“Flint Can’t Get in the Hearing”: The Language of Urban Pathology in Coverage of an American Public Health Crisis

Abstract

This study examines the presence and influence of urban pathology language in coverage of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. The use of urban pathology language to describe low-income urban neighborhoods may lead news consumers to “understand those communities entirely in terms of their problems.” This study of coverage in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal describes urban pathology frames that suggest a lack of agency among residents. The use of those frames, the study argues, may distract from broader questions of environmental justice.

Keywords

framing urban pathology environmental justice Flint journalism

On March 25, 2015, the readers of The New York Times were introduced to Melissa Mays, a marketing professional in Flint, Michigan—one of the thousands of residents in that city plagued by contaminated drinking water. The story opens:

Depending on the day, Melissa Mays says, the water flowing out of her home’s faucets might have a blue tint. Or it might smell like mothballs. Or it might fill her home with the scent of an overchlorinated swimming pool. (M. Smith, 2015)

Flint officials insisted the water was safe, but over the next year and a half, Flint residents, and the country, would learn differently. Flint was in the news almost daily at points in 2015 and 2016 when it was learned that lead from corroded pipes had seeped into the city’s water supply, putting residents at risk. Using studies of urban pathology in news coverage of American cities (Dreier, 2005; Ettema & Peer, 1996) as a foundation, this qualitative textual analysis describes the ways two newspapers framed the Flint water crisis. While the newspapers emphasized different aspects of the water crisis, both used the language of urban pathology in ways that portrayed Flint and its residents as unable to contribute meaningful solutions to the city’s problems. By showing the city’s residents as angry but powerless, we argue, the two newspapers contribute to a “moral evaluation” of Flint and its people (Entman, 1993) that allows readers to distance themselves from Flint’s problems and the structural issues that underlie them (Eller, 2008).

Background

While it gained national media attention in late 2015, the water crisis in Flint had been brewing for decades. Flint’s water crisis was preceded by years of industrial pollution that made water in the Flint River unfit to drink (M. C. Smith, 2017). As General Motors (GM) began divesting itself in the region in the 1970s and 1980s, depopulation and unemployment increased (Highsmith, 2015) as the city’s more affluent residents relocated (Pulido, 2016). Flint’s African American population was hit especially hard by the city’s economic decline. Flint, and GM in particular, were a destinations in the early twentieth century for African Americans leaving the south in search of industrial employment (Scott, 2018). But in the wake of GM’s departure, African American residents were disproportionately affected by urban renewal projects that restricted their physical access to employment opportunities in downtown Flint (M. C. Smith, 2017). While the decline of the automotive industry in Flint and the community problems that accompanied it were critically documented in works such as Michael Moore’s 1989 film Roger and Me, major news organizations framed GM plant reductions in 1991 as logical business moves, not decisions made in the best interests of a corporation rather than workers or the community (Martin & Oshagan, 1997).

In the early 2010s, facing plant closings and population loss, “Flint found itself in a decades-long spiral that made it a prime target for emergency management . . . ” (Fasenfest, 2017, p. 7). The city’s budget deficit was $25.7 million in 2011, when the state governor appointed an emergency manager to handle city finances (Detroit Free Press, n.d.). Prior to the water contamination, Flint purchased water from nearby Detroit, which pulled water from Lake Huron. In March 2013, Flint leaders decided to instead purchase water at a lower price from the Karegnondi Water Authority starting in 2016. Flint needed an alternative water source until the switch could take effect (Detroit Free Press, 2016). In April 2014, the city began drawing water from the Flint River. Throughout the summer of 2014, residents complained of the water’s strange look, taste, and odor. Despite those claims, the city insisted that the water was safe (Lin, Rutter, & Park, 2016).

In the fall of 2014, the city issued two boil-water advisories—one in August and one in September—due to the presence of Escherichia coli and coliform bacteria found it the water. Toxins were found in the water in the following months, and lead was ultimately first detected in January 2015. On September 23, 2015, the city issued a lead advisory to residents; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the situation a public health emergency a few weeks later, and the city reverted back to Detroit’s water system (Detroit Free Press, 2016; Lin et al., 2016). On January 16, 2016, President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in Flint and appropriated $5 million in aid, signaling the first federal intervention (Egan & Spangler, 2016). The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform began holding hearings on the crisis that February, and criminal charges were filed against three Flint city employees on April 20 (Detroit Free Press, 2016; McLaughlin & Shoichet, 2016). In March 2017, city officials said it would be years before Flint residents should drink tap water without filters (Oosting, 2017).

