When I was a young reporter, just two years out of college, working for a small weekly newspaper, a portion of the community I covered was shaken by the news that their drinking water could be poisonous.
The G&H Landfill, located about 15 miles north of Detroit, was declared an EPA Superfund site, contaminated with a long list of toxics that were seeping deep into the soil and possibly into the underground aquifer that fed the drinking water wells in several neighborhoods.
This was a sprawling site that served as a dumping ground for industrial chemicals in the 1950s and 1960s. Years later it was a dormant burial ground, surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire. The old skull and crossbones marked the warning signs that rimmed the property.
I contacted a fledgling environmental activist who lived across the street from the newly declared Superfund dump and who had studied the history of G&H. He offered to provide a tour. He supplied myself and my paper’s multi-talented photographer, Karen Hamilton, each a pair of thigh-high rubber boots. We snuck through a hole in the fence and plunged into one of the most polluted pieces of property in the nation.
That day, I sloshed through the muck and debris and, for the first time in my life, I saw pools of red water, bubbling puddles of purplish water, orange water. No one who saw what I experienced that day, Republican or Democrat, could disagree that this was no way to treat God’s green earth.
The result was a front page story in that week’s edition of The Romeo Observer and two full pages of additional coverage inside Section A.
Flash forward 33 years and we have reporters converging on Flint for tonight’s Democratic debate who apparently feel uncomfortable stepping foot into a city with a recent history of contaminated drinking water, though clean bottled water is widely available.
Politico reports that some of the typical Inside-The-Beltway political pundits made arrangements to stay in hotels outside of the city. The reporters’ “filing center” at the University of Michigan-Flint hired vendors to ship in food and drink from the outside. Many have struggled with how to break free of their standard horserace coverage of the presidential race to face the people living in crisis in a devastated city. To his credit, D.C. Examiner reporter Kyle Feldscher, who is from Michigan and worked in the state as a reporter for several years, told Politico that, “Being here makes the political reporting on all the horse trading and bureaucracy feel almost absurd.”
Feldscher said the Clinton vs. Sanders debate should help highlight the importance of local journalists such as Ron Fonger of The Flint Journal, who has been covering the city’s water woes nonstop for more than three years, “doing the kind of work that we should all aspire to do some day.”
That’s what local reporters do. They dig deep, they get down in the muck to report on what the people of their community are experiencing. And they put elected officials on the spot, questioning how they are going to make their constituents’ lives a little bit better.
But the elite political reporters who parachute into American cities and towns to cover candidates’ stump speeches apparently remain uncomfortable sticking around to talk with folks at the grassroots. Hadas Gold of Politico found that reporters on the campaign trail declined to respond, on the record, to her questions about their aversion to “piercing the media bubble” and deal with distressed parents who wonder if their children are lead-poisoning victims.
Here’s how Gold ponders this situation:
It’s rare that such a large group of political journalists, who might not otherwise be sent out to cover stories such as the water crisis in Flint, come face-to-face with a major humanitarian issue.
Having the next Democratic primary debate at the University of Michigan-Flint is definitely putting a larger spotlight on the water issue. For some reporters, traveling to Flint has helped put the real impacts of this race, which has so often been overshadowed by rhetoric and the horse race, into perspective.
Journalists, most of whom declined to speak on the record, described calling hotels ahead of time to see if their water is from the Flint supply. Others said they were warned by friends and colleagues about the water and for brief moments, questioned the safety of the food they picked up in the city. Others chose to avoid the situation entirely and stay outside of the city.
When you watch from afar, when you stay with the pack, when you don’t stick your nose inside the fence, you are not truly reporting on what’s happening in America in an important election year.
If you stay in the “spin room,” acting as a stenographer, you’ll keep your shoes clean. But you should probably feel a little dirty.
Chad Selweski is a freelance writer and blogger with a centrist point of view from suburban Detroit, Macomb County (population 870,000), home of the “Reagan Democrats.” Selweski worked as the political reporter for The Macomb Daily for 30 years. This is cross posted from his blog Politically Speaking.