Cartoon by Politico<\/strong>‘s Matt Wuerker.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Janine Jackson:<\/b> Welcome to CounterSpin,<\/b> your weekly look behind the headlines. I’m Janine Jackson. This week on CounterSpin<\/b>: Michigan’s attorney general has indicted<\/a> nine state officials, including former Gov. Rick Snyder, the state’s former health director and two of the emergency managers of the city of Flint, for exposing at least 100,000 people to dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water, and for an outbreak of Legionnaires\u2019 disease that killed at least 12 people and sickened many more.<\/p>\n In an op-ed for The Hill<\/b><\/a>, Michigan Congressman Dan Kildee called the 2014 decision to switch the source of Flint’s drinking water \u201cone of the greatest environmental injustices in our lifetimes.\u201d Which is true, but \u201cthe environment\u201d didn\u2019t do it: It\u2019s often forgotten that Flint was a crisis of democracy. Decision-making had been taken out of the hands of Flint’s elected officials and given to an \u201cemergency manager\u201d tasked with reining in costs\u2014a system that seems to be used disproportionately in communities of color, taking decision-making out of community hands but leaving them to deal with the fallout of those decisions.<\/p>\n There’s been a $640 million settlement of class action lawsuits, but Michigan Radio<\/b> reports<\/a> that many civic leaders say the deal presents inappropriate hurdles\u2014children might not get their settlement if they don’t undergo a specific bone lead test\u2014and some question how money could ever compensate Flint residents for months and months of washing and bathing and cooking with bottled water to avoid exposing themselves and their families to a neurotoxin, all while officials deflected and denied and belittled their concerns.<\/p>\n We’ve talked about Flint on CounterSpin,<\/b> in its particulars and in terms of how it fits into bigger questions around environmental racism and resource control and local governance. In light of the renewed attention around the story\u2014which has not<\/i> ended, even as media have looked away\u2014we’re going to revisit some of those conversations today.<\/p>\n You’re listening to CounterSpin<\/b>, brought to you each week by the media watch group FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n Janine Jackson:<\/b> While Flint’s water became a symbol\u2014a meme<\/a>, even, around the world\u2014of environmental racism and government indifference, it was mainly local reporters who really tracked the political actors and actions behind what was not at all a natural disaster.<\/p>\n In January 2016, we talked<\/a> with Chris Savage, owner\/publisher of the Michigan-based Electablog.com<\/b><\/a>, about the chain of events.<\/p>\n Chris Savage: “The ironic part about this, and the really just disgusting part about this, is that that phosphate treatment would have cost them about $60 per day to do. It was very inexpensive to do.”<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Chris Savage:<\/b> The whole thing really began in 2013. Prior to that, Flint had been considering changing where it got its water. It was at the time getting its water from the city of Detroit, through the Detroit Water & Sewage Department; they had a nearly 50-year contract with them. However, the water was very expensive; they had some of the highest water costs in the country, actually, in Flint, Michigan.<\/p>\n They joined up with other regional concerns, like Genesee County and other groups around the area, and decided to form what was called the Karegnondi Water Authority. And they\u2019re building a pipeline and a water treatment plant to provide their own water, rather than purchasing it from Detroit. That happened in April of 2013.<\/p>\n Several days after they did that, the Detroit Water & Sewage Department exercised its option to cancel their current contract with the city of Flint, which meant they had to give one-year advance notice. This was done, by the way, with Detroit being under an emergency manager as well. So both cities were actually under the control of emergency managers at the time, who were making all of the decisions for the local government.<\/p>\n So what transpired in the following year was that Flint had to make some decisions about where they were going to get their water, or if they were going to renegotiate their contract with Detroit. Just prior to when Detroit\u2019s contract ended with them, in April of 2014, the Detroit Sewer & Water Department sent Darnell Earley, who was at the time the Flint emergency manager, a letter saying you can stay on our system, you\u2019re not being kicked off, but they were going to renegotiate the contract. And of course, because of this, their water rates were going to go even higher. And I find some brutal irony in this, that both cities were under emergency managers, and yet you have one city basically exploiting the other city for higher water costs.<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> Right.