What a mess in East Palestine, and probably not the mess you are thinking.
Today, Joe Biden is visiting East Palestine, Ohio as part of a campaign stop to see the destination of the train wreck that spewed toxic chemicals into the waterways there. It’s about a year too late, as Trump was the first to go out there immediately and gain the support of the community, which happens to be a major issue that I am sure plenty of people will be Monday morning quarterbacking as the exact moment where Biden went wrong when he loses the vote again there. He’s been failing to show up for that area for a long time, decades before the train wreck happened. He now looks like he is pandering ahead of an election, and he is. The Mayor already endorsed Trump, so it is probably a lost cause.
Nonetheless, the ones who really fumbled the ball here are my progressive friends in the media — many of whom I think were unwittingly duped into running narratives that ultimately benefited the coal and nuclear industry. David Sirota, a public relations guy pretending to be a journalist, was one of the worst offenders. He had just started a news website called The Lever and used this to build his platform while he did “public interest public relations” that he told people was journalism. I intend to write more on the difference and why it is problematic on a different channel soon, but for now my previous piece defines some terms here. I am not exactly certain that Sirota’s brand of public interest public relations is always in the best interest of the public.
To be clear, it is a disaster, and they need help. They did not need opportunists to come in and profit from it by putting money in their own pockets spreading narratives to promote their media business. I will explain how it all happened here.
On that day
I personally grew up in Avon Lake, Ohio. It’s just outside of Cleveland, near where former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner was running for Ohio’s 11th congressional district special election in March 2021 and then again in 2022. Turner was very vocal about East Palestine, and I want to explain why it was problematic, especially since she had just lost an election, and was looking to brand herself as a journalist at the time.
At any rate, Avon Lake is the location of the Ford Plant where my father worked as part of UAW most of my life until he died in 2006. It is a wealthy, mostly white town, where celebrities often go to hide out, located on the shores of Lake Erie. It’s also the location of the recently closed Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. power plant, which was on Lake Road which runs all the way down the lake into Cleveland with stunning views. Lake Road is filled with extravagant and wealthy mansions on the beach. It’s gorgeous, and I often tell people in Cleveland to drive down Lake Road to visit, as well as Mitchell’s ice cream, where I was one of the first employees way back in the day when it first opened, and I was in college. I was blessed to live there, as many of the working-class people who work at the Ford Plant like my dad are often are priced out of the area. At any rate, when I was a child, I remember walking to pay our electric bill at the power plant next door. That’s how close it was to where we lived. The company would eventually become part of FirstEnergy Corp, and that is partially what this story is really about.
When the train wreck in East Palestine had happened, I was actually there on an extended stay taking care of my mother who has Alzheimers. My mom was born near East Palestine, and I have relatives on my mother’s and father’s side who still live near there — on both the Ohio and Pennsylvania sides — all within a 40-mile radius of that region. I grew up visiting relatives there. I mention the locations because I want to be clear East Palestine is about 2 hour drive from Cleveland — a seemingly miserable trip as a child. Located on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania, East Palestine is not near where Nina Turner ran for office. Nina Turner ran for office where First Energy, a major employer and source of money is located. Until recently, the sports stadium in Cleveland was named after First Energy as well. These are all highly relevant points to the story I am about to tell.
When the train wreck happened, I had been sitting on the couch next to my sickened mother, along with her caregiver watching the news. We had turned on Spectrum News in Ohio, which had been pretty much always running when I was there taking care of my mom, to give me some stimulation and prevent my own brain from going crazy.
That day, it just so happened that Larry Householder, former Ohio House speaker, was on trial (and now convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison) as part of a massive $60 million federal corruption case, where he was accused of operating a 501(c)4 dark money organization for accepting bribes to give First Energy a billion dollars in taxpayer money. This move had major environmental impacts including polluting the local water to say the least. What happened in East Palestine was a drop in the bucket compared to the implications of this bill. I was familiar with the case, because I spent my time trying to prevent it from happening, so I was explaining it to my mom’s caregiver.
The entire Ohio Statehouse, Governor, and Attorney General were being implicated and investigated. It is still being carried out today.
According to the EPA, the train wreck happened February 3, 2023 at 8:55 PM EST. Immediately, all the coverage of the trial on HB6 turned to East Palestine. I sat right there and watched it all happen. What ensued next was a national media circus where reporters mobbed the small town covering it. There were entire teams from major national news outlets rushing down there immediately.
Ohio’s HB6
In 2019, Ohio’s HB6 is what David Roberts at Vox and many others claimed as “the worst energy bill of the 21st century.” That was an understatement. It later proved that it was far worse than that as described above. I was spending my time in 2019 working with environmental groups trying to do everything I could to prevent this bill from happening.
There is a lot of press coverage at the national level for East Palestine, but crickets on HB6.
Enter Nina Turner and David Sirota
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people say the “mainstream media,” which I am still not sure what that term means, is not covering something, when they in fact are. Wall to wall coverage. One of the ways that I have seen conspiracy theorists manipulate narratives is by telling people that no one else is covering something but them, and so you should only listen to them. These are some of the ways that propaganda and disinformation are pervading our media ecosystem. We don’t even need to worry about Russia and China.
