Jordan Chariton of Status Coup News is a leading investigative journalist and the author of We The Poisoned: Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans, a major exposé of one of the most outrageous scandals of our time. Chariton has spent extensive time on the ground in Flint even as the mainstream media has lost interest and moved on. He explains why every one of us should understand this story of the poisoning of a city, which was not an accident and for which there has still been no justice.

Nathan J. Robinson 

The Flint water crisis began over a decade ago now, and you've just come out with a book about it. Some might say you're revisiting it, but I think that you are reporting on a story that has not yet ended. So tell us why you thought it was so important to do all the work that you have in documenting this crisis in this book and putting it out now.

Jordan Chariton 

The book came out this year, but it's the manifestation of eight years of ongoing reporting. And really, besides getting the story and building the sources and getting the reporting, the biggest challenge has been keeping this in the news as an active, ongoing disaster because, like so many other stories—hell, we have mass shootings in this country, and the media stops covering them after a day or two—the media stopped covering this about eight years ago for the most part. I have stayed on it, and it's clear to me, based on my reporting and just to my eyes and ears, that this is still an unfolding disaster. I don't even like the word “crisis" because people are kind of numb to that word. It's a disaster. I was just there two weeks ago. People are still showing me rashes they're getting from the water on their skin. People are still showing me images and video of brown water coming out of their taps. People have cancer. Cancer is through the roof right now in Flint. Some studies are showing certain types of cancer are up 300 percent, compared to before the water switch. So this is not, as the media described it, some tragedy from the past that's now in recovery. It's an ongoing disaster, and it's an ongoing cover-up.

A lot of people, particularly older Americans, have a kind of nostalgia for Watergate as the quintessential government cover-up. In my view, this is the actual Watergate because nobody died from Watergate. It was just a couple of knuckleheads breaking into an office. If the president hadn't been involved, I don't really think anyone would care. In this case, people are actively dying. This is a massive cover-up. We'll get into it, but I'm talking heinous things, and it involves the federal government, the state government, the city and local government, including Wall Street banks as well.

Robinson 

Well, yes, it's shocking. There are so many revelations in your book that leave the reader's jaw on the floor, but I want to just dwell for a moment on what you were saying there about the media's lack of sufficient coverage of this. Early in the book, you talk about your history in the mainstream media. You've seen the inside of Fox News and MSNBC, and you know how stories are chosen and the amorality is incredibly disturbing. In the book, you mentioned proposing to do a pretty solid story interviewing the homeless, and an MSNBC producer just shot that down, being very explicit about the fact that that's not going to get ratings. It's really extraordinary just how all of your most cynical takes on how the inside of the media works and how stories are chosen are true, which is why you're an independent journalist now.

Chariton 

Yes. I started at Fox. I didn't even know that much about politics. I just needed a job, so I just said, hey, it's a TV network, and I thought it was great. I quickly learned that it was the Republican National Convention. But, when I started at Fox, they were covering Natalee Holloway and her disappearance, non-stop, 24/7. I'm not saying it wasn’t unfortunate that a young woman was kidnapped and killed, but they certainly don't cover Black children missing like they did her. So they covered her relentlessly. I remember when I was at MSNBC, there was a Georgetown student that Rush Limbaugh called a slut—Sandra Fluke. They covered that relentlessly.

Robinson 

Incessantly. Everyone knew her name.

Chariton 

Meanwhile, I was walking to MSNBC in New York City, and there was just rampant homelessness, and I remember talking to my executive producer saying, you should send me out as a producer—I wasn't on camera at the time—I really think it would be interesting to talk to homeless people and get their stories. “Yeah, that's not going to rate, but good for you to, you know, care.” And the same thing has happened with Flint, by the way. I could write a whole book just on the media burying this. I pitched Mother Jones back in the day. It's in the book, but I obtained evidence that the former governor of Michigan and his top officials just deleted their phones right before the launch of the Flint criminal investigation—kind of a big deal—and they asked me, is there a Trump angle to this? So I had a friend who worked at NBC. She put me in touch with an editor I was pitching a story on. I got evidence that the former governor's right-hand man—think Tony Soprano's consigliere—was going around Flint offering payoffs to sick Flint residents. And the NBC News Editor basically told me, in a nice way, that for the amount of resources we'd have to put into this, we don't think there's enough return, meaning: we don't think there'd be enough clicks or interest. I tried explaining to her, actually, there's a lot of interest, just most people don't know.