Flint had an estimated population of 98,310 in 2015; 56.6% of its population was African American, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Approximately 41.2% of Flint’s residents lived below the poverty line (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.). Flint’s per capita annual income was $14,360, and its household median income was $24,843, both of which were below the state averages of $25,681 and $48,411, respectively (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.). Robert Bullard, a central environmental justice scholar and advocate, called the water contamination in Flint environmental racism (Wernick, 2016). Bullard said:

Too often a dismissive culture exists within state and federal environmental agencies that results in slow response or no response to environmental and health threats to low-income and people of color communities, which are also referred to as environmental justice communities. (Yale Environment 360, 2016)

Environmental Justice

The notion of environmental justice is founded on the idea that clean air and drinking water and healthy living and working environments should be equally available to all (Chavis, 1993). That equal distribution of environmental benefits and risks is not a reality; while some communities are able to resist undesirable enterprises or byproducts of development, others become “sacrifice zones,” bearing disproportionately high burdens of waste, pollution, discomfort, and risk (Bullard, 2000; Chavis, 1993). Environmental injustice can manifest itself in a number of ways, including siting of hazardous facilities (Auyero & Swinstun, 2009 ; Bullard, 2000; Cole & Foster, 2001), the health risks associated with those facilities (Evans & Marcynyszyn, 2004), problems associated with extractive industries (Burns, 2007; England & Brown, 2003), and differences in the ways polluting industries are regulated (Zimmerman, 1993).

Environmental justice is rooted in a fundamental argument that healthy living conditions constitute a basic civil right that should be afforded to all people, regardless of race or class (Bullard, 2000). It can also be traced to grassroots movements against the siting of toxic enterprises such as those that contaminated Love Canal, New York, and Times Beach, Missouri, in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Cole & Foster, 2001). The two approaches to environmental inequality, which eventually merged to form what is today recognized as the environmental justice movement, offer different perspectives on power structures. While civil rights activists understood “discrete racial assaults . . . as part of a social structure of racial oppression that ultimately had to be dismantled if racial justice was to be achieved,” the antitoxic activists experienced the assaults as part of the “natural functioning” of the U.S. economic system—for progress to happen, some communities would be forced to endure pollution (Cole & Foster, 2001, p. 23). Race remains an important element of environmental justice, but scholars and activists have broadened the scope of the movement to emphasize other social factors, most notably economic class (Evans & Kantrowitz, 2002; Evans & Marcynyszyn, 2004; Morello-Frosch, 2002;). While they emphasize socioeconomic status, researchers still acknowledge the connections between race and environmental risk: “the more researchers scrutinize environmental exposure and health data for racial and income inequalities, the stronger the evidence becomes that grave and widespread environmental justices have occurred throughout the United States” (Evans & Kantrowitz, 2002, p. 323; Morrone, 2008).

Framing and Representation

Media and other forms of communication are central to the development and maintenance of culture (J. W. Carey, 2009) in that they provide a forum for the “reading of prevailing behavior” that often determines how individuals in a community will act (Sen, 1999, p. 277) and how they will treat others (Dyer, 1993). As such, scholars have for decades gone about the work of understanding the various ways media audiences may interpret texts, and how those interpretations may contribute to the development of what we might broadly think of as the naturalized establishment of a common sense social order (Gilens, 1999; Hall, 1980, 1996).

A great deal of that scholarly work has emphasized media framing, which we broadly define as the establishment of common sets of representations included in media texts to simplify a complicated world for the purpose of relaying a story (Gitlin, 1980; Lasorsa & Dai, 2007). When, through the use of frames, media producers promote particular facets of an issue, they in turn endorse and pass on to audiences “a specific problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or a treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993, p. 51). Critical scholar Richard Dyer (1993) argued that media representations could in fact never adequately describe reality; rather, he wrote, representations of social groups offer oversimplified and often insulting views of oppressed groups. Cultural scholars have extensively studied the resulting reinforcement of hegemony (e.g., Merskin, 2010; Reed, 2009; Rendleman, 2008; Westerfelhaus & Lacroix, 2006). For example, athletes in the Special Olympics with learning disabilities have been framed as “normatively passive, dependent people who deal bravely with their impairments and rely profoundly on the assistance of others” (Carter & Williams, 2012, p. 244). Westerfelhaus and Lacroix (2006) argued that the Bravo television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy subversively challenged but at the same time reaffirmed a heterosexist sociosexual order.

