There has been a steady drumbeat about the deterioration of local and regional news throughout the country, largely because the internet, media consolidation, and now COVID has eviscerated news outlets’ primary business model: advertising. So I thought it would be nice to focus on a few success stories in journalism, specifically two online investigative news sites that do deep dives into environmental and health problems and malfeasance or just plain incompetence among state and local officials. One of those venues is a badly needed investigative site that covers West Virginia: Mountain State Spotlight. The other is national in scope and digs deep into problems that are either ignored or under-covered by the mainstream press: ProPublica.
These online sites don’t pretend to be traditional news outlets that cover the kitchen sink, including news, sports, entertainment, food, arts and culture, etc. They focus on topics that are essential to voting citizens in a democracy: state and local politics, the economy, environment and health, including of course the pandemic. And their reports don’t pull punches. For example, a recent story by one of Mountain State Spotlight’s founders, Ken Ward, exposes how black communities in West Virginia and throughout the country became sacrificial zones for industrial air pollution. The article reveals how some of the worst polluting plants in the country are located in black communities, and the lead example is the former Union Carbide plant (now owned by Dow Chemical) in southern West Virginia, located in the predominantly black community of Institute. The plant emits cancer-causing chemicals that pollute not only the air but also the groundwater and have sickened many local residents over the years, according to advocates who live there. As Ward notes, it is just one of many dangerous plants built in minority communities:
Many of the 1,000 hot spots of cancer-causing air identified by ProPublica are located in the South, which is home to more than half of America’s Black population. “None of this is an accident,” said Monica Unseld, a public health expert and environmental justice advocate in Louisville, Kentucky. “It is sustained by policymakers. It still goes back to we Black people are not seen as fully human.”
What’s interesting is that this deeply researched article was funded through Propublica’s Local Reporting Network and can be found on both websites. Another recent Mountain State Spotlight piece notes that West Virginia Governor Jim Justice sat on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid for much of the pandemic, only earmarking some of the CARES money in the past week. Mountain State Spotlight is a welcome and much-needed addition, since most of the state is a news desert. The only other half-way decent news venue in West Virginia is the Charleston Gazette-Mail, which has suffered its share of downsizing in recent years. (Several of its veteran reporters now work for Mountain State Spotlight). And don’t get me started on how bad the local newspaper in Morgantown (where I live), is; it’s called the Dominion Post but residents here call it the Diminishing Post for good reason. It seems to be allergic to doing hard-hitting reporting about slum landlords, bars that sell drinks to underage students, cronyism in local politics, or bad governance at West Virginia University (which owns much of Morgantown). When I taught at WVU, my journalism students did a much better job of reporting such stories than the Dominion Post did.
Like Mountain State but on a much larger scale, ProPublica writes about issues not always covered by the mainstream press. A recent ProPublica exclusive exposed how the state of Arizona spends very little of its welfare funds helping poor people; instead most of the money goes to the state’s child protection agency, which then sometimes takes children away from the same poverty-stricken parents who turned to the state for help in the first place.
Both of these sites were started with grants but they now mostly rely on donations from generous readers. So as 2021 winds down and you consider your end of year giving, please consider donating some money to one or both of these outlets. They are doing crucial work in keeping all of us informed.
This blog is also posted on medium.com
