Thank FSM for independent progressive home-town papers.
It’s now Day 8 since our non-profit investigative group, Insightus, issued our exclusive report on widespread uranium contamination of well water in the seat of North Carolina’s state capital, Wake County.
Number of conventional news organizations which have run with the story so far: zero. But the state capital’s major newspaper, the Raleigh News & Observer, has a hard-hitting front page story today about what a nice place Apex is to live in. And one of the capital’s major TV stations, WRAL, has a thing about a thing Trump said.
It’s not like we weren’t trying to get this story in front of journalists. Every significant reporter in NC received a personal email notification when our report broke, and our server logs suggest that most of them soon viewed that article. And there they learned (for the first time anywhere) that 400,000+ North Carolinians are at risk of chronic uranium poisoning, and that state and county health agencies have known this for at least six years...and have either gone out of their way to bury the story, or are so crippled by budget cuts via our Republican-controlled state legislature that they’re simply not up to the task of addressing this public health crisis.
But the good news is: NC’s edgy, progressive indie paper, Indy Week, is on the job. They independently reviewed our data, publicly vetted and expanded on our findings, viewed the resulting conclusions with appropriate concern, and have begun making state and county health agencies’ lives a little uncomfortable by interviewing officials and submitting public records requests. And rumor has it that that’s just the start of what may prove to be a multi-part series regarding this public health threat and the bad politics that have hidden it from view till now.
Yet another reason to read and support your local independent progressive press.