The impacts of representation can extend to communities, cities, and even regions of countries. In the preface to his history of Appalachia, Ron Eller (2008) suggested the prevailing focus on the region as a land of welfare cheats, moonshiners, miners, and other “types” distances society “from the political and economic realities of the region, including our own injustices toward those stereotyped,” allowing “the rest of America to keep the region at arm’s length, rather than to confront the systemic problems of a dependent economy, environmental decay, and institutional weakness that challenge mountain communities today” (p. x). Academic work on news coverage of poverty in other contexts has come to similar conclusions, suggesting media have the power to shape public perceptions of welfare policy, poor individuals, and their communities, and that the perceptions they create are often negative (e.g., M. C. Carey, 2017; Gilens, 1999; Hancock, 2004; Kendall, 2011; Kitch, 2007). Those portrayals may have tangible consequences; for example, scholars have shown the ways negative imagery of poverty in urban African American communities have shaped public discussions of welfare policy (Gilens, 1999; Hancock, 2004).

Urban Pathology and Agency in News Coverage of Communities

The way individuals perceive social problems in their local context in part determines how they will react to those problems (Auyero & Swinstun, 2009; Iyengar, 1990). Those perceptions and responses may be shaped in part by external economic, political, and social forces, including news media. In communities that have endured legacies of environmental exploitation, those influences on perception can lead to what Auyero and Swinstun (2009) called “toxic uncertainty” (p. 91)—an inability to craft a consistent narrative that will enable agency and change. Media visibility can support or detract from the message of a social movement depending on the way it is portrayed. Thus, “mediated visibility is a precious but precarious resource for activists and peddlers of political influence, creating news frames that can work for and against their objectives in unpredictable ways” (Lester & Hutchins, 2012, p. 849). The connections between media, politics, environmental risk, and lived experiences can promote or detract from both the willingness and capacity for residents and decision makers to act on community issues (Lester, 2010). Language used in journalistic discourses on social issues in a community helps shape the ways individuals in those communities view their problems as well as possible solutions (M. C. Carey, 2017).

Urban communities like Flint are often described using problem-focused language described as “urban pathology” or “social pathology” (Ettema & Peer, 1996, p. 835; Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993) that may impede mediated visibility. Ettema and Peer (1996) wrote that the use of an “evermore elaborate language of social pathology to describe lower-income urban neighborhoods” has led Americans to “understand those communities entirely in terms of their problems” (p. 835). Dreier (2005) argued that media preoccupations with social pathology in cities—urban crimes, gang warfare, subpar schools, and a host of other issues—worked to the detriment of efforts to solve those issues. By reinforcing an overwhelmingly negative, misleading view of life in American cities, Dreier wrote, media lead their audiences to view problems such as poverty and crime as “intractable,” (pp. 193–194) undermining trust in efforts to build better communities. Issues such as a lack of affordable urban housing are rarely illustrated as the products of government policies; rather than framing stories around those larger issues or community-based efforts to address them, journalists frame stories around related symptomatic matters where conflict occurs, detaching those conflicts from the institutions that created them (Dreier, 2005; Lens, 2002). Ettema and Peer (1996) encouraged journalists to consider instead a “vocabulary of community assets” (p. 850) that focused on grassroots efforts to fix social ills and root out their underlying causes. Such coverage, they argued, illustrates the agency residents have to solve their own problems or to contribute to the solutions of those problems in meaningful ways. Dominant narratives about social ills, on the other hand, “give their audience of readers and viewers little reason for optimism that ordinary people working together effectively can make a difference, that solutions are within reach, and that public policies can make a significant difference” (Dreier, 2005, p. 199).

The impacts of journalistic emphasis on urban pathology in coverage of social issues in cities, coupled with broader understandings of the ways frames influence media consumers, lead us to the study’s primary research questions:

Research Question 1: What aspects of urban pathology manifested themselves in media frames used by two national news organizations that covered the Flint water crisis, and how did those representations vary between publications?

Research Question 2: What frames were employed to assign blame and describe solutions in coverage of the crisis?