<\/p>\n CS:<\/b> So Darnell Earley at that point just sent them a letter back, saying thanks but no thanks. He had made the decision they were going to go to the Flint River. And in April of 2014, that is when that happened. And that really was the fateful decision, that decision not to remain on Detroit water, but to switch to the Flint River in the interim, while the Karegnondi pipeline was being completed.<\/p>\n The idea that they would go to Flint had been considered in the past, and a report was sent to the state of Michigan in 2013, telling them that going to the Flint River would require considerably more water treatment, including phosphate treatments to prevent the mineral scale and biofilm on the insides of people\u2019s pipes from being eroded away and revealing the lead solder underneath. And it\u2019s that lead solder in the pipelines going from the main water line in the streets to people\u2019s homes that is the source of the lead in people\u2019s drinking water.<\/p>\n They made the switch in April 2014. Almost immediately, people in Flint began to report this disgustingly discolored water coming from their taps. The water smelled foul, people were getting rashes, people were getting sick. They found that there were high levels of E. coli, so there was a boil-water alert for some time. They began treating with chlorine to fix that problem. And because of the overtreatment with chlorine, it started creating trihalomethanes, which are a byproduct of disinfection. They exceeded the Clean Water Act\u2019s regulations on those. That had to be treated. So they had a lot of problems before the lead issue manifested itself.<\/p>\n It took a while for that water of the Flint River, which is more corrosive than the Detroit River, to sort of erode away this coating that\u2019s on the inside of these pipelines. And it was basically around January of 2015 that the lead problem started to become manifest.<\/p>\n Reports that were being sent to Michigan\u2019s Department of Environmental Quality, which is in charge of approving all water treatment plants for municipalities, they had been doing testing according to guidelines, and they were using the guidelines incorrectly. They were supposed to be testing 100 different high-risk homes at the tap and then, if the lead level in the 90th percentile was above 15 parts per billion, then they were supposed to take action. This is required by federal law. They had only taken actually 72 samples, which they were supposed to take 100, and some of those had spiked pretty high, putting them in the action zone in the 90th percentile. And so people that were responsible for that reporting were instructed by DEQ to remove two of the samples, and that brought them down below the action level of 15 parts per billion, and so they could continue on without further treatment.<\/p>\n The ironic part about this, and the really just disgusting part about this, is that that phosphate treatment would have cost them about $60 per day to do. It was very inexpensive to do, this phosphate treatment, which is very effective at maintaining that film that covers the lead, and protects the water from being exposed to lead. But the DEQ signed off on the treatment that did not include the phosphate, and that\u2019s why the Snyder administration\u2014Governor Snyder is our governor\u2014and his administration is complicit in this.<\/p>\n I do give a lot of credit to our local media. I don\u2019t always do that, Janine, but the Detroit Free Press<\/b>, the Detroit News<\/b>, MLive<\/b>, these organizations have done a very good job over the last couple of years in following this story and making sure that people knew what was going on. In an interesting turn, the ACLU actually hired an investigative journalist, Curt Guyette<\/a>, and he\u2019s done a lot of the FOIA work, and has revealed a lot of the information that we have today that has shined a light on the Snyder administration, and the ways that they have so tragically failed the Flint residents.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n Janine Jackson:<\/b> There were those who claimed that the fact that Flint is a predominantly African-American and predominantly poor community had nothing to do with the poisoning of their water. We talked<\/a> around<\/i> such people in February 2016 with Talia Buford, then a reporter at the Center for Public Integrity<\/b>, working on a series called\u00a0 \u201cEnvironmental Justice, Denied<\/a>.\u201d She filled us in on the role of agencies like the EPA.<\/p>\n Talia Buford: “When you have something ‘not in my backyard’ from these more politically connected people, it still goes in someone\u2019s backyard.”<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Talia Buford:<\/b> I think that what we see in Flint is a failure on a number of different levels, a failure from the city level to the state level to the federal level. EPA has a role, of course, as an overseer of the Michigan Environmental Agency. The Michigan department should be probably the one that has a bigger responsibility than the federal agency, since they are working in conjunction with the state, but I think that everyone here had something that they did where they fell off the job.<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> A headline of a piece<\/a> that you co-wrote recently was \u201cEnvironmental Racism Persists, and the EPA Is One Reason Why.