I'm actually building an independent outlet based on these stories, where people are paying 5 to 10 bucks a month because I'm covering these stories. So basically, outlets, for lack of better word, were saying people don't care. Even trying to get a publisher—I had several bigger publishers tell me, we really admire your work, I'm glad someone's doing this, but we don't think this is commercially viable. So it's really a disaster because, to me, we live in a tribal country, and everything is team red versus team blue. We all need water to live. Conservatives need it, liberals need it, progressives need it, and people without labels need it. But the media has kind of—not just Flint—failed to investigate and cover water contamination, air pollution, and soil contamination. And with all these stories, it's not just the contamination, it's toxic government that's covering all these things up.

Robinson 

And just to underline the point you've been making there, obviously, I think many editors and producers are a little bit foolish about what they think people want versus what people actually want. I think that you're right that there is interest in exposés of government killing you. I think people want to know. I think people want to know about wrongdoing in their country at the highest levels of power. I think they actually would like to find out about that. But also, as you point out, people look at Watergate as the classic case of blowing the lid off corruption. But what happened in Flint was so outrageous, so despicable, that even separate from ratings—okay, let's agree that the Flint story might not even be popular. I think it would be because I think, as I say, people want to know when their government is killing them—of all the stories that a journalistic outlet should cover, corruption, homicide, cover-ups, financial malfeasance, and the poisoning—as the subtitle of your book points out—of 100,000 people [is something that should be covered]. I emphasize this just to say—just to scream—this is what we're talking about here. The human stakes of this story that you covered are huge.

Chariton 

And, by the way, it is sexy. It's got all the elements that I don't even think the best filmmaker could come up with. We're talking about political payoffs. We're talking about destruction of evidence. We're talking about witness tampering. We're talking about residents—the top activists—having their brakes cut from their car after they were a little too loud against the government. We're talking about evidence that the governor himself knew about the deadly water and was in on a cover-up for 16 months to bury it, including phone calls at 4 a.m.—two days of phone calls between the governor, his chief of staff, the health director—22 phone calls in two days at the same time the Legionnaires' disease outbreak, which killed a lot of people, is spreading. We're talking about so many things that even one of those things I just told you—the payoffs, destruction of evidence—is a story on its own.

In the book, I have stories of poor mothers who wanted to call Child Protective Services on themselves to get clean water for their kids. I have stories where I'm sitting on porches with 7- or 8-year-olds who can't count to 10 anymore, or are forgetting the alphabet. So you see the damage up close. I saw it, and I tried to express it in the book. Stories of people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, dropping like flies—dying. And for me, it was the moment that kind of radicalized me as a journalist.

I'm seeing all this—I've been there over 20 times—and then you go back to your hotel and put on TV, and it's Don Lemon talking about Trump's latest tweet in 2016 or whatever it was. Such an alternative reality. I saw this at Standing Rock, too. I covered Standing Rock, and you have police shooting at Native Americans for banging on drums, and then you go back and CNN is covering Trump's tweets. It's just total cognitive dissonance, alternate reality. And at the end of the day—I don't want to get biblical; I'm not religious—but water is in the Bible. Water is life, as the Native Americans say. And there is something as simple as, if your government harms you, whether it's intentional or just gross negligence, you would expect the government to try and make it right, and you would expect the media to treat it as a public health emergency, even if they didn't think it would get sky-high ratings—children are being poisoned, elders, adults—and continue to cover it. Hell, the media cares about clout and awards—I am a good journalist, but this could have been broken by the New York Times. It could have been broken by others if they just had the will. There were sources out there begging for coverage, willing to give up a lot of this information.