That misleading news hacking is what I saw Nina Turner and David Sirota particularly doing when East Palestine happened. They were on a mission to convince you that no one was talking about it but them, and ultimately their narrative was benefiting themselves, but also the coal and nuclear industry, as I describe here.
Nina Turner’s first tweet about East Palestine was when it made national news that a reporter had got arrested for covering it — five days after it had happened. Turner later deleted the tweet as the original narrative was misleading and had been first spread by conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Green, as Newsweek clarifies. The arrest of the reporter was being used to sell a narrative that this was something that was not being covered at all. No one was paying attention to this poor town devastated by a train wreck.
When I saw that tweet, I knew something was very wrong. I went to college at Ashland University, which is well-known for their Ashbrook Center, an independent program that churned out some of our top conservative minds in media and politics today. To be clear, I was NOT interested in politics at that time. I went to that university because it was the cheapest and most affordable when I was 18 — largely because they gave me a theater scholarship and a massive amount of grants because my mom was born handicapped.
At any rate, I mention this side tangent because my friends who were part of that program went on to do public relations for the Governor. I know some of these people and sat in classes with them personally. While I disagree with them politically — I know for a fact they are not banning reporters from press conferences because it goes against the code of ethics from the school we all went. Furthermore, as I will explain in this piece, Mike Dewine had every incentive for reporters to cover East Palestine rather than the trial that was happening at that time in which he was implicated. It made no sense. That’s why he kept giving press conferences there drinking the water. He was begging people to show up to distract from his own legal troubles.
I have given anecdotal evidence, but now I will give you analytical evidence that there was not a media blackout in East Palestine ever. A search of professional media monitoring databases Muckrack, TV Eyes, and Nexis indicated an overwhelming amount of national media coverage over those past days via every single form of media available. Many of them had teams there since the event happened on Feb 3. In fact, I observed that the coverage was overriding the attention to the highly important HB6 issues. A lot of people in power with money had an interest in East Palestine dominating the news cycle. My search turned up 16,748 articles about East Palestine, Ohio from February 3–8, 2023 — far more than other similar train incidents received in the past. I found only 37 articles about HB6 during that time period.
If you didn’t see it, I might ask: were you even looking at the news? No? You tuned out “mainstream media” a long time ago? Well, that might have been the first problem and probably the reason why you missed it. You have now made yourself open to and vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
My facebook memories of this exact day one year ago, show me that Donald Trump Jr. and Nina Turner and David Sirtoa were tweeting nearly identical messages. Both of them trying to get you to follow a “news” source by discrediting other news sources. As someone who specializes in media ethics, I am very alarmed by this practice.
At any rate, the real issue here is that Nina Turner and David Sirota ignored the long-standing issues in the community to focus on a salacious narrative about workers’ rights and even racial issues, taking on their own personal objectives and pushing them through, instead of observing the real issues at the core here.
East Palestine’s environmental and economic problems did not start on February 3, 2023, but if you ask Nina Turner and David Sirota, it sure did seem like it.
When a professional reporter from Grist raised the past environmental and economic concerns in the area, an onslaught of harassment came on targeted at her from progressive supporters whipped into a rage online. She later wrote this piece that is actually one of the most informed journalistic articles I have seen on the subject: The Upper Ohio River Valley has been layered in industrial pollution for centuries, and residents are fed up. She continues to cover the issue well today, reporting it is still unsafe. Many of those who rushed to cover this issue had no interest in that community before it happened, and once the noise died down, they went back to having no interest. They were simply opportunistic.
I am not a stranger to this either. Over a decade ago, on behalf of many environmental groups, I had brought Ohio residents to meet with Congress and media and the EPA to talk about the problem of toxic coal ash in their communities. We did a press stunt in front of Cass Sunstein’s house dressed up like “Ash Sunstein,” in 2009 when he was named the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. I make this point because environmental issues are not new to this area nor me. It’s been covered by outstanding journalists, but overlooked by the public and officials, for a long time. Reporters Matt Daly and Fred Frommer at Associated Press and Kate Sheppard had done a great job covering the topics in the past. There was no lack of coverage, because I worked on it for well over a decade. There was a lack of people reading it and doing anything about it. I have done public interest public relations and advocacy on water issues ranging all across the board. It’s always rooted in community and not my own agenda. I personally spent about a decade doing public relations on water issues for an organization in Washington DC as well, and the topic of fish kills and intersex fish is one that I worked on extensively.
Few seemed to note that East Palestine was right next to the largest coal ash waste site in the United States, due in large part to First Energy. They were sued for it in 2012. The ones behind the HB6 bill that was on trial for massive corruption were the ones who were polluting that area and distracting you from seeing them get caught. The water and air there was already massively contaminated, and it had been very apparently causing people to be sick for some time. The train might have been salacious, but the problem was already there. Nothing about this was new. The first thing I thought when this happened was, of course there are chemicals in that water, long before Norfolk Southern. While it is true that worker’s rights for those operating a train are very important, that’s not really what this is about. What is the reason why that train is running through that community carrying chemicals in the first place? It has long been a dumping site for chemicals. Adding chemicals to chemicals is eventually going to lead to an explosion.