\u201d Those are strong words. You\u2019ve talked about the Office of Civil Rights. What did your investigation turn up about the actual track record of that office?<\/p>\n TB: <\/b>In our investigation, we looked at more than 15 years of complaints that citizens had filed to the EPA Office of Civil Rights. These are minority communities, often low-income but not always, who are saying, we live next to a sewage plant that makes it horrible for us to sit outside on our porches, or there are pesticides being sprayed on the fields next to our schools.<\/p>\n So what we found is that over the 22-year history of the office, the agency had only had about 300 complaints, and they\u2019ve never made a formal finding of a Title VI violation. They\u2019ve made one preliminary finding, and there have been some investigations, but they\u2019ve never come out and said, Texas or Indiana or whatever state, you are violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.<\/p>\n And that struck us as something\u2014especially over a decades-long history\u2014that you can\u2019t find one bad actor, when we know that there are so many of these cases; we hear about them all the time. To hear that there\u2019s been no wrongdoing, it struck us as kind of odd.<\/p>\n So in our investigation, what we also found is that only 12 of those cases that the EPA has found, they\u2019ve closed with any actual official action. That means they\u2019ve either negotiated or had some sort of informal settlement. The rest of them were all resolved among the complainants or the agencies, or dismissed. And that even beyond that, there are several cases, almost 20, that have been just waiting in limbo, waiting for EPA to act in some way. In some cases, they\u2019ve been waiting more than a decade.<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> Your thoughts on journalistic coverage of this?<\/p>\n TB: <\/b>\u00a0I\u2019m thinking about it in the context of Flint, and I think that a lot of the local news media is paying attention, and there\u2019s been some amazing reporting and watchdogging that\u2019s been coming out of the Detroit Free Press<\/b> and the Flint Journal<\/b>. But a lot of this really comes down to people not being listened to\u2014either by state officials and, in some cases, by the national media.<\/p>\n There is so much information that\u2019s just out there if you look for it. Our series was built on data that we pulled from the EPA that was publicly available. We were able to get it through a FOIA request. We actually created a database<\/a> and made it public on our website, so that people can tell their own stories using our data as well.<\/p>\n So I think that these stories like Flint, or other stories out of the Office of Civil Rights even, can be a jumping off point for us to just start asking more about our communities and asking more about the world that we live in, and looking for the data to back those questions up.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n Janine Jackson: <\/b>We spoke<\/a> with Talia Buford again in July 2017, after Michigan’s Attorney General brought involuntary manslaughter charges<\/a> against five officials, one of whom\u2014Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon\u2014had been reported saying<\/a>, \u201cEveryone has to die of something.\u201d Now at ProPublica<\/b>, Talia Buford gave us some history of environmental justice as a state concern.<\/p>\n TB:<\/b> It popped up during the civil rights movement, but it really took hold in the early \u201980s, when citizens in North Carolina really pushed back on the state choosing to dump contaminated soil in a landfill near their homes. After that happened, the federal government started to take notice. There were some studies by EPA, and then there was a church group that also did a really instrumental study on just where toxic facilities were sited around the country.<\/p>\n And after that, President Bush\u2014this is George H.W. Bush\u2014at that point decided to implement the Office of Environmental Equity, which is today the Office of Environmental Justice. That was in \u201992.<\/p>\n Two years later, President Clinton gave us, I guess, the biggest win for the environmental justice community. Clinton signed an executive order in \u201994 that required federal agencies to consider environmental justice in all of their policies. What he also did is he declared that environmental injustice was a violation of Title VI\u2019s Civil Rights Act, which was huge, because it\u2019s the same law that also sought to end segregation in schools. So this is a really powerful tool that advocates now had to use.<\/p>\n During the second Bush administration, however, a lot of those protections got rolled back. They were watered down, in some instances. The Title VI office was basically dormant for years, cases languished for literally a decade, and there just wasn\u2019t any movement on the issue.<\/p>\n And Democrats in Congress tried to push legislation on this issue forward, to really mandate and legislate some of the protections that Clinton had tried to implement through the executive order, and just really make them law and really crystallize them and give them some teeth. They weren\u2019t able to even get a vote on any of those issues during the time that they were in Congress, and, actually, there\u2019s never been a vote on an environmental justice bill in Congress ever since this has become an issue.