A Media Matters review of national TV news coverage of Gary’s post-storm recovery from August 12-25 found:

• Corporate broadcast and cable news shows aired a combined 42 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery, 18 of which mentioned demographic or socioeconomic conditions.
• Cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, and MS NOW — aired a combined 26 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery, 17 of which mentioned demographic or socioeconomic conditions.
  • CNN aired 13 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery, with 10 mentions of demographic or socioeconomic conditions.
  • MS NOW aired 9 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery, with 7 mentions of demographic or socioeconomic conditions.
  • Fox News aired 4 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery, none of which mentioned demographic or socioeconomic conditions.
• Corporate broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — aired a combined 16 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery. Only 1 segment mentioned demographic or socioeconomic conditions.
  • ABC aired 10 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery, none of which mentioned demographic or socioeconomic conditions.
  • CBS aired 1 segment about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery. It did not mention demographic or socioeconomic conditions.
  • NBC aired 5 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery, 1 of which mentioned demographic or socioeconomic conditions.

On August 11, a powerful derecho brought winds reaching 99 mph to northern Indiana, toppling trees and utility poles and causing the worst outage in NIPSCO’s history. The utility reported nearly 375,000 outages across its service territory, and approximately 40,000 Gary residents — almost 60% of the total population — lost power. The following day, Mayor Eddie Melton declared a local disaster emergency.

Parts of Gary remained without power for two weeks. By August 25, NIPSCO said it had restored power to 99% of affected customers, although hundreds remained without electricity and recovery from the storm was continuing.

“These aren’t simple repairs,” said Melody Birmingham, an executive at NIPSCO parent company NiSource, as the outage entered its second week. “These are systems that are being rebuilt.” 

The storm caused extraordinary damage — Birmingham said approximately 300 utility poles and 44 transmission poles in Gary needed to be repaired or replaced. But the scale and duration of the outage also raised questions about NIPSCO’s maintenance practices, infrastructure investments, and response. Gov. Mike Braun called for state regulators to investigate the utility, while residents filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that inadequate vegetation management contributed to the damage. 

The prolonged outage unfolded in a city where decades of steel-industry job losses and population decline have contributed to widespread abandonment, a diminished tax base, and aging infrastructure. Today, 76% of Gary’s approximately 67,000 residents are Black, one-third live in poverty, and the median household income is under $39,000.

As the outage dragged on, the costs mounted. Gary Common Council President Linda Barnes-Caldwell told Free Press Indiana that some residents had spent money on hotel stays and diesel for generators and were approaching the end of the month with rent still due. “They’re just trying to maintain a level of survival,” she said. The Associated Press reported that residents had discarded hundreds of dollars in groceries and that school closures could force families living paycheck to paycheck to miss work to provide childcare, while one Gary restaurant owner estimated losing $19,000 in sales during an eight-day closure. 

In a city where a significant number of residents are poor, those costs were part of what made the prolonged outage a climate and environmental justice story.

National television news initially paid little attention to that story. The major corporate broadcast and cable news networks combined mentioned Gary in only 2 segments on August 12, both within broader coverage of the storm and its damage across Indiana. They aired no additional segments about the city for the next six days. Coverage began focusing specifically on Gary’s prolonged outage on August 19. From August 19-25, the networks aired 40 segments as outages became increasingly concentrated in Gary, with thousands of residents approaching two weeks without electricity.

ABC, CBS, and NBC aired 16 segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery. Most focused on the immediate conditions residents faced and the logistics of restoring power, including extreme heat, homes without running water, and the arrival of additional assistance. Several also examined NIPSCO’s preparedness and response, including the class-action lawsuit and the state investigation into the utility.

The August 24 episode of NBC Nightly News was the only broadcast segment to mention Gary’s demographic or socioeconomic conditions. The segment documented the outage’s medical and economic consequences and asked Mayor Eddie Melton whether race contributed to Gary’s delayed recovery.

The omission of those issues from other coverage is consistent with a broader pattern in broadcast environmental justice reporting. Media Matters previously found that the number of environmental justice segments aired by ABC, CBS, and NBC decreased from 19 in 2021 to just 2 in 2025. Even when the networks have documented environmental harm, their reporting rarely explained how racial and economic conditions, infrastructure, and public policy shaped who was most exposed or least equipped to recover.

Cable news featured 26 total segments about Gary’s prolonged outage and recovery (CNN aired 13, MS NOW ran 9, and Fox News had 4). CNN and MS NOW provided the most sustained coverage, including reports from Gary and interviews with residents and local officials. Across their 22 segments, the two networks included 17 mentions of Gary’s socioeconomic conditions. Fox’s 4 segments included no such mentions.