I got thousands of confidential documents from the Flint water investigation. Hell, in 2020—this is a story that will drive you crazy—I drove to Michigan. This is at the beginning of COVID. Nobody knew anything. I met with a top editor for the Detroit Free Press in a parking lot. We rolled down our windows. I handed him very confidential documents that I obtained. They basically showed that the governor of Michigan was on the phone for two days with his chief of staff, the health director, 22 times in two days—on the phone with a health lobbyist who was tied to the hospital where this outbreak was going on. I had documents showing that criminal prosecutors believed this was the governor of Michigan covering up the deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak. Two weeks before he was up for reelection, the Detroit Free Press editor said, this is gold. I even offered to throw one of their reporters names on it in front of me. I know they want the credit, and it wasn't about credit for me. And two days later, his boss, whatever: we don't have the resources for this.

Robinson

But isn't there some evidence that the governor also tried to put pressure on media in Michigan to not cover this story?

Chariton

Yes, it's in the book, but I believe that there is sufficient evidence that the governor's office was huffing and puffing at any media that was covering this. They were trying to control the narrative, which obviously, government officials and PR people do all the time. But at least in one instance, a local ABC station had gotten documents six months after the water switch in 2014 that a local hospital had a Legionnaires’ outbreak. Legionnaires’ is basically a deadly form of pneumonia. It comes from water, and sometimes it's misdiagnosed as pneumonia, but it's much worse than basic pneumonia. They had documents showing this, that there was a Legionnaire's outbreak in the hospital. The hospital was increasing its cleaning procedures. It was known that residents were showing up to city hall with brown water, and they killed the story. They didn't run the story. It would have saved countless lives. That station has dodged me for years, and I'm asking them, why did you not run this? They would have saved lives and probably won some awards, too. I believe that they were contacted by the governor's office, and that's why they didn't run it.

There are many stories like that. Hell, I just broke a story around the same time the book came out. I got the mayor of Flint on tape basically saying that a private foundation was pulling all the strings behind this, that the private foundation basically selected the unelected emergency managers. That's part of this story, by the way.

Robinson

Yes, that's a crazy revelation in the book.

Chariton 

And no Flint outlet covered it. No Michigan outlet covered it. So I can't get in their heads, but I do believe the media is partly to blame for why, a) people falsely believe this is over and fixed, and b) no one has been held accountable.

Robinson 

I do want to go back, just to refresh our audience on exactly what happened in Flint and when it began. Could you give a brief rundown of how this all started, how the people of Flint came to be poisoned?

Chariton 

Sure. So I want people to really think right now about how you're getting bombarded with fundraising emails and super PAC ads about democracy. "Democracy is at stake," and whatever you think of that, this is an example of democracy actually being removed. So in 2011, the governor of Michigan, a Republican, declared a financial emergency in Flint. It's arguable whether that was even necessary. He declared a financial emergency, and he just appointed unelected emergency managers, just like czars, to run this city. He did it in Detroit and other cities—majority Black cities, by the way. And these czars, they had their power top the power of the elected mayor and city council; i.e., people's votes were canceled.

So these czars, their first order of business was, let's try and privatize the water system. Flint got its water from Detroit for 50 years. The water came from the Great Lakes, and it was some of the best water in the world. Detroit treated it and then sent it to Flint, and Flint gave it to its residents. But Detroit had been kind of price gouging Flint for many years, so local politicians and residents were complaining about the prices. So there was a narrative and a campaign of, let's just build our own water system. Oh, okay, that sounds good.

