Analysis Will Journalists Heed the Lessons of Flint? By JOSEPH A. DAVIS


Flint Journal reporter Ron Fonger takes notes as former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling holds petitions for the city to end its use of the Flint River. Photo: Jake May / The Flint Journal


The lead-laced drinking water debacle in Flint, Mich., became a top national story in December 2015. By January 2016, a Poynter Institute blog headlined: “How the Media Blew Flint.” [http://j.mp/FlintMedia] Did we blow it? Well, yes and no. Almost everybody blew Flint.


Earlier warnings and louder watchdogging might have headed


off the failures and kept neurotoxic lead out of kids’ bloodstreams. To competent water treatment engineers, to conscientious drinking water regulators, to experienced environmental reporters, none of this should have been a surprise.


Flint was a repeat of lessons taught long ago. Yet a lot of local and regional media didn’t blow it. In fact, the


Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press and the micro-budget pub- caster Michigan Radio [j.mp/HowFlintUnfolded] had done much good work on the Flint story. Flint Journal reporter Ron Fonger and Detroit Free Press re- porter Paul Egan definitely didn’t foul up Flint. Within days of the city’s switch from Detroit water to Flint River water, Fonger was asking skeptical questions and reporting the unfolding disaster. Fonger has written more than 250 stories on the water since the switch in April 2014, according to Upvoted [http://j.mp/Fonger]. Fonger gets extra credit for turning over rocks and publishing warnings — stories about discolored water, disturbing symptoms, coliform bacteria, trihalomethanes, government misreporting and nonreporting, and lead levels in both the water and children’s blood. But such coverage took place against a backdrop of steady of-


ficial denials that there was any problem. And the national media were not there yet [http://bit.ly/1KntF0h]. Once the resignations and the finger-pointing began, the na- tional media — often general assignment and political reporters — parachuted in, started covering it and pronounced themselves shocked. New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan acknowl- edged as much in a January 27, 2016, column [http://j.mp/NY- TimesColumn].


So the national media failure involved not just a lack of cu- riosity and concern, but a general readiness to credit deceptive or inaccurate official statements. Or to accept official silence.


Flint’s not first such story, nor the last


But another failure of many in the media is inability to see, remember and learn from the lessons of the past. Something very like the Flint debacle happened a decade ago


in Washington, D.C. [http://j.mp/DCLeadStory]. A big urban drink- ing water system developed pervasive lead problems. There were whistleblowers, a government (Centers for Disease Control) denial and cover-up — and a major-media (Washington Post) investigative exposé [http://j.mp/DCLeadWiki]. The problem was understood, and eventually mostly fixed.


The D.C. debacle was in some ways the same as the one in Flint: changes to the chemistry of the water system caused corro- sion of lead in aging pipes, which causes health-harming concen- trations of lead in water at the tap, which poisons kids.


8 SEJournal Spring 2016


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