Lead in Water

I share the disdain of many people for our media, but not because they're too liberal or too conservative, or too whatever. I accuse them of other things. I accuse them of being lazy and incompetent. Today I'm adding to that list irresponsible.

The National Resources Defense Council a few days ago released a report indicating that more than 5300 communities nationwide, like Flint, Michigan, suffer from some for of lead contamination in their drinking water. The first question I want answered is, do I live in one of those communities?

If you read about this story on CNN or NBC, you wouldn't immediately know. To their credit, CNN, provided a link to instructions for investigating your own water for lead. But instead of linking to the NRDC report with interactive maps that let you zoom in on your part of the country, they created their own static maps that make that difficult.

I don't foolishly think that news organizations exist for the public good. They exist to make money for their owners. The marginal cost of adding a link to a news article in negligible, which is another way of saying it costs them nothing. To leave out links to answers when 18 million people are being poisoned, that's irresponsible.