<\/p>\n Under Obama things got a lot better, but they still weren\u2019t perfect. He was able to really focus on environmental justice during his administration. They cleared a backlog of civil rights complaints, they really elevated the idea of environmental justice, and the Office of Environmental Justice was really, really productive during that period. They were able to go out and give grants, and they had meetings and really talked to communities, and it really did a lot of education during that point.<\/p>\n But even then, there was still a lot more that could have been done. There could have been a stronger executive order that was put forward, to maybe have a federal environmental justice advisor at every federal agency, or we could have tried to push further to codify a lot of the things into law that the executive order professed, and those things were never done.<\/p>\n So there was a lot of progress, and then things just kind of stalled a little bit. And now the movement is at a point where a lot of the protections they had been relying on are possibly in retreat.<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> The fact that the Trump White House is looking to eliminate the EPA\u2019s Office of Environmental Justice, that\u2019s no surprise, and it fits with everything else<\/a>. They\u2019re doubling down on this ideological twist, if you will, that you note predates them, that comes really from Bush Jr., this effort to say, oh, sure, all<\/i> people deserve protection from environmental harm.<\/p>\n TB:<\/b> Right. And some of the people we talked to, they called it the \u201call lives mattering\u201d of environmental justice. The idea that, yes, of course, everyone should not be subjected to intense environmental pollution. And, yes, you do want to have protection for everyone. But by not focusing on the people who currently do not have those protections, you\u2019re basically ensuring that they never will.<\/p>\n Phys.Org<\/strong> (1\/20\/16<\/a>)<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n JJ:<\/b> I just want to cite the work of Paul Mohai, from the University of Michigan, who researched<\/a> the chicken-or-the-egg question in terms of environmental racism. You know, do polluting industries cause white people to move out, or people of color to move in (for lack of options, for example)? Or do companies locate polluting industries and hazardous waste facilities in minority and poor communities? And he found that it\u2019s the latter, that existing minority communities are targeted. It\u2019s not happenstance, and class has a lot to do with it, but it\u2019s not class alone. There\u2019s this irreducibility of racist impacts that it seems to me the whole environmental justice movement is about, and I guess I\u2019m asking what one of the sources in your piece asks: Do we have to prove this all over again?<\/p>\n TB:<\/b> A lot of work has been done to tie a lot of zoning issues to environmental justice. Think about whatever community your listeners may have grown up in; think about where facilities were sited in your community. Were they in the more affluent areas, with tree-lined streets, and along the waterfront in a very affluent part of town? No, they were probably\u2014maybe they\u2019re on the waterfront, but they were on a part near a landfill and near, you know, a power plant, and near dilapidated buildings or more industrial areas. And there are always homes still around there.<\/p>\n So you have to think about the people who are maybe not allowed to, either through restrictive covenants or other more blatant reasons, not allowed to move into some of those nicer places, some of those more affluent places, and had to settle or had to move and make their homes in communities in places that were less desirable, less affluent areas or generally less desirable areas. So that\u2019s definitely a part of it.<\/p>\n And when you don\u2019t take into account the history of the way that communities are formed or have been formed in our country, you\u2019re in danger of ignoring an entire section of the population that needs that special attention, or needs, at least, that focused attention, in order to make sure that they aren\u2019t being unduly harmed.<\/p>\n JJ: <\/b>Yeah. I cited the Mohai research, because I think sometimes people think that environmental justice is about the feeling<\/i> that some people are disproportionately impacted, or it\u2019s just a sense<\/i> that we have\u2014and people should understand that there\u2019s plenty of data to back it up.<\/p>\n I wanted to bring you back for just a moment. In the piece, you talk about one of the early beginnings of the environmental justice movement, in Afton, North Carolina, and you cite a pastor who was one of the people resisting a landfill there. And what he says is so important: He says, \u201cNobody thought people like us would make a fuss.\u201d And so we really are talking about political voice.