Design

This research examines coverage of the Flint water crisis and its social and political consequences published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal between October 3, 2015, and April 20, 2016.¹ Using searches of each newspaper’s online archive and the LexisNexis database, 135 articles from the two newspapers were drawn for qualitative textual analysis.² As the national “paper of record,” The New York Times has been called “a reasonable, if imperfect, proxy of journalism in general” (Wagner & Gruszczynski, 2016, p. 15). To allow for comparative analysis, we analyzed The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper with a large, typically affluent national audience (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). The study is primarily interested in the representations used by journalists at those newspapers to describe conditions in Flint and the people who were affected by those conditions to their national audiences. To maintain that focus, we did not analyze wire service content published by the two newspapers, nor did we analyze local news coverage of the crisis.

Our analysis is concerned with the “narrative character” of media texts and their potential as sites of “ideological negotiation” (Fürsich, 2009, p. 238) of public understandings of Flint, its residents, and its problems. The media texts chosen for this analysis were subjected to three separate readings to

(a) explore the rich meanings embedded in the text, (b) situate the text in relation to other texts that serve as a reference of the text, and (c) locate the significance of the text in the cultural and historical contexts. (Yin & Miike, 2008, p. 21)

The first reading served primarily to familiarize the authors with the texts and to allow for the development of broadly defined themes (Worthington, 2001). During the second reading, the authors categorized content into those broad themes and specific subcategories of themes within the text, taking note of “implicit patterns, assumptions and omissions” within the texts (Fürsich, 2009, p. 241). A third reading was used to evaluate the credibility of the analysis and refine interpretations. The authors read the articles separately and met following each reading to discuss common themes and interpretations.

Findings and Discussion

The Wall Street Journal: Feeling Like the “Walking Dead”

Wall Street Journal stories often used language steeped in urban pathology in coverage of the Flint water crisis. The newspaper told its readers Flint was a “Rust Belt city, which is still synonymous with the decline of the U.S. auto industry” (Belkin, 2016), a “hobbled Midwest city” (Maher & McWhirter, 2016), a “distressed city” (Kesling, 2016), and one that had been subject to “decades of misrule” (“Through Hell and Flint Water,” 2016). The example that perhaps best exhibits the traits of urban pathology was “A Gold Medalist Fighting Her Way Out of Flint,” a profile of local boxer Claressa Shields, who won a gold medal in the 2012 Olympics and was training for the 2016 games. The water crisis was not mentioned until the next-to-last paragraph of the profile of Shields, where it was called a “scandal.” The paragraph pointed out that Shields “launched a campaign to collect bottled water for its residents, including her mother and siblings” (Helliker, 2016). The story’s central theme is that boxing could be Shields’ ticket out of Flint, and the language used to describe the city makes getting out sound prudent: Flint was called “impoverished” and, later, “a city devastated by unemployment, poverty and drug abuse” (Helliker, 2016).

The voices of average Flint residents appeared in Journal coverage of the water crisis infrequently. Only 9 of the 63 stories in the present sample included quotes from Flint residents who were not government officials or employees or otherwise interviewed for their professional expertise (e.g., doctors asked to describe community health risks). Fourteen residents shared their experiences and thoughts about the water crisis with the Journal (one man was interviewed for two different stories). Most commonly, they articulated blame and anger. Marshall Green, a Flint resident who described a rash he contracted because of the contaminated water, said he was initially confident in local government’s ability to address the crisis. The Journal continued:

Today, Mr. Green said there is plenty of blame to go around, from Mr. Snyder [Michigan’s governor], to the series of emergency managers who ran the city beginning in 2011, to the former mayor. “He’s the one that flipped the switch,” he said. (Maher & McWhirter, 2016).

A day earlier, in a story under the headline “Flint’s Water Woes Make Residents Feel Like ‘the Walking Dead,’” Flint resident Michael Webber told a reporter, “I’m angry at the local officials that knew [about the contamination] and didn’t say anything, on up to the governor” (Maher, 2016a). In coverage of a congressional hearing the following month, the Journal paraphrased Lee-Anne Walters as saying she was “outraged that the EPA continues to allow problematic testing under the Lead and Copper Rule” (McWhirter, Maher, & Calvert, 2016).

