Secret Oil Spills and Grand Intentions

Between 300 and 500 gallons of oil spilled into the Grand River last Sunday night and I didn’t even hear about it until yesterday. And that was through a pal’s Facebook status.

Apparently an equipment malfunction at a local power plant caused oil to breach a containment area. I can’t remember the last time our local utility, the Lansing Board of Water and Light, caused this kind of environmental contamination so I was pretty surprised to learn about this yesterday.

Granted, I don’t watch a lot of local television but I do listen to Michigan Public Radio and surf the net so I would have expected to run across more about this mishap.

Oil absorption materials have been deployed and booms have been installed so I suppose there’s not much more to say. I just wish the people who decide what the populace needs to know would have shared more about what happened to a local stretch of the 252-mile-long Grand River, Michigan’s longest, and what’s being done to protect it from now on.

My friend Peter Richards used Facebook yesterday afternoon to lament the fact that this story wasn't getting the media coverage he thought it deserved. Someone we know who writes for MLive.com, an online news site owned by Booth Newspapers, of course refuted this, insisting that she can write news stories until the cows come home but she can’t make people read ‘em. I’m not sure why she’s appointed herself Defender of All Media but her implication that newsworthy stories are covered adequately in this town is about as accurate as saying Donald Trump is modest or Mark Zuckerberg is strapped for cash.

When I visited MLive.com earlier today, I immediately saw a story on the front “page” announcing the opening of MLive’s downtown Lansing office that comprised 21 paragraphs. I saw nothing on the main page about the Grand River oil spill. I did find something on the incident that was posted at 10:43 last night. Guess how many paragraphs were devoted to this story? Just 11. As I shared with Peter, I’ve been inundated with stories about what an ignorant jackass Dave Agema is – the former state lawmaker and current GOP official recently insulted homosexuals on his Facebook page – but since environmental degradation isn’t about sex or controversy, I guess it warrants less coverage.

I realize this isn’t a new dichotomy – the claims that 1) news coverage is varied and adequate but the consumer just has to do a little searching, and 2) if it bleeds, it leads and if it involves sex acts or organs, even better – but I’m sick of it. And I’m sick of sanctimonious scribes who argue for the sake of argument and wouldn’t know a relevant news story if it landed on their laptops.

Thank goodness Facebook offers a blocking option.