<\/p>\n And that seems to be what the Flint story is about, too. It\u2019s not just the water; it\u2019s the way the community was treated when they complained. It really is a story about political agency as well.<\/p>\n TB:<\/b> That\u2019s a main tenet of environmental justice, that the communities that are impacted have a voice, their voices are listened to, and they\u2019re taken into account before decisions are made. And I think that definitely, that\u2019s what you saw in Flint. That was where you had people complaining for months and months and months, and they were literally being dismissed, and told that they were wrong and that there was nothing wrong, even though we now know that it was the state and then the federal regulators who were doing something wrong.<\/p>\n Environmental justice, when I think about it, a lot of times I think of the idea of \u201cnot in my backyard.\u201d There are certain communities that if something were to happen, they\u2019re able to call their local congressman, or their city council member or the mayor, and get a direct line and complain, maybe because they have donated money for a campaign, or maybe because they\u2019re politically connected in some other way, and their concerns are listened to.<\/p>\n But there are other people who, whether they are minorities, or whether they are low-income, or whether they just don\u2019t have a lot of political clout, are often cast aside, and their issues are not championed in the same way as someone who is a little bit more connected would be. And so when you have something \u201cnot in my backyard\u201d from these more politically connected people, it still goes in someone\u2019s backyard, and those backyards are often the people who are low-income, minority or speak a different language.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n Janine Jackson: <\/b>By April 2018, a judge was calling<\/a> an agreement to screen Flint’s children for learning disabilities a \u201cwin\/win situation for all sides.\u201d The state cut off free bottled water for residents, whether or not their tap water was safe. And, to complete the circle, Michigan decided<\/a> to let Nestl\u00e9 extract more spring water to sell for profit.<\/p>\n It shouldn’t take much to connect these things, which is what Peggy Case, president of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation<\/a>, did when she spoke<\/a> with us in April 2018. First, we noted that when media said Nestl\u00e9 faced a fight moving into Michigan, her group was who they were talking about.<\/p>\n Peggy Case: Flint “get[s] money taken away from them; Nestl\u00e9 gets profits given to them, in the form of free water. It\u2019s just completely unjust.”<\/em><\/p><\/div>Peggy Case:<\/b> That\u2019s how our group was formed<\/a>, actually, back in the year 2000, when we discovered that Nestl\u00e9 was pumping<\/a> 400 gallons per minute from a spring well in Mecosta County, Michigan. When they put up the bottle plant was when people realized they were even there. So our organization formed way back then to oppose it, because there were already damages showing up to a stream and a lake, and the environment was already being impacted with that level of withdrawals.<\/p>\n It took a nine-year court battle<\/a> and a million dollars to win a case. It was a partial victory. We didn\u2019t get Nestl\u00e9 out of there. They had to reduce their pumping by a half, down to 218 gallons per minute, and the judge ruled that anything more than that is damaging to the environment.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s a court precedent case that still stands on the books, and it\u2019s important to know that, because almost two years ago, Nestl\u00e9 applied<\/a> for a permit to increase their pumping at a well in Evart, Michigan, 20 miles down the road from where the original battle was, to 400 gallons per minute, the exact amount they were told they really couldn\u2019t take from Mecosta.<\/p>\n It\u2019s spring water, which is bottled as \u201cIce Mountain,\u201d and they were given an increase of 100 extra gallons per minute, with no public comment, no chance for anybody to go through the proper procedure, and we think it really violated the existing water withdrawal laws. Then they tacked on another 150 when they applied for the 400 permit. So it gets very complicated after a while, and your head starts to spin. But the bottom line is that Nestl\u00e9\u2019s wanting to take even more out of a stream that\u2019s already damaged. So of course we\u2019re contesting that again.<\/p>\n And I just wanted to say that I\u2019m really glad that you started your comments out by mentioning Flint, because that\u2019s been really significant for us. We have been connected<\/a> to the Flint battles over water from the beginning. We were invited to come and consult in Flint four years ago, when things first began to develop. We find it totally outrageous that Flint is still in the condition that it\u2019s in, and people are getting shut off from their water.<\/p>\n And you mentioned the high water bills. They\u2019re even higher than you suggested. Some people we know are paying $350 or $400 a month for water that they still can\u2019t drink.<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> Wow.