Nancy West is the founder of InDepthNH.org, New Hampshire’s only nonprofit statewide investigative news outlet.
By Nancy West
Finally, there’s a whole lot of outrage as we learn more every day about how the government poisoned Flint, Mich.’s public drinking water to save a few bucks, then tried to cover up the whole mess.
The tragedy for the families of Flint, many of whom are poor and black, goes to the very heart of why we started InDepthNH.org in New Hampshire.
The government of Flint wasn’t held accountable soon enough to protect families from drinking poisoned water that caused increased levels of lead in their children along with any number of future health risks.
It’s not that there was no reporting. There was, some of it notable. But it wasn’t enough soon enough to protect citizens from their own government.
Some reporting was likely thwarted by Michigan’s public records law that protects government over citizens.
The governor’s emails are exempt from public records disclosure in Michigan. They have only recently been subpoenaed as part of a class-action lawsuit.
It has also recently come to light that the attorney general backed charging exorbitant fees to discourage public records requests.
A crisis similar to Flint’s involving any sort of government wrongdoing could easily happen here, and we just may not find out about it.
And the root causes in New Hampshire would be the same as Flint’s elephant, just in a different living room.
The right-to-know law in New Hampshire also shields the government at the expense of its citizens. The governor’s office here also claims it is exempt from the right-to-know law.
Challenging the government for denying a right-to-know request in New Hampshire costs a pretty penny in Superior Court, too expensive for many to pursue. And the attorney general’s office often shows a heavy hand when it comes to redacting documents that it does deem to release.
And there are simply too few working reporters to do indepth news reporting.
By my best estimate, there are fewer than half the reporters working in New Hampshire today as there were in 2000.
Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst, has estimated that by this year or next, the number of newsroom jobs nationally could easily be half as many as there were in 2000 if the downward trend continues.
At the same time, the government in New Hampshire has insulated itself more and more behind so-called public information officers who make sure their bosses look good at all costs.
Flint’s troubles started in April 2014 when officials switched the public water supply to save money. The complaints started soon after, but it’s only in recent weeks that a state of emergency has been declared.
Where was the outrage in the interim? How come we didn’t know sooner?
Over the last week, the New York Times and NPR’s Here and Now, among others, have examined how the crisis has been reported.
Some conclusions are inescapable. There were not enough reporters doing time-consuming, expensive investigative reporting. One fine exception was the investigative reporting done by a former reporter who was working for an arm of the ACLU.
Michigan Radio and newspapers in Flint and Detroit also provided coverage, but it just wasn’t enough soon enough.
Some complain, too, that editors assign their limited number of reporters to frivolous stories to woo richer, younger readers to sell to advertisers at the expense of reporting stories like Flint.
Margaret Sullivan, the public editor at the New York Times, shined an appropriately harsh light on her own organization in a recent editorial, but I don’t think she placed enough weight on the drastic loss of reporters across the country.
In 2000, there were 56,400 full-time newsroom jobs in the U.S. Last July, Ken Doctor reported that newsroom jobs had dropped 10.4 percent from the previous year alone, down to 32,900 full-time journalists in 2014 at about 1,400 dailies.
“As life shattering as job loss may be journalists, they aren’t our prime concern here,” Doctor wrote in a NiemanLab article last July. “It’s the news poverty we — readers — are experiencing. If we project the recent decline forward, we’ll have one-half the number of daily journalists working in 2016 or 2017 as we did 16 years ago.
“Will hitting the halving point finally send a signal of NEWS EMERGENCY?” Doctor asked.
Sullivan pointed out the paucity of The Times coverage of the Flint crisis while pretty much dismissing an explanation from Matt Purdy, a Times deputy executive editor, that it couldn’t have been helped.
“If we had poured more of the valuable time of reporters into Flint, we would not have gotten other stories,” Purdy told Sullivan.
Purdy also sounded an alarm about the decrease in the number of reporters on the job today that we all need to hear.
“Perhaps most disturbing is that there are likely hundreds of troubling events unfolding around the country at any time that are getting very little if any attention from the media,” Purdy told her.
Sullivan wasn’t buying it.
“Imagine if The Times really had taken on the Flint outrage with energy and persistence many months ago,” Sullivan asked.
“With its powerful pulpit and reach, the Times could have held public officials accountable and prevented human suffering. That’s what journalistic watchdogs are supposed to do.”
Sullivan, too, cautioned about the future that rings true in New Hampshire. “As traditional local investigative reporting withers, The Times’s role becomes more important.”
There was plenty of Times resources, Sullivan wrote, to cover every sneeze of Hillary Clinton and every single bombastic remark by Trump.
“There seem to be plenty of Times resources for such hit-seeking missives as ‘breadfacing’ or for the Magazines thorough exploration of buffalo plaid and ‘lumbersexuals’,” Sullivan wrote.
“And staff was available to produce this week’s dare-you-not-to-click video on the rising social movement known as Free the Nipple.”
All that may be true, but Sullivan didn’t mention whether there are fewer Times reporters based in the Midwest now than in the past.
Even if the number is the same or even more, staff limitations at other publications could have helped limit investigative reporting allowing the government to keep its horrible secrets longer.
InDepthNH.org’s journalists work mostly for free for now because we believe in our mission to hold government accountable while giving voice to people, issues and geographic locations that are overlooked in mainstream media.
We plan to hire four more reporters over the next five years, and even that won’t be enough to truly fill the gap left by newsroom cuts around the state.
While this may sound self-serving, and probably is, we can’t work for free forever so we frequently ask for your tax-deductible donations and we are soon launching a corporate underwriting program.
News costs money, for sure. But without a vibrant press, I am certain that our democracy is imperiled.
I don’t care how you do it, but please support news. Donate to InDepthNH.org or buy a subscription to your local and statewide newspapers. Or better still, do all three. Invest in your right to know.
I hope down the road we aren’t wringing our hands over the people harmed by some scandal in New Hampshire that was overlooked years before – all for the lack of reporters.
You can Sound Off, too, by emailing your concerns about government accountability or a tip about wrongdoing to nancywestnews@gmail.com