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apply for next year's course here >> 408 application
In the fall of 2003, Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism offered a new course called “Investigative Reporting: Environmental Issues”
A small group of upper level undergraduate and graduate students studied investigative reporting techniques and analyzed news stories about the environment. They discussed in-depth reporting with print and broadcast journalists from throughout the country who currently cover the environment.
Law enforcement officials, academics, state regulators, activists and others explained some of the current environmental issues facing Michigan. The class then tackled its own environmental investigative project.
The group decided to inventory the historic contaminated sites throughout the state and look at the bureaucratic, legal and fiscal challenges to cleaning them up. Incredibly, no media organization had ever taken such a comprehensive look at Michigan’s toxic legacy.
The task sounded deceptively simple. But the students soon encountered the same problems that face any reporter working an in-depth project. Initially the state’s data bases of polluted sites promised to be a trove of information on which to hang the stories. But the journalists soon found them incomplete, and that regulators in different regions had different interpretations of compiling them.
Balance required interviews that explained how relaxing some regulations spurred economic development, a trade-off that many in the state believe to be positive.
Getting a sense of Michigan’s contaminated landscape required interviews and record searches to interpret politics and the complex changing of laws that decide who has to pay to clean up pollution.
And to get a sense of whether sites would ever come clean, the students had to delve into murky budgets and funding strategies.
Among their findings:
* Michigan’s voter-approved cleanup bonds are running out much faster than sites will be cleaned. The only consistent source of funding is unclaimed bottle deposits that instead of paying for new cleanups, must be used to oversee the cleanups already underway.
* The state law governing toxic sites has little power to force most property owners to clean up pollution unless they’re proven responsible. Court battles last years.
* Funding shortfalls have meant little or no oversight of some cleanups by those responsible for contamination.
* A federal fund to pay for cleanups at Superfund sites - the worst in the nation - ran out in September. Michigan has 67 Superfund sites.
* More than 9,000 underground storage tanks have leaked petroleum products in the state, posing the single greatest threat to the water that almost half the state’s population drinks. New spills are reported faster than old ones are cleaned up.
* Contaminated lake and river sediments that continuously poison the Great Lakes are a widespread and expensive threat. Federal authorities say one-fifth of Michigan’s shoreline holds contaminated sediments.
* Fourteen of the most contaminated Great Lakes waterways are in Michigan, according to international experts. Some estimates are that it will cost about $119 million to clean up the sediments at nine of them; problems at the other five are so massive that costs haven’t been calculated.
* Contaminants at sites across the state have been linked to cancer, developmental problems, organ failure and brain damage. Children are most at risk.
To drive home the impact of these issues, the students localized the four-story project for major communities across the state. One student produced a radio spot (LINK) that aired on Michigan Public Radio.
Investigative Environmental Reporting is next offered in the fall of 2004. Applications for the class are here. (LINK to APPLICATION) For information, contact course instructor David Poulson at poulson@msu.edu.
The students in the 2003 muckraking course took four stories about contamination in Michigan and localized them for each of the following regions: (click on the city name to view the stories)