Eight Flint residents, including a pastor who organized aid for the needy in Flint,³ were mentioned by name in “Flint’s Water Woes Make Residents Feel Like ‘the Walking Dead.’” Many of the sources in that story voiced another dominant theme: helplessness. In the story’s opening, Christine Brown, an unemployed woman visiting a local mission to get clean water, was described this way:

“We’re nothing but the walking dead in Flint,” Ms. Brown said Wednesday, bundled in a full-length New York Giants coat and a Detroit Pistons hat. She was making her daily pilgrimage across the city to the daytime shelter for three, one-gallon jugs of water. “It’s pitiful,” she said. (Maher, 2016a)

Others in that story expressed a desire to leave Flint but an inability to afford to do so. The story did little to make its subjects seem like agentic actors. The Journal pulled from several stereotypical tropes to introduce Lashanda Warner, mentioned in the story here but not quoted, and never referenced again:

For Lashanda Warner, 37, who has eight children, that means driving to four fire stations every day—due to rationing at each point—to get cases of water for cooking and drinking. The trips consume an hour or two of her day and run up the gas bill for her GMC Yukon to $50 a week. (Maher, 2016a)

Other Flint residents interviewed for Journal stories expressed concern about their health and pessimism that government would be able to resolve the problem. In March 2016, as federal government actors became more involved in the Flint crisis, coverage started to move from Michigan to Washington, DC, and the voices of Flint residents became less pronounced, both in the process and in the Journal’s coverage of it. At the end of a March 17 story about a congressional hearing, the newspaper quoted Doris Patrick, a 67-year-old Flint resident who noted that some locals were unable to get a seat. “Flint can’t get in the hearing,” the Journal quoted her as saying (Harder & Maher, 2016).

In the Journal’s portrayal of Flint’s water crisis, agency belonged primarily to the entities that caused and exacerbated the crisis in the first place: local, state, and federal government. Much of the newspaper’s coverage focused on the churn of government bureaucracy. Water issues, the newspaper told its readers, are “just part of a much wider budget pinch in the distressed city” (Kesling, 2016). Efforts by the mayor and governor to find the millions of dollars needed to replace water lines were the principal subject of many stories, which focused bureaucratic action. “Now is the time to do things to help the people of Flint address the damage that’s been done,” the newspaper quoted Michigan’s governor as saying in January 2016. “This is the start of a longer-term process to make sure that we are committed to Flint” (Maher, 2016b). That commitment focused on infrastructure improvements. Other forms of assistance, referenced less often, included “programs that have been shown to promote child development, including early literacy programs, nutritional support and support for children with developmental delays” as well as “better nutrition” which can “help blunt the effects of lead” (Maher, 2016d). Those solutions originated with and were facilitated by top-down government programs developed as specific responses to the water contamination.

In the newspaper’s April 20, 2016, story about the filing of criminal charges in connection with the contamination, reporter Kris Maher (2016e) wrote:

Whether a series of bureaucratic missteps or criminal misconduct left the city of nearly 100,000 exposed for months to potentially hazardous levels of lead has been a question at the heart of efforts to understand what went wrong in Flint.

In the same story, Maher quoted Michigan Governor Rick Snyder as saying: “I have said all along that bureaucrats making bad decisions failed the people of Flint.” Those statements are perhaps the most explicit expression of the Journal’s standard blame narrative in Flint: That the water crisis was the result of government ineptitude and crumbling infrastructure. The Journal reported in January 2016 that “some officials see what happened in Flint as an aberration, brought about by bad decisions, such as not properly treating water from the Flint River, which is highly corrosive and ate away at the protective lining inside lead pipes” (McWhirter & Maher, 2016). The Journal wrote often of different government perspectives on whose “fault” Flint’s water crisis was, a debate summed up nicely in a story published on February 4:

The two [political] parties are taking different approaches to the crisis, with Democrats tending to blame Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican. The [sic] say the problems show a disregard for the welfare of the public, especially low-income African-Americans. Republicans, for their part, blame government more generally and say President Barack Obama’s EPA is also at fault for not acting faster. (Harder & Peterson, 2016).