Well, they decided, we'll just build our brand-new water system along the same exact path. In engineering terms, this is kind of unheard of. They built a duplicative water pipeline along the same exact path from Detroit to Flint. This new pipeline was going to be raw water, whereas the water Flint got was already treated. Well, what do you need a lot of raw water for? Fracking. The governor of Michigan was fracking the hell out of Michigan. You need a ton of raw water for that. Farming, auto industry—industry. They say this will be the blue economy, because of all the water businesses could use at a cheaper cost. Most of the water in this new pipeline was not actually going to be for residents, it was going to be for business.

At the last-minute, Detroit, because they didn't want to lose Flint—Flint was its biggest customer—they offered to cut Flint's rate in half. So think about if you're going to the store, and 50 percent off. Pretty good. If Flint had just stayed with Detroit, they would have been saving money. But this new water system was never about saving money. It was a for-profit privatization scheme. Detroit was a public asset, a public water system, and this new regional system was, by all intents and purposes, going to be privatized. And what they did was, while they were building this new water system—first, Flint was broke; it had no credit rating, but to fund this new water system, the county, the local politicians, needed Flint to be in on the bond deal. So they needed Flint to be one of the cities to fund construction. It was a $230 million, almost $300 million, pipeline. So Flint was legally broke and could not legally borrow any more money, so the governor's unelected king and czars, along with J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo, orchestrated a fake emergency that allowed Flint to borrow $100 million to help fund a completely unnecessary water system.

And by the way, in two years they were going to build this boondoggle, this totally unnecessary water system, and use the Flint River, which General Motors, Dow Chemical, DuPont and every corporate criminal you could think of had been dumping their waste in for a hundred years. And by the way, we'll use the Flint water plant, which is the equivalent of these Boeing planes falling apart midair. The Flint water plant did not even have the necessary equipment in the plant when they switched the water to add the proper chemicals. So the media has always reported that they failed to add the corrosion control chemicals. They did not have the equipment to do it. They did not have a lot of equipment.

It's in the book, but two weeks before the water switch, it was so understaffed. They didn't have enough workers. They moved people from the garbage department in Flint to the water department. So what you have here is politicians, Wall Street banks who issued the bonds to help fund this construction, a private foundation, and the Republican governor and his unelected cronies, basically create a cabal to indebt Flint, and basically use the residents as guinea pigs for a totally unnecessary, privatized water system.

Robinson

As you say, people might have heard that this was a mistake: they switched the water from the Detroit supply to the Flint supply, the Flint River water wasn’t clean, then they were too slow, and they covered it up. What you're describing, the preliminary process that set the stage for this, is not just the poisoning of the people, but the robbery of the people. This is an act of robbery as well as poisoning.

Chariton 

Yes, and the book details it, I believe, pretty meticulously. Firstly, legally, you're supposed to test the water when changing a water source; you're supposed to test it for a year before you send it out to residents. They didn't do that. That's not a mistake. They knew they were supposed to. Legally, you have to test the water for a year before sending it out.

Secondly, legally, if you are serving a city over 50,000 people, you have to add corrosion controls. Our pipes underneath us, all across America, are between 50 and, in many cases, over 100 years old. So, in cities with populations over 50,000 people, you have to add these chemicals that help prevent lead and other heavy metals from peeling off the pipes into your water. They didn't do that. I have a whole chapter on the plant. There were workers in the plant as early as a year before, screaming, hell no. I quote, "Hell no. We can't do this. We don't have the staff. We don't have the equipment.” The plant had not been used as a full-time water treatment plant for half a century.

I show in the book that the governor of Michigan was warned a year before the water switch by his own environmental people that there's a bacterial risk from using the Flint River. There's a carcinogen risk—cancer-causing chemicals—warned a year before. So either all of these people were asleep at the switch or they just didn't care and said, let's roll with it, it can't be that bad, we'll figure it out as we go. And that's what they were doing.