The difference in reporting was not whether the networks recognized that Gary residents were suffering — broadcast and cable segments documented many of the same immediate hardships. Instead, it was whether the coverage explained why the outage had become especially difficult for Gary to withstand and what the city’s stalled recovery revealed about infrastructure, inequality, and accountability. CNN and MS NOW were the networks that most consistently made those connections.

In their strongest segments, those connections were more than demographic shorthand. CNN and MS NOW examined how poverty limited residents’ options during the outage, why an overwhelmingly Black city accounted for a disproportionate share of the customers still without power, and whether wealthier communities were receiving help faster.

During the August 22 episode of CNN This Morning Weekend, host Victor Blackwell interviewed small-business owner Shatiya Hardin about residents’ limited access to food, fuel, and other necessities. Hardin contrasted conditions in Gary with those in nearby communities, where stores were open and residents had more resources available to them. “Because we are a poverty-stricken area, the cries are not heard,” she said. “Their residents have different options other than what we have.”

A segment during the August 22 episode of MS NOW’s Connect with Jacob Soboroff made the disparity plain: More than half of the approximately 32,000 customers still without power across NIPSCO’s service territory were in Gary. The segment did not treat that concentration as merely another measure of the storm’s damage. It reported that NIPSCO charges Indiana’s highest electric rates but has the state’s worst service-reliability record, then detailed a lawsuit alleging that the utility’s failure to maintain trees and vegetation around power lines contributed to preventable outages.

During the August 23 episode of CNN Newsroom Live, Indiana University public affairs professor Courtney Page-Tan connected the outage to a changing climate, warning that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and hitting communities harder. Communities still planning for the storms of the previous century, she said, “are planning for a climate that no longer exists.” Anchor Salma Abdelaziz then noted that Gary is predominantly Black, roughly one-third of its residents live in poverty, and many were still waiting for power nearly two weeks after the storm. She asked whether Gary was “simply being left behind” and whether wealthier communities appeared to be receiving help faster. Page-Tan pointed to research repeatedly finding that minority communities are disproportionately affected by environmental problems. She also emphasized the importance of food pantries, churches, and other “social infrastructure” when government, institutions, or the energy grid fail.

These segments did more than document the consequences of the outage or cite Gary’s demographics in passing. They used race and poverty to examine why residents had fewer options as the crisis dragged on, compared Gary’s recovery with that of surrounding communities, and scrutinized the systems and institutions responsible for restoring power.

As Gary’s recovery stalled, the strongest coverage began asking the questions that define climate and environmental justice reporting: not only how many people remained without power but who they were, what resources they could draw on, how the city’s grid had been maintained, and who should answer for the delay. Those questions were relevant from the first day, but their urgency became clearer as power restoration advanced across northern Indiana while thousands of Gary residents remained in the dark.

CNN and MS NOW had more time than the broadcast networks for sustained interviews and follow-ups. However, the differences in coverage were not simply a function of airtime. Their strongest segments brought residents, local officials, and experts into the story and connected the immediate crisis to Gary’s racial and economic conditions, aging infrastructure, history of disinvestment, and NIPSCO’s response. Broadcast networks can make many of those same connections within shorter segments by incorporating demographic context and questions about infrastructure and accountability into the reporting they are already producing.

Gary offers more than an example of a gap in national coverage. It provides a practical model for reporting that follows communities through recovery and treats climate and environmental justice as essential to understanding what happens the moment after an extreme weather event is over.

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original episodes of ABC's Good Morning America and World News Tonight, CBS’ Mornings and Evening News, and NBC’s Today and Nightly News as well as all original programming on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MS NOW for any of the terms “Gary,” “Indiana,” “NIPSCO,” or “NiSource” within close proximity of any of the terms “derecho,” “blackout,” “recovery,” “damage,” or “wind” or any derivations of any of the root terms “storm,” “outage,” “power,” “electric,” or “restore” from August 12, 2026, when Gary, Indiana, Mayor Eddie Melton declared a local disaster emergency following the derecho, through August 25, 2026, when NIPSCO announced that power had been substantially restored in Gary.

We included segments, which we defined as instances when post-storm conditions or recovery efforts in Gary, Indiana, were the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of those conditions or efforts. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed them with one another.

We did not include mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned the post-storm conditions or recovery efforts in Gary, Indiana, without another speaker engaging with the comment, or teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about the post-storm conditions or recovery efforts scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We then reviewed the identified segments for whether they connected the city’s recovery challenges to its demographic or socioeconomic conditions.