THE ANDERSON FILES

Amid Ohio train disaster, labor and environmentalists need to unite

BY DAVE ANDERSON

After the toxic train disaster in Ohio, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said, “East Palestine is overwhelmingly white and it’s politically conservative. That shouldn’t be relevant but ... it very much is. Imagine if this happened in, well, the favored cities of Philadelphia and Detroit. In both cases, had it affected the rich or the favored poor, it would be the lead of every news channel in the world.”

Media Matters, a progressive webbased research group monitoring rightwing misinformation, said several other rightwing commentators on Fox and other similar outfits also claimed that those “favored poor” get all the breaks. Wink wink. Some were more explicit. Turning Point USA founder and radio talk show host Charlie Kirk yelped about a “war on white people” waged by the “Biden regime,” which is allowing the “poisoning” of “citizens of eastern Ohio.”

Researchers Ruby Seavey and Payton Armstrong of Media Matters say this is wrong. They note that the “inadequate coverage [of the East Palestine disaster] reflects a pattern Media Matters has consistently documented: The media’s coverage of environmental and public health crises — particularly when they affect communities of color — is frequently poor, both in quantity and quality.”

They say the rightwing media’s assertion that “the government’s poor response is because residents are white conservatives is unsupported and nonsensical. In fact, mounting evidence suggests that white people receive more aid from the federal government than people of color following disasters.”

In this year alone, more than a dozen train derailments had already taken place in America before the East Palestine disaster. There have been several more since. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there’s an average of 1,705 train derailments every year, with 54,570 occurring between 1990 to 2021.

For years, railroad workers have tried to get the nation’s attention.