I have emails showing the governor's chief of staff, a year into this, saying, I think we could make the river safe. Well, at the time, they were telling the residents it was safe, but they were privately saying we could make it safe. Listen, in this screwed up media environment, people don't remember something that happened 10 hours ago, much less 10 years ago. But this is the biggest government cover up in the 21st century. I can't think of anything that involves the EPA, state government, city government, county government, private foundations, a Wall Street bank, and the media—and people are dying.

That's the part that people don't really get. Because the media in this country, I'm sorry to tell you—not all, but a lot of the big corporate funded ones—they basically just regurgitate what agencies tell them. If the EPA says, Flint's water levels are meeting regulations, check—we'll report that and move on. But the problem is, I'm not one of these government conspiracy people, and I’m not saying government lies all the time, but I found in the case of Flint, they were manipulating and cherry-picking the data.

I knocked on over 400 doors. It's one of the chapters in the book. I found that the governor was sending in his environmental officials to run people's water and then put the sample bottles in, which is totally illegal because you're just flushing out the lead, and then you're putting the sample bottle in. The governor of Michigan, now a Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, acknowledged on camera my reporting that they manipulated the water testing yet still said, the water levels are meeting EPA regulations.

This is not just Flint, by the way, this happens elsewhere. So bottom line, this was buried, swept under the rug by state and federal government and the media, through their laziness and choice to cover the Trump circus. They basically abandoned the city.

I was just there. I did a documentary in April, and I was just there for the book release. When I say it's a disaster, that's not to be dramatic. I'm telling you, the water is still bad. It's not as bad as it was in 2016, but you have brown water coming out, you have smelly water in many homes. Residents are showing rashes they're still getting. Residents are still losing hair. And from a just a plumbing and engineering perspective, it's common sense. Ten years later, they have not replaced all the damaged pipes. If you haven't replaced the damaged infrastructure that was badly corroded by essentially acid water, it doesn't matter if the water coming through is as clean as if Jesus blessed the water from the plant. If it's going through busted pipes, shit's going to peel off.

Robinson 

I don't want to diminish the quality and quantity of the original scoops that you have gotten through your reporting. But in some ways, it strikes me, reading your work, that you just went and did the work. You just went and knocked. It's not like the stuff is deeply buried. Yes, you had to get access to confidential documents, but also you can go and just knock on doors in Flint and find out that what you're being told isn't true. You just talk to residents, and they'll say things like, I can't be in the shower, the water burns. And so the information is out there waiting to be found, and the only way that it isn't reported is if you choose not to go and report it.

Chariton 

Listen, I love the people of Flint, but I don't consider it a vacation spot. I went because the people from the Detroit Free Press an hour down the road were not. I went because the national outlets were not. And I cared, and I'm passionate about it. But yes, it's not easy. You do have to build sources, build trust. People need to take a risk, leak documents to you. But residents were begging reporters way bigger than me, just handing them scoop after scoop. So this could have been reported much earlier by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press. We could go down the list. It was not. When outlets did report it, they significantly watered it down. And I believe there are many reasons for that, but at the end of the day, I'm not some incredible, otherworldly, scholarly journalist. I just gave a damn and kept going, and that's kind of what you're supposed to do as a journalist.

Unfortunately, we have a system now that's based on scaling up and ratings and clicks and this and that. Journalism is no longer considered a public good. It is a for-profit, billion-dollar industry, and I believe out of touch cosmopolitan editors in New York and D.C. are the ones making the decisions whether to send people to Flint and whether to continue covering Flint. And to me, these are very disconnected people. I don't think they're bad people. I don't think they wake up and say, hey, let's just ignore people dying and being poisoned. I just think it's out of sight, out of mind, and this is the rust belt. This is flyover country.

If this happened on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I'm pretty sure they would have stuck with the story a little longer—if it happened to a more cosmopolitan, different class of people. I think this is a story of class and race. I know there's a liberal debate between class and race.