On its editorial page, the Journal actively rejected the notion that Flint’s water crisis was a symptom of systemic neglect, largely through countering statements made by Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign. In January 2016, the newspaper’s editorial board wrote:

Hillary Clinton [the Democratic nominee for president in 2016] and most of the media are peddling this as a parable of Republican neglect of a poor black city. But the real Flint story is a cascade of government failure, including the Environmental Protection Agency. (“Through Hell and Flint Water,” 2016)

“The broader lesson” learned from Flint, the paper opined, “is that ladling on layers of bureaucracy doesn’t result in better oversight and safety” (“Through Hell and Flint Water,” 2016). A day earlier, an opinion columnist suggested Clinton saw Flint as

a crisis worthy of exploitation because Flint is an impoverished majority-black city in a state with a white Republican governor. Yet the decision to use the river as a short-term water source was made while Flint was under the control of a black emergency manager appointed by the state. (Riley, 2016)

Later, Riley (2016) wrote that “for Democrats, courting black voters means turning every issue, whenever possible, into a question of racial justice.” On its news pages, the Journal similarly relegated discussions of racial justice in Flint to the realm of campaign rhetoric: “The strategy to elevate the crisis in Flint underscores the scramble between Mrs. Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont for African-American support as the Democratic primary tightens and heads south, where black votes are critical” (Belkin, 2016). In April 2016 at the end of a story about a New York campaign appearance, the newspaper quoted Clinton as mentioning Flint in the context of “systemic racism” (Meckler, 2016).

Even in routine stories about government meetings, there were opportunities to consider the issue of environmental justice. In March 2016, the Journal’s report on a panel formed to investigate the water contamination included this paragraph:

The facts surrounding the crisis “lead us to the inescapable conclusion that this is a case of environmental injustice,” the panel concluded. “Flint residents, who are majority black or African-American and among the most impoverished of any metropolitan area in the United States, did not enjoy the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards as that provided to other communities.” (McWhirter, 2016)

Race was not mentioned again in the story. The next paragraph redirected readers to the cause articulated in most Journal stories—infrastructure:

The crisis received national attention as a stark example of the problems facing the nation’s aging water infrastructure. The report—116 pages including footnotes and appendixes—listed 36 task force findings on how the crisis developed, as well as 44 recommendations on how to keep such a crisis from happening again. (McWhirter, 2016)

That is not to say that the Journal never talked about racial or class inequalities in the context of Flint. Under the headline “Flint’s Poorest Area Is at Center of Crisis,” the newspaper told its readers:

The health impact of lead in drinking water is typically more pronounced in poorer communities like Flint, where 40% of the population lives below the poverty line. Poorer people are less able to buy bottled water and filters. Poor nutrition, which is common in such communities, can leave developing brains and nervous systems more vulnerable to the damaging effects of lead. (Maher, 2016c)

A February 18 story about appointed emergency managers was published under the subhead, “Critics of law decry loss of local control that accompanies the appointments, especially in largely African-American communities.” The story made this point about appointed emergency managers:

The law’s critics decry the loss of local control that accompanies the appointment of a manager, especially because the affected cities and school districts tend to be largely African-American. The mayor and other officials who are elected by residents of Flint, which is majority African-American, are relegated to figurehead status. Of Flint’s four emergency managers, three were white, with two of those appointed twice. (Calvert & Maher, 2016)

Race was not mentioned again in the February 18 story, which largely focused on who was responsible for switching Flint’s water source to the Flint River.

The New York Times: “We’ve Just Given Up on the City’s Water”

New York Times reporters described Flint as “economically troubled” (Davey, 2015b), “cash starved” (Bosman, Davey, & Smith, 2016), “an industrial city with high poverty rates” (M. Smith, 2016), and as a city with a “plummeting population and violent crime rates that rank among the nation’s worst” (M. Smith, 2015). Of the 72 Times articles about the Flint water crisis or its political fallout considered for this study, 17 included quotes from residents who were not government officials. The Times often described victims in a state of helplessness. In October 2015, the newspaper quoted Flint resident Chris Thornton as saying “I don’t think people know what’s going on at all.” A paragraph later, his wife told the newspaper’s reporter “As far as my family . . . we’ve just given up on the city’s water” (Davey, 2015a). In January 2016, the newspaper quoted Flint resident Sonya Houston, who saw moving out of Flint as the best solution to escaping the crisis (Atkinson, Haimerl, & Perez-Pena, 2016). The next month, the Times published an entire story about the notion that, for some residents, moving was seen as an attractive, albeit rarely viable, solution to the problem (Bosman, 2016). The sample reviewed for this study did include descriptions of a few residents who were working to improve situations. For example, M. Smith (2015) noted Melissa Mays’ work to organize marches to protest the water contamination in “A Water Dilemma in Flint: Cloudy or Costly?” Mays was a source in other Times stories, in which her activism was described.

