Updated, 4 p.m.
Almost a year ago, last March, The Times published a frightening article about the drinking water in Flint, Mich.
Here’s an excerpt:
When fecal coliform bacteria showed up in parts of the city last summer, residents were told to boil their water before using it. Officials addressed the issue by pumping extra chlorine into the system, but in solving one problem, they created another.
The high chlorine levels led to elevated levels of total trihalomethanes or T.T.H.M., which required another public notice in January. Residents will again receive a notice of elevated T.T.H.M. levels in the mail later this month, Mayor Dayne Walling has said. Long-term consumption of water with high T.T.H.M. levels can lead to liver or kidney troubles and an increased risk of cancer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The article appeared on Page A16 in print. Then, more than six months went by. In October, The Times ran one brief and two articles about Flint.
Then, nothing of substance until this month, when a state of emergency was declared in Flint.
Since then, the nation has been up in arms about what happened in Flint, and more to the point, what didn’t happen. The Times published a highly critical editorial last week (“Outrage is the only sensible response to this man-made disaster,” it said). And some presidential candidates have hammered away at it.
Issues of race and class are on everyone’s minds. Would this have happened in a rich, white community? Many, quite reasonably, doubt it.
And some Times readers are wondering why the news media, The Times included, didn’t do more, earlier, when it might have made a real difference.
Donald Brandshaft wrote to me about it:
The media coverage of the Flint water problems strikes as somewhat hypocritical. One of the reasons that this could not happen in a white community is that every newspaper in the country would have reported it by May. The people of Flint were severely hurt by their governor and let down by the E.P.A., but they were also let down by the news media. I didn’t notice any media self-examination resulting from this lapse.
I asked a deputy executive editor, Matt Purdy, about The Times’s coverage. He reviewed it on Tuesday and spoke to the national editor, Alison Mitchell.
After doing so, Mr. Purdy told me that he was proud that The Times had written the March article, and had returned to the subject in October. He praised the quality of recent reporting work that landed two related Flint articles on the front page.
If The Times had dug in and devoted investigative resources to the situation, Mr. Purdy said, the results certainly could have had impact and been important. But the same few Chicago-based reporters have been covering a wide range of stories in the middle of the country — the Tamir Rice case in Cleveland, problems in the Detroit schools, the aftermath of racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and Rahm Emanuel’s re-election in Chicago, among others. Mr. Purdy wrote to me:
“The Midwest is one of the busiest regions of the country in terms of news, from Ferguson to police shootings to political unrest in Chicago. If we had poured more of the valuable time of reporters into Flint, we would not have gotten other stories.”
He added: “The resources of regional and national outlets are stretched increasingly thin. We are fortunate to have a robust and talented national staff, but we certainly can’t get to every important story and we can’t go deep on every one we get to. 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.”
As Columbia Journalism Review wrote, some of the most important watchdog work in Flint was done by a dogged investigative reporter, Curt Guyette, who no longer works for a news organization at all but for an arm of the American Civil Liberties Union. C.J.R. also cited the Detroit and Flint newspapers for their work. (After this post was published, a number of readers pointed out that Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has been a strong and persistent voice on the Flint story for weeks.)
My take: The Times got off to a strong start with its initial Flint story in March. It was good to return to the subject in October; and this month’s coverage has been thorough. But there could have been, and should have been, much more. If — for example — the March article had been followed up with some serious digging, and if the resulting stories had been given prominent display, public officials might have been shamed into taking action long before they did.
I understand the argument that The Times — which covers the whole nation and the globe — can’t be responsible for investigating every local problem. With only a few Midwestern reporters, pulled in many directions, editors must make tough decisions about how to spend their time and energy.
The counterargument is this: Imagine if The Times really had taken on the Flint outrage with energy and persistence many months ago. 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. As traditional local investigative reporting withers, The Times’s role becomes ever more important.
Yes, that takes journalistic resources. Investigative reporting is notoriously time-consuming and expensive. The Times, to its credit, does a great deal of it.
But were such resources really unavailable in this case?
After all, enough Times firepower somehow has been found to document Hillary Clinton’s every sneeze, Donald Trump’s latest bombast, and Marco Rubio’s shiny boots. There seem to be plenty of Times resources for such hit-seeking missives as “breadfacing,” or for the Magazine’s thorough exploration of buffalo plaid and “lumbersexuals.” 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.”
Isn’t it a matter of choosing how to deploy the 1,300 members of the newsroom staff? Call it a question of priorities. Given all that’s happened, especially on issues involving race, maybe it’s time to beef up that talented Midwest staff.
If The Times had kept the pressure on the Flint story, the resulting journalism might not have made the “trending” list — but it would have made a real difference to the people of Flint, who were in serious need of a powerful ally.