Media Looks the Other Way: U.S. Military Largest Source of Toxic Waste

Media Looks the Other Way: U.S. Military Largest Source of Toxic Waste

By Andrea Sutton



The U.S. military is the world’s largest polluter, contaminating communities in the United States as well as overseas, according to an article in Censored 2003, a book that uses experts and media analysts to catalogue the 25 stories that the mainstream media most under-cover each year.

The article says that in the United States, communities near military bases suffer increased rates of cancer and birth defects caused by poisoned land, polluted air and contaminated water. Rather than fixing of the problems, the article points out that the Pentagon has pushed for exemptions from environmental laws based on a need for better troop readiness and national defense.

A review of the metropolitan monopoly newspapers in the three largest cities in Texas shows that the issues of military pollution and the military’s lobbying for the environmental law exemptions have been largely under-covered.

In 12 months of 2003, the Houston Chronicle published only one article mentioning the issue. In a biography about former Air Force employee Armando Quintanilla, the Chronicle tells of groundwater contamination in the community near Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio. The contamination, which was caused by solvents used to degrease fuels, leaked from underground tanks and affected 20,000 homes.

The San Antonio Express published three articles about contaminated groundwater and cleanups at both Kelly and Lackland Air Force Bases near San Antonio.

Mentioning the same incident as the Chronicle, the Express went into more detail about the contaminated water, its danger to the community and the decade-long struggle to clean it up.

The Dallas Morning News published one article about water contamination in El Campo, Texas. The water of the small town 70 miles southwest of Houston was contaminated with a cancer-causing solvent that in the past had been used and dumped by military bases.

In terms of the number of story about toxic waste from military bases, alternative news outlets did not do any better than the mainstream media, but they differed greatly in content.

An article in the monthly magazine, Mother Jones, tells of toxic waste caused by the military in Wisconsin to illustrate a problem they say plagues the entire nation. In addition, the article tells of the exemptions sought by the government and the dangers that could lay ahead.

Two articles in www.AlterNet.org, a San Francisco-based news magazine website, focus on the military’s affects domestically as well as in the rest of the world. One article states that 28,000 bombs containing potentially toxic depleted uranium were dropped in Iraq last year. The website points out that many of the more than 14,000 contaminated military sites in the United States are located near minority neighborhoods and poor communities.

The alternative media portray the military’s pollution as a larger social issue that puts the environment and humanity in toxic danger. The alternative outlets question the actions of the government more than the mainstream media.

The mainstream coverage seems to have only a local concern. They tend to focus on the area problem and ignore that similar instances occur around the country and the globe. Perhaps the San Antonio Express had more in-depth coverage of the pollution because the city is surrounded by military bases.