flint Prove Elite Media Ignores Environmental Crisis When it Disproportionately Affects People of Color

EcoWatch

In 2016, major environmental crises that disproportionately affect people of color—such as the Flint water crisis and the fight over the location of the Dakota Access Pipeline—were under-covered by the national media for long periods, despite being reported by local and state media early on. The national media's failure to spotlight these environmental issues as they arise effectively shuts the people in danger out of the national conversation, resulting in delayed political action and worsening conditions.

In early 2016, Michigan Republican Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency in the majority black city of Flint over the dangerous levels of lead in the drinking water—more than a year after concerns about the water were initially raised. While some local and state media aggressively covered the story from the beginning, national media outlets were almost universally late to the story and even when their coverage picked up, it was often relegated to a subplot of the presidential campaign.

One notable exception was MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who provided far more Flint coverage prior to Snyder's state of emergency declaration than every other network combined. Flint resident Connor Coyne explained that when national media did cover the story, they failed to provide the full context of the tragedy by ignoring the many elements that triggered it. In particular, national outlets did not highlight the role of state-appointed "emergency managers" who made arbitrary decisions based on budgetary concerns, including the catastrophic decision to draw Flint's water from the Flint River instead of Lake Huron (via the Detroit water system).

This crisis, despite media's waning attention, continues to affect Flint residents every day, meaning serious hardships for a population that's more than 50 percent black, with 40.1 percent living under the poverty line. Additionally, according to media reports, approximately 1,000 undocumented immigrants continued to drink poisoned water for considerably longer time than the rest of the population due in part to a lack of information about the crisis available in their language. Even after news broke, a lack of proper identification barred them from getting adequate filtration systems or bottled water.

At Standing Rock, North Dakota, like in Flint, an ongoing environmental crisis failed to get media attention until it began to escalate beyond the people of color it disproportionately affected. Since June, Native water protectors and their allies have protested against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, an oil pipeline which would threaten to contaminate the Missouri River, the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation's primary water source. Several tribes came together to demand that the pipeline be rejected, as it had been when the (mostly white) residents of Bismarck, North Dakota, raised similar concerns.

The tribes' calls for another route option for the pipeline went "criminally undercovered" by the national press until September, when security forces and protesters started clashing violently. CNN's Brian Stelter wondered whether election coverage had crowded out stories about Standing Rock, saying, "It received sort of on-and-off attention from the national media," and, oftentimes, coverage "seemed to fall off the national news media's radar." Coverage of this story was mostly driven by the social media accounts of activists on the ground, online outlets and public media, while cable news networks combined spent less than an hour in the week between Oct. 26, 2016 and Nov. 3, 2016 covering the escalating violence of law enforcement against the demonstrators. Amy Goodman, a veteran journalist who consistently covered the events at Standing Rock, even at the risk of going to prison, told Al Jazeera that the lack of coverage of the issues at Standing Rock went "in lockstep with a lack of coverage of climate change. Add to it a group of people who are marginalized by the corporate media, native Americans and you have a combination that vanishes them." [MORE]