Most of the newspaper’s articles ascribed agency to the federal government rather than local residents. The majority of the solutions to the crisis covered in the Times dealt with intervention or help from the federal government. Stories such as “Senate Democrats Seeing Federal Aid for Flint Crisis” positioned state and local governments as the principal actors capable of “fixing” Flint through spending money to repair infrastructure, although that story, like some others in the sample, referenced environmental injustice. It included this quote, attributed to Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow: “‘If one of the governor’s supporters in a wealthy part of the Michigan’ [sic] had called his office with complaints about water contamination, Ms. Stabenow said, ‘I don’t think it would be very long before it was fixed’” (Steinhauer, 2016).

The cost-saving measures enacted by the city government and the inaction of state government were held up as causes of the crisis in the newspaper’s coverage. In January 2016, a Times editorial criticized state and local government for negligence, dressing down Michigan Governor Rick Snyder:

He had turned a blind eye, possibly because it was a destitute city whose elected officials had little political power and were under the thumb of an emergency manager Mr. Snyder had appointed. Or possibly because he wanted to maintain state control, he failed to call on the obvious source of assistance, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (“How Michigan Failed the City of Flint,” 2016)

In “Anger and Scrutiny in Michigan Over a City’s Poisoned Tap Water,” the Times quoted Flint citizens and business owners who were angry at the state government’s slow actions. A story published under the headline “As Water Problems Grew, Officials Belittled Complaints from Flint” detailed the state government’s initial lack of action during the early days of crisis. Working from a release of e-mails, the newspaper wrote that the state government did not act “until late in 2015, after months of complaints” (Bosman et al., 2016). Later, the article describes how “[state] officials seemed slow to respond. In one memo for the governor from February 2015, officials played down the problems and spoke of ‘initial hiccups.’”

The Times referenced Flint’s demographics in stories about the crisis and its political and social consequences more frequently than the Journal, and it occasionally questioned whether the negligence in Flint was evidence of racial and economic inequality. The Times’ public editor at the time suggested in January 2016 that the newspaper should have been a “tougher watchdog” in Flint, noting that “[o]ne 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” (Sullivan, 2016). In another piece, the Times questioned the motives of state and local government this way, asking, “Would it [the water crisis] have happened at all in a city populated by affluent white people?” (Bosman et al., 2016). Times columnist John Eligon acknowledged e-mails from Snyder “included no discussion of race” but considered the notion that institutional racism could contribute to the inaction gripping state officials. Eligon suggested the following explanation:

Environmental decisions are often related to political power. In some cities, garbage incinerators have been built in African-American neighborhoods that do not have the political clout to block them. In Michigan, where blacks are 14 percent of the population and the state government is dominated by Republicans, Flint has little political power.

The water contamination in Flint was born out of a decision to switch the city’s water source to the Flint River in April 2014. The explicit goal was to save Flint, which was on the brink of financial collapse, millions of dollars. At the time, an emergency manager appointed by Mr. Snyder, a Republican, was running Flint. And in a sign of how racial issues are often not simple, that manager, Darnell Earley, who supported the switch, is Black (Eligon, 2016).

In another opinion piece, Matt Latimer (2016), a former speechwriter for U.S. President George W. Bush, contended that Flint’s socioeconomic make-up, “large African American population,” or even the fact “that the city has always been a Democratic stronghold” should entice Republican leaders to address the crisis and change the hearts and minds of a population that does not usually vote Republican. However, Latimer wrote that Republicans were staying away from Flint because “they are used to staying away.” The article “Governor Denies Race Affected Flint Response” dealt almost exclusively with Snyder rejecting the idea that environmental racism played a part in state officials’ decision-making (Perez-Pena, 2016).

Conclusions

Journalistic discourse can contribute to a broader dialogue about social issues and empower community members to bring about change. If residents are to initiate change, they must first see themselves as agents capable of acting (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993). Ettema and Peer (1996) noted that “stories that emphasize the capacities of community residents themselves” (p. 852) can contribute to making communities “a little less bad” (p. 854). The language associated with urban pathology stands in the way of such stories, and that language dominated much of the coverage of Flint considered for this study. Flint residents were largely portrayed as either angry or desperate, and news coverage discussed solutions largely in terms of actions government could take to improve infrastructure.

