Yes, it's the obvious reason
A recent poll explains why the Intelligencer didn't carry last week's AP story and map that showed a significant rise in local mortality rates from Trump's rollback of EPA emission standards
Last week the Associated Press provided a detailed analysis of the recently-released EPA analysis of the health effects of President Trump's rollback of Obama's EPA standards. (I wrote about it here.) The AP article included the above map which very-effectively visualized a key finding of the study:
Nationally, the EPA says, 350 to 1,500 more people would die each year under Trump’s plan. But it’s the northern two-thirds of West Virginia and the neighboring part of Pennsylvania that would be hit hardest, by far, according to Trump’s EPA.
Trump’s rollback would kill an extra 1.4 to 2.4 people a year for every 100,000 people in those hardest-hit areas, compared to under the Obama plan, according to the EPA analysis. For West Virginia’s 1.8 million people, that would be equal to at least a couple dozen additional deaths a year.
The map never made it into our papers despite our local area being the most affected by the rollback. Why not? The results of a recent national poll provides the likely reason:
Voters are less likely to support the Trump administration’s plan to regulate coal plant emissions if they’re told about a government analysis that estimates the rule would result in more than 1,000 additional deaths each year.
Forty-five percent of respondents said they would be more likely to oppose the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Affordable Clean Energy rule once they learn that it would lead to approximately 1,400 more annual deaths than the Obama administration Clean Power Plan it's replacing, according to a poll released this week by Politico and Morning Consult.
Last month, we once again were treated to an Intelligencer self-congratulatory editorial on the occasion of the anniversary of its founding:
Both in our reporting and our editorial leadership, our allegiance is to the well-being of our neighbors here in the Ohio Valley. Special interests and powerful politicians seeking to influence us are wasting their time.
Their allegiance is "to the well-being of our neighbors." Which ones? The ones who own the coal mines and the politicians who support them? I don't see much concern for the rest of us.