In East Palestine, Ohio, there's something happening right now after Norfolk Southern blew up five cars of toxic vinyl chloride. People are sick there. It's the same exact playbook. The EPA does some BS testing. They say, everything's fine. I got sick five months ago. There, I'm talking to residents who are sick. These are poor white people. So, for poor Black people, poor white people, it's the same playbook being used, and the media is not reporting it because they want to cover the horse race. They want to cover politics and treat politics as sport. And it's too depressing, or it's not sexy to cover people being poisoned and slowly dying. Everybody has their issue.

Journalists are humans, and we have particular issues that draw us in more than others. I really don't know of a bigger issue than the number one necessity for living: water. If it is being threatened and if people are being harmed, even if you want to give the government the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't intentional, we spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on national security. I'm pretty sure your water being poisoned by your government is a national security issue.

Robinson 

Well, our readers and listeners may remember a time when their water was shut off for a day or two, and how you realize very quickly how much you depend upon consistent access to clean water. The moment your water gets shut off after a storm or something, you realize life without water can't be lived. And then you talk about Flint: day after day, month after month, year after year, you're trying to get your kids a bath. Imagine being in the situation where you want to keep your kids clean, without knowing whether you're going to kill them by trying to keep them clean.

It's such an evil thing to do to people, to put that them in that situation. And as you pointed out, indeed, I don't think it's understating it to say this is ultimately a murder case because people died in Flint of Legionnaires’ disease. We don't know quite how many, I don't think, but we know that it's a dozen, at least, people who are dead because of this.

Chariton 

Well, it's also cancer. Cancer is through the roof.

Robinson 

Oh, yes, of course. Long term.

Chariton

Heavy metals cause all sorts of cancers and kidney failure. People are dying of kidney failure and liver disease. So between the heavy metals, the lead, the bacteria, the PFAs, it's really a horrible mixed ball of things that these people were contaminated by. At the beginning of covid, we had the death count live on TV, so we knew how many people were dying per day. And it was awful, but we don't have an accurate count of how many people have died from this because they didn't even have a health registry for many years. And the population is 20,000 less than it was when this happened because so many people have left.

So when I say it's an ongoing cover up and an ongoing disaster, I can tell you, every time I go there, I hear about more people—not just elderly people, I'm talking people in their 40s, 50s, 60s—dying of cancers, liver problems, kidney problems. And also, I really think people need to realize this is not just the Republicans involved. The Republicans presided over it. They were involved in the lead up to it, and while the water was contaminated, they were covering it up in real time.

With that said, the people of Flint were overjoyed to vote for Democrat Gretchen Whitmer and Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel because those two ran on Justice for Flint. Gretchen Whitmer ran on opening up the water stations that the Republican governor had shut down. That's where the residents got free water. The Attorney General said that the investigation before her was basically incompetent. Well, my reporting shows she fired those prosecutors. They were building a case against the Republican governor for involuntary manslaughter. You mentioned murder. They were building a case against a governor—this would have been a historic event for involuntary manslaughter, because he knew about the deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak and did not notify the public. She fired them, and she sabotaged the investigation, I believe, so they couldn’t follow the money. She is, right now—I'm saying it's ongoing—refusing freedom of information requests from yours truly. I'm trying to get the documents. Her predecessors were building a racketeering case—RICO, which was used in the '70s when it was created to go against organized crime. They were building a racketeering case based on that fraudulent financial scheme I told you about.

First, her office told me they didn't have the documents. I knew that was not true. Then I publicly threatened to sue them. Then they saw Jesus and told me they'll look again. And then they told me they found them, but they couldn't give them to me. So I'm telling you, it is not a conspiracy. There were Wall Street banks involved with this. She fired prosecutors that were heading in the right direction, that were going to charge people over the financial fraud. Then the Democratic attorney general charged lesser crimes, and she did not follow through on that financial investigation. I'm independent. I don't care who you vote for. If you're Democrat, liberal, doesn't matter to me. But the bottom line is, Republicans caused this, and Democrats, it seems, are helping to sweep it under the rug.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.