Those narratives, we argue, leave the national audiences of the Times and the Journal with a view of the water crisis as a battle among government agencies to ascribe (or dodge) blame for the water contamination, set against the backdrop of a downtrodden community unable to do anything but wait for a solution. The findings reported here are largely consistent with other scholarly critiques of news coverage of Flint (i.e., Martin & Oshagan, 1997; M. C. Smith, 2017), but they call special attention to the ways narratives of urban pathology may further constrict communities in times of crisis. Socially constructed norms of news judgment, objectivity, and news gathering already make it challenging for environmental issues to make it onto the front page of the newspaper or the evening news and, subsequently, for problems to be debated and acted upon (Butler & Pidgeon, 2009; Lester, 2010). News coverage that persistently portrays communities “in terms of their unending problems” (Ettema & Peer, 1996, p. 852), as much of the news coverage studied here did, lends credence to the idea that such problems are intractable and may impair efforts to empower individuals and search for new solutions (M. C. Carey, 2017; Sen, 1999). Media narratives about the actions or negligence of government actors can exist alongside stories about community organizers and grassroots efforts to address environmental racism and structural inequality that were overlooked in the Journal and the Times. However, researchers have noted that efforts of Flint’s African American community to develop solutions to the crisis have gone largely unrecognized (J. E. Johnson & Key, 2018). That lack of recognition further separates already-disenfranchised residents from efforts to address issues in their own community.

The voices of local actors and perspectives on environmental justice are crucial to understanding and addressing the structural issues at play in Flint and elsewhere; however, they were largely absent or powerless in the texts considered for this study. The question of whether that image of powerlessness is a product of journalistic practices or story sources themselves is a complex one. The processes through which story sources are identified, individual quotes are selected, and details of a scene are chosen for (or excluded from) media accounts are products of a journalistic paraideology (Gans, 1979) that may, as shown in this study, contribute to pathology narratives in urban communities. Some stories produced by local outlets in Flint reflect diversities of sources and alternative narrative approaches that were absent from coverage of the crisis in the Times and the Journal, standing in contrast to the language of urban pathology evident in national news coverage of the crisis. The hyperlocal news organization Flint Beat, for example, has chronicled government proceedings while also providing coverage of community organizing efforts (i.e., J. Johnson, 2018; Terrell, 2018) and commentary on broader inequalities (i.e., Foote, 2017). In a January 2018 story, 13-year-old community organizer Tiara Darisaw pointed out the value of creating spaces for inclusive community dialog and noted that because of her participation in such a space, “I believe that I can cause change” (Terrell, 2018). It is possible (perhaps likely) that other local outlets would be more likely to focus on solutions to problems and the “vocabulary of community assets” Ettema and Peer (1996, p. 850) argued could contribute to community building. If so, they could serve as valuable local counterbalances to negative national narratives, particularly in communities where residents struggle with economic uncertainty.

Future studies should consider the way media “closer to home” describe Flint, its residents, and their capacity to be involved in helping fix what went wrong there. Analyses of Flint and Detroit news coverage of the crisis might reflect different coverage patterns that could provide better nuance. Meaningful studies that seek better methods of covering news events such as the Flint water crisis are also needed. Research focused on the beliefs and practices that led (and at the time of this writing still lead) to the creation of media messages about Flint and other communities can help scholars, journalists, and perhaps audiences understand how some communities come to be viewed as “bad places,” building on Ettema and Peer’s 1997 study of urban pathology. As they go about that work, media scholars might consider a more robust inclusion of activists and community leaders who, although they operate outside of newsrooms, may present valuable alternatives to urban pathology that could drive public conversations toward more inclusive, better solutions to local problems.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Michael Clay Carey (PhD, Ohio University) is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Samford University. His academic research focuses on cultural studies of media, including the impacts of stereotypes and the roles media play in the formation and maintenance of individual and group identity. He is the author of The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia.

Jim Lichtenwalter graduated from Samford University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communications and received his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism. Over the years, he’s written about everything from healthcare to history. He currently lives in Chicago, where he writes about the construction industry for a news and networking website called BuiltWorlds.

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