Two Essential Journalisitic Takes On The Flint Water Crisis [Video]

The tragedy of the Flint water contamination is that no one heard the cries of the people of that city as they tried to tell us their water was bad.

While blame is hard to pinpoint, one thing is clear: officials who weren't elected, and thus had no stake in the community, were making some very bad decisions.

Two very well done pieces of media have come out today that not only explain the Flint water crisis well, but seek to rectify it.

The first, a Vox.com story written by Flint resident Connor Coyne, explains the huge elephant in the room that the national media continues to ignore: that non-elected officials were calling the shots, thus eliminating any democratic recourse the citizens may have had.

Writes Coyne:

...by empowering an unelected official with virtually unchecked local power, the state did not just obtain the right to set local policy, but also stripped residents of much influence over their elected representatives. Indeed, campaign aides working for locally elected officials told me that they had been pressured by the state to enforce the priorities of the managers or face an indefinite continuation of the state takeover.

 

That's, in a nutshell, why Flintstones (residents) have been drinking contaminated water. Often we didn't know that it was contaminated because we were assured of its safety by organizations we trusted, and when we did complain we were informed that the decision was out of our hands at any rate.

The second piece that struck a chord with me is FOX2 Detroit reporter Charlie LeDuff's interview with Governor Rick Snyder. The usually bombastic LeDuff seems to realize half way through this interview that Snyder is real with his very emotional response to his failures to provide Flint with safe water.

When the interview is over, LeDuff himself shoulders some of the blame for the problem, saying in frustration, 'I just can't get over the fact that when this was going down, nobody seemed to care, not the bureaucracy, not the governor's office, not the legislature, not the media, not anybody...'