jimpeel
Well-Known Member
Medas silent on the government's role in the debacle.
Tennessee Sludge Spill: Government Disaster 30 Times Worse than Exxon-Valdez
Media ignore fact that New Deal utility is run by the government.
By Julia A. Seymour
Business & Media Institute
1/14/2009 2:32:44 PM
A new, New Deal may very well be on its way, but one of FDR’s own New Deal creations, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), is in big trouble.
Federally-owned TVA, the nation’s largest utility, recently made headlines for spilling more than a billion gallons of “thick black” coal sludge that literally “swallowed” up homes as it spread out over hundreds of acres in eastern Tennessee. It destroyed three homes and damaged dozens, forcing evacuations just days before Christmas 2008.
NBC “Nightly News” called the “toxic mess” “30 times larger than the 1989 Exxon-Valdez disaster,” on Dec. 24.
But news coverage on the three broadcast networks and three major newspapers barely mentioned that the TVA is under federal ownership – making this environmental tragedy the government’s fault and the taxpayers’ liability. Since Dec. 24, only 2 out of 18 (11 percent) newspaper reports in The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times admitted that fact. The ratio was slightly higher for the networks with 2 admissions out of 15 broadcast stories on ABC, CBS and NBC(13 percent).
Tennessee residents affected by two separate sludge spills, the huge one on Dec. 22 and a smaller one on Jan. 10, blasted the TVA.
NBC “Nightly News” spoke to James Sheen, who was asleep when the river of sludge hit his home. “I climbed out the window and – before the house completely – completely collapsed,” Sheen told NBC Dec. 24.
“Hundreds of millions of gallons of coal ash mixed with water, enough to fill more than 550 Olympic-sized swimming pools, broke through an earthen dam in the town of Kingston, fouling waterways and burying homes while people were sleeping,” anchor Ann Curry said on “Nightly News” Dec. 24. The accompanying NBC report was one of only two from the networks to refer to TVA as “government owned.”
“The ash came within yards of the home of Deanna Copeland, a customer service worker, and enveloped her dock, she said. Pieces of her neighbor’s house were in her yard. ‘To see this happen on the week of Christmas, it’s devastating,’ Ms. Copeland said. ‘People are pretty upset. The big question now is, What’s T.V.A. going to do to fix things?’” The New York Times wrote on Dec. 24.
They’re probably going to pay a lot of money in court. Two Tennessee families filed a lawsuit against seeking medical and environmental testing for their family members. A group of land owners is also suing the TVA for $165 million over the incident according to Associated Press. And at least one environmental group intends to sue under the federal statutes including the Clean Water Act.
Despite the government’s culpability, most of the news reports portrayed the disaster as a failure of the coal industry. They included left-wing environmentalists’ attacks on coal and calls for more regulation of the utility industry, instead of blaming the government for failing to police itself.
Coal, Not Government, Gets a Black Eye
The only rightful target for blame was the TVA itself which allowed the spill to happen, and the bureaucracy that failed to govern the government utility.
According to Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean, five years ago there was a blowout of the wall of a “massive, above-ground coal ash landfill” at TVA’s Kingston plant. The TVA had to find a way to stabilize it’s sludge and according to state records and TVA documents, “top officials rejected solutions that were deemed ‘global fixes’” for that problem.
TVA’s CEO Tom Kilgore admitted to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that “the most expensive solution wasn’t chosen … Obviously, that doesn’t look good for us.” That solution would have cost the TVA $25 million – only $5 million more than the current estimate for cleaning up the mess and nowhere near as much as lawsuits might cost.
At least one government figure took some blame for the disaster. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D.-Calif., accepted responsibility for not properly overseeing TVA saying “We didn’t really do much in the first two years looking at T.V.A.,” according to the Jan. 9 New York Times.
But a Tennessee policy group pointed out the underlying problem. Shaka Mitchell of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research addressed the TVA spill in a Jan. 7 op-ed. Mitchell wrote, “If there is one thing we can all learn from the disastrous toxic ash spill in Kingston, it’s that when government-run companies fail, no one is held accountable, but everyone pays.”
“Where’s the outrage? Where are the special hearings and calls for resignations?” Mitchell asked.
There certainly wasn’t outrage against government on the networks. Much like the 2008 coverage of another FDR creation, Fannie Mae, broadcast journalists criticized industry and called for more government intrusion rather than pointing out the failure of government.
In fact, one-third of the broadcast stories presented environmentalists’ attacks on the entire coal industry – as if a private industry had anything to do with the Tennessee disaster!
NBC “Nightly News” quoted a Union of Concerned Scientists spokesman condemning the “oxymoron” of clean coal on Dec. 24. CBS’s Mark Strassman said “the industry touts its cleaner product,” but turned to the same UCS critic for a rebuttal.
NBC even asserted Dec. 27 that the TVA spill was giving “the coal industry’s clean coal campaign a black eye.” But the spill should have given a black eye to the concept of government-run businesses.
“[E]nvironmentalists are trying to use this coal ash spill as an example to illustrate what they’ve been saying all along,” ABC’s Gigi Stone said in a Dec. 27 report before quoting Stephen Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
Smith said, “To call this clean coal is absolutely ridiculous. This is devastating.” Stone followed Smith’s remarks by mentioning a coal industry campaign “to present itself, not as a global pollutant, but as a clean energy alternative if the proper technology is developed.”
The New York Times argued Jan. 7 that regulation could have prevented the problem, but was lacking because the EPA “backpedaled in the face of an industry campaign.”
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