When the News Disappears, So Does Environmental Justice

‘Whose Movement Is It’, a series co-produced by NPQ and the Environmental Justice Oral History Project, is a call to action for those at the forefront of environmental justice decision-making, drawing on insights, hopes, and visions for the future from some of the foundational women organizers of the environmental justice movement.

When residents in southwest Tucson first discovered their drinking water was contaminated with chemicals used to clean airplane parts in 1985, they did not learn about it from government agencies or the county bulletin. The scandal—perpetuated by Hughes Aircraft Co, which spent 30 years dumping trichloroethylene in Tucson waterways—was revealed by the Arizona Daily Star through over a year of consistent reporting. Advocates like Rose Marie Augustine, one of the foundational environmental justice movement leaders in the Southwest United States, said that without that reporting, she would not have been spurred to action. Without reporters like Jane Kay covering the issue consistently for over a year, the predominantly Latinx population of south side Tucson would probably still be drinking that contaminated water.

Journalism has long served as an early warning system and as a form of accountability against environmental harm. Stories like that of Tucson in the early 1980s are emblematic of a larger relationship between communities and institutions that disseminate information.

The birth of the in Warren County, NC, got a similar start. While weeks of protest and arrests would become the launching point for the movement, it was consistent local coverage by outlets like the Daily Tar Heel, the Carolina Times, and photojournalists like then-Duke student Jenny Labalme that pushed the marches into the path of Time Magazine, CBS, and the Washington Post. The Post would go on to compare the marches, songs, and grit of organizers like Dollie Burwell, now considered the mother of the movement, to that of the civil rights movement 20 years prior.

Journalism once again nationalized environmental injustices in 1987, following the landmark Toxic Waste and Race Report, with advocates like Vernice Miller-Travis using first-of-its-kind geospatial data to highlight the disproportionate placement of toxic facilities in predominantly Black, Indigenous, and communities of color. The report gained traction after The New York Times reporter Lena Williams published a review of the study for a national audience. The trend can be seen with more contemporary issues, as in 2014, journalist Curt Guyette used his position at the ACLU of Michigan to surface community concerns and scientific findings that uncovered lead contamination of drinking water in Flint, MI.

The examples are innumerable; even in 2026, small and large news organizations alike have continued reporting on the rollback of environmental and climate policies and oversight by the Trump administration.

The Role of Journalism in a Changing News Landscape

And as history shows, when the media disappears, so does political and social accountability, with the communities that have the least political capital paying the price.

Accountability journalism has become increasingly difficult with the consolidation of local newsrooms and the shuttering of climate desks at major outlets. According to a 2025 report from the Medill School for Journalism at Northwestern University, nearly 3,500 local newsrooms have shut their doors since 2005. This accounts for approximately two closures per week, leaving over 50 million people across the country in “news deserts”—areas with limited access to credible or comprehensive local news. At the same time, climate coverage remains episodic, and the deeper narrative and cause of environmental injustice and climate change is missing.

At the same time, the news landscape has gradually concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals, with outlets like the Washington Post coming under fire for potential editorial interference by their owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. At the national level, the Trump administration attempted to cut $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds National Public Radio (NPR), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and hundreds of local stations nationwide. Although a federal judge ruled the administration’s attempts to defund public broadcasting unconstitutional, the action marks the most recent in a longstanding effort to privatize and centralize news media to the detriment of the public.

In both cases, these cuts disproportionately hit rural, poor, and historically disinvested communities that rely on politically neutral outlets for information on anything from extreme weather in the area to local education, public health, and municipal government updates. And as history shows, when the media disappears, so does political and social accountability, with the communities that have the least political capital paying the price.

In this moment of misinformation and disinvestment in the media landscape, there is an opportunity for other information and data disseminators to bolster local news.

The role of news media in movement and advocacy work is longstanding. Black reporters like Ida B. Wells and Walter White were prolific for their documentation of the Jim Crow violence and the often-hidden atrocities of the American South. During the civil rights movement, reporters like the First Lady of the Black Press, Ethel Payne, grew to prominence for their accountability coverage of the White House in the 1950s. Collectives like Word in Black and the National Newspaper Publishers Association have attempted to keep the power and legacies of Black media and narrative alive through their networks of hundreds of independent, local, and Black news outlets.

Additionally, when given the opportunity, communities have shown time and time again how much they value their local stations. In Wilmington, North Carolina, when the local WHQR faced a $174,000 budget hole after federal cuts, the community raised over $200,000 in three days. Similar fundraisers have taken place with Houston Public Media in Texas and WYSO in Ohio.

Environmental justice is only possible through visibility; as such, journalism should be treated as essential infrastructure

However, individual fundraising cannot replace institutional support. In Spokane, WA, following the passing of the founder of The Black Lens, a small-time publication providing nuanced reporting of the city’s small Black population, the local paper partnered with foundations, community members, and Gonzaga University, raising just under $100,000 to keep the publication going. Their partnership model highlights the promise of resource pooling and the establishment of institutional support for news media. In this moment of misinformation and disinvestment in the media landscape, there is an opportunity for other information and data disseminators to bolster local news.

In the context of environmental justice, this partnership model has been tested; according to Peggy Shepard, the co-founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, when a community in New York City began raising concerns about poor air quality in the 1980s, their concerns were dismissed. It was only after researchers at Columbia University studied the area and connected the dots between diesel pollution and children’s development that community concerns were validated and gained attention. And rather than publishing findings in academic journals, the researchers instead made the data publicly available, sharing directly with residents and facilitating a community-owned research model that was then connected to local environmental reporting.

Environmental justice is only possible through visibility; as such, journalism should be treated as essential infrastructure.

Until policymakers prioritize public media and local news infrastructure, it is up to the public and other information-disseminating institutions to cultivate cross-sector partnerships that keep information accurate and flowing to the masses. The greatest opportunity is foundational support through nonprofit newsrooms and institutions of higher learning; this includes academic institutions funding journalism partnerships, leveraging student and educational reporting to fill local information gaps, generating and distributing publicly accessible data platforms, and using their expansive platforms to uplift independent and community-driven news.

Academic institutions like Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, in partnership with the Google News Initiative, as well as the University of Southern California Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism, are already filling gaps made by recent media cuts, developing fellowships, and supplying thousands of dollars of grant funds for environmental, climate, and public health reporting across the country. With a particular emphasis on deeply data-driven investigations, they’re bridging the gap between community narrative and accountability journalism by funding, mentoring, and resourcing the reporters closest to these stories directly.

“Articles used to come out in the newspaper about what they were doing with the water contamination. We need a newspaper that doesn’t charge; we need a newspaper through the communities, so that everybody knows what’s going on,” said Rose Marie Augustine about her community in Tucson.

Without local news, issues that were once an everyday note in the daily paper have become a footnote on television, if that. It’s time we stopped treating such fundamental institutions for accountability as afterthoughts.