I want to stress that I have been working on these issues for A LONG time. I have never seen David Sirota nor Nina Turner take an interest in them until they could profit from it. I saw David Sirota do so many East Palestine fundraisers that I was unable to even count them all to give a number for this article because I lost count. I wonder how much money that man made off these poor people in Ohio while advocating for a cause that, while noble, had nothing to do with them. And on top of that, how much change is he making versus money in his own pocket. This is wrong, and it is a scam.
Nina Tuner and David Sirota had an interest to promote themselves as journalists, but they were not doing journalism. They were doing advocacy for their own personal interests. In fact, Nina Turner had never been to East Palestine, and it took her three weeks to show up there as she continued to talk on and on over social media. She sure did talk about being a Black woman from Ohio during that time to mislead people that she was advocating for a community, when in fact, she really and clearly didn’t know it at all. She had no past of advocating for them as I describe below. This was an opportunity for them to fundraise for their own objectives.
When East Palestine happened it was a cesspool of disinformation that ultimately hurt the community more than helped it:
· Automatically, false rhetoric, especially on twitter started to make #OhioChernobyl trend. The irony is that the real nuclear disaster was HB6. I do not think this was coincidental.
· Disinformation ranging from inaccurate maps to false images and narratives were widespread.
· Claims about racial issues resulted in me getting fundraising emails from groups like Color of Change to protect Black communities from this disaster. This infuriated me. East Palestine is nearly 99 percent white according to census data, and this was an environmental issue affecting a white working class community — something anyone who had ever been to that area could clearly tell you.
We need to do better as progressives to not spread disinformation. In an environmental crisis, we need to have credibility and look at past context, especially when recognizing ourselves as journalists. Progressives were the biggest offenders of opportunistic disinformation here. They wanted to advocate for issues that were important to them rather than cover the community.
Turner and HB6
I had been frustrated about Turner and HB6 in the past. In March 2021, when HB6 was repealed, and the investigations started playing out, it just so happened to be the same exact time that Nina Turner put her name in to run for political office. I could not figure out, if she wanted to go after dark money and environmental issues, as she claimed she did, why she said NOTHING about the biggest one happening in her own district. I have seen her do nothing about this. She refused to comment when she could have made a difference. It also would have been a huge point to run on because Ohio residents were outraged. As far as I am aware, Nina Turner did nothing to prevent HB6 from happening in her own hometown or mention it in her own campaign materials while running for Congress. Claiming to be a champion on environmental issues when you were silent on the biggest one is insane. What are you going to do in Congress to prevent this from ever happening again? Nothing. Apparently. This was an issue that made every single person regardless of of political party in Ohio angry, except those in power and wealthy, where was she?
I have no idea why. What I can tell you is that wealthy people in Turner’s district, and the one I grew up in, stood to make money off this deal, on the backs of the working class people in areas like East Palestine. She literally sold them down the lake — where intentional or not. I found it highly disrespectful to even mention them now. I still for the life of me can’t figure out why she was silent for years about HB6.
After endless opportunistic tweets I saw Turner spitting out about East Palestine, on February 10, 2023, I asked Nina Turner publicly why she had not said anything about the billion dollar nuclear and coal energy buyout that would have benefited the wealthy in her district. She sent me a tweet about the First Energy sports stadium claiming she had. That’s not the same thing! I am not talking about the sports stadium. That was offensive. I am talking about the huge scandal about First Energy in your district. I pointed out that she had dozens of tweets about East Palestine, not in her district, and zero about the First Energy scandal in her district. She blocked me. I was fuming mad. I was hoping she would prove me wrong and tell me she actually had been trying to do something behind the scenes or that I missed.
To be clear, I had spent so much time trying to mobilize people to vote for her, fundraising for her, writing press releases in her support, and now I feel like she had duped me. She has lost my support forever, and I used to be one of her greatest fans. In 2020, when Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race, I was sitting on intimate press calls with Turner to continue promoting the movement. Long before the Bernie campaign, I’ve known and am good friends with many of the people who work on her press team and done public relations on social issues with them. I spent a long time supporting Turner— sometimes paid for groups that are around her and most of the time for free out of the kindness of my own heart. I couldn’t believe that she was going to sit here and say she was concerned with freedom of speech and press rights, when she just blocked one of her greatest fans and campaigners, with family in her District and nearby the East Palestine train wreck, for asking a question about the huge environmental scandal taking place there. That is absurd.
***I am fully aware that Avon Lake, Ohio is just outside where Nina Turner ran for office. I want to be clear that I grew up there and make the point about the wealth and First Energy. My mom and entire family does not live there anymore, they moved a few minutes down the road. They now live in Cuyahoga County where Nina Turner ran, and that is why I was there.
But the real important part here is less about that and more about the dangers in both our actual environment and our media environment. That’s why I write. I am just one woman not getting paid anything at all here, and I feel a civic duty to comment about these issues. Please follow me, but also excuse typos.