<\/p>\n PC:<\/b> And at the same time, the water that the city claims is good water, now, people are being shut off from that water as well. It\u2019s not just that they\u2019re not delivering bottled water to people; they\u2019re also cutting people off at the tap, in the same way that they\u2019ve been doing<\/a> in Detroit now for a number of years. We think those issues, Detroit and Flint, are intimately related to what\u2019s going on with Ice Mountain.<\/p>\n Before the Flint crisis, the state had cut Flint off of revenue-sharing money that could have been used to fix their infrastructure. They get money taken away from them; Nestl\u00e9 gets profits given to them, in the form of free water. It\u2019s just completely unjust.<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> There\u2019s not been a tremendous amount of coverage, but those stories that have existed, that are deeper, will mention that this has been a twisty road for Nestl\u00e9, and that in fact they were initially rejected<\/a> by the state\u2019s water withdrawal assessment tool, that said, \u201cYou\u2019re going to harm streams, you\u2019re going to harm fish.\u201d<\/p>\n But Nestl\u00e9 appealed that decision, and it\u2019s that appeal that is now being approved. So it\u2019s not as though it was always obvious, you know, there\u2019s no environmental impact, or no harm here.<\/p>\n PC:<\/b> Yeah, the water assessment tool<\/a>, which they got scored<\/a> a D on it\u2014that\u2019s the lowest grade you can get\u2014so they didn\u2019t pass that. So they go to the site-specific review, which is not site-specific at all. It\u2019s a computer model. It takes place in an office. They never visit the actual site to determine what\u2019s really going on there. So in both cases, you\u2019re dealing with computer models; you\u2019re not dealing with reality.<\/p>\n Whereas, we walk out and walk around in the woods and tromp around in the streams and the wetlands, and take reporters who are interested to look at the actual site where the streams are dried up, where Nestl\u00e9 claims that water is pumping at 250 gallons per minute, and you\u2019re looking at a puddle that\u2019s one-foot wide and there\u2019s no water moving in it at all.<\/p>\n They were given a lot of expert testimony, legal testimony, extensive, that was submitted as part of those 80,000 comments. They chose to ignore that as well.<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> I guess it\u2019s a question of, \u201cWho are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?\u201d Because Nestl\u00e9\u2019s natural resources manager for Michigan says<\/a>, \u201cWe never take out more than nature\u2019s bringing back in.\u201d<\/p>\n PC:<\/b> Yes, that\u2019s probably Arlene<\/a>, right?<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> Yes.<\/p>\n PC:<\/b> Yes. We\u2019ve gone to their dog-and-pony shows, which is what we call them, where they do their PR work. It\u2019s very fancy, charts and graphs, and they keep passing the same information out to people all the time.<\/p>\n The other issue is that they create 3,000 plastic bottles\u2014I can\u2019t remember whether it\u2019s in an hour or what. So there\u2019s the plastic bottle issue<\/a> as well. Another story.<\/p>\n JJ:<\/b> What would you say to people who hear that now a company, Nestl\u00e9 or another company, is coming to their community to pump their water out from under them?<\/p>\n PC: <\/b>One of the things that has to happen is that people have to strengthen the laws that are supposed to be protecting the water. Because we do have the\u00a0 public trust doctrine<\/a> in Michigan, which requires that the state of Michigan protect the water for all of us. And if that were actually honored, they wouldn\u2019t be able to come and take it and send it off in bottles elsewhere, and they wouldn\u2019t be allowed to destroy the environment.<\/p>\n In 2008, however, the state of Michigan weakened<\/a> its laws a bit. They gave themselves the loophole<\/a> to send it out as much as they wanted to, in small plastic bottles that end up in the Pacific Ocean. There\u2019s some pieces of that Safe Drinking Water Act<\/a> that could be used by the government to protect the water, but they don\u2019t choose to use those pieces of the law.<\/p>\n So I would tell people, \u201cGet those laws in place that actually make the government protect the water.\u201d<\/p>\n Particularly it\u2019s important that the state laws get strengthened, and that the people who are paying attention continue to put pressure on the various agencies to do it.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n JJ: <\/b>We’ll end on that note of people paying attention and applying pressure. That was Peggy Case of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation<\/a>. Before her you heard Talia Buford of ProPublica<\/b><\/a> and Chris Savage of Electablog.com<\/b><\/a>. And that’s it for CounterSpin<\/b> for this week.<\/p>\n CounterSpin<\/b> is produced by the national media watch group FAIR<\/a>.\u00a0 We\u2019re engineered by Erica Rosato. I’m Janine Jackson. Thanks for listening to CounterSpin<\/b>.<\/p>\n\n![\"Chris](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Chris-Savage-Portrait.jpg\")
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