• From January 1 through December 31, 2024, corporate broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — aired a total of 7 segments about environmental impacts, regulations, or health hazards that included a mention of a socially marginalized community. This marks a continued decline from 9 such segments in 2023 and 12 in 2022.
• CBS and ABC each aired 3 environmental justice segments in 2024 while NBC aired just 1.
• PBS News Hour aired 11 environmental justice segments in 2024, which is more than the combined total from the three corporate broadcast networks. Weeknight and weekend episodes of PBS News Hour were reviewed for comparison but are not included in the segment total.
• Corporate broadcast networks also failed to cover several major environmental justice stories, including the water funding crisis in Jackson, Mississippi; the Supreme Court’s decision to halt EPA ozone protections; ongoing pollution monitoring failures along the Houston Ship Channel; and the growing barriers to black lung compensation in Kentucky.

In 2024, corporate broadcast networks aired just 7 segments about environmental impacts, regulations, or health hazards that also identified how those issues affected a socially marginalized community. This continues a multiyear trend of declining environmental justice coverage.

CBS and ABC each aired 3 environmental justice segments in 2024; NBC aired 1.

What environmental justice coverage looked like in 2024

Most of the 7 qualifying segments that aired in 2024 focused on long-standing crises, with limited attention given to newer or escalating issues. One segment featured remarks from Chelsea Clinton at an environmental justice event highlighting the disproportionate impacts of extreme heat and pollution on low-income families, communities of color, and Indigenous populations. Another examined elevated asthma rates and property devaluation in neighborhoods near major highways. Other segments covered lead contamination in drinking water and chemical exposure in industrial corridors.

Despite the overall decline in volume, a few segments stood out for their clarity and framing.

Notable environmental justice segments in 2024

During the May 6, 2024, episode of GMA3, ABC profiled twin sisters Joy and Jo Banner, who are leading efforts to stop new industrial development in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” through The Descendants Project, which challenges the siting of new petrochemical and grain export facilities in a region already saturated with polluting infrastructure. The segment focused on their environmental justice work and highlighted the legacy of zoning changes that enabled industrial expansion in majority-Black communities, noting that the United Nations has identified the cumulative health burden in the area as environmental racism.

During the March 19, 2024, episode of CBS Evening News, correspondent Charlie De Mar reported on a new study estimating that nearly 70% of children under 6 in Chicago may be exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water. The segment highlighted disproportionate exposure risks faced by Black and Hispanic children and featured local environmental advocate Chakena Perry, who explicitly framed the issue as both a public health crisis and an issue of environmental justice.

During the January 10, 2024, episode of NBC Nightly News, correspondent Cynthia McFadden reported on the aftermath of the Exide battery plant closure in East Los Angeles, California. One advocate described the state’s response as environmental racism, citing years of failed cleanup efforts and continued exposure to toxic lead and arsenic in working-class Latino neighborhoods. The segment included community voices calling out the lack of accountability and the long-term health impacts still affecting residents.

Corporate broadcast networks continued to miss critical environmental justice stories in 2024, offering minimal or no sustained national coverage of events that directly affected the health, safety, and rights of overburdened communities. These are not examples of misframing; they are stories that, based on their scale and impact, warranted broader attention and did not receive it.

Jackson, Mississippi, water rate hike amid funding shortfall

In early 2024, Jackson’s federally appointed water system manager warned that cash reserves for water system upgrades had been depleted, prompting a 24% rate increase on water usage. The city, which is 82% Black and has long suffered infrastructure neglect, had already diverted emergency federal funds just to stay solvent. At the same time, the EPA closed a civil rights investigation into whether the state had discriminated in allocating water funds, finding insufficient evidence even though the agency acknowledged disproportionate harm. Jackson remains under a federal agreement to overhaul its water system after repeated violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The situation reflected the ongoing fallout from the Jackson water crisis, one of the country’s most recent and visible environmental justice crises, which received national coverage in 2022. It deserved ongoing national coverage, but corporate broadcast networks did not return to the story in 2024.

Air monitoring failures in Houston’s petrochemical corridor

In March 2024, a joint investigation by The Texas Tribune, Environmental Health News, and palabra, a multimedia, informative news initiative of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, revealed that state-run air monitors  around the Houston Ship Channel failed to adequately track key pollutants such as benzene, formaldehyde, and particulate matter in heavily impacted Latino neighborhoods such as Cloverleaf and Manchester. In many cases, monitors didn't measure the most hazardous pollutants at all, or presented the data in ways that were inaccessible to residents, especially in communities where most families speak Spanish at home. Despite decades of documented exposure and multiple studies identifying elevated cancer risks and life-expectancy gaps in the region, the findings did not receive national coverage from corporate broadcast networks.

Barriers to black lung compensation in Kentucky

In March 2024, NPR reported on Kentucky coal miners facing growing obstacles to receiving black lung compensation after a 2018 state law sharply limited who can diagnose the disease. As advanced cases surged among younger miners, the law left just one doctor in the state authorized to evaluate claims. CBS aired a strong segment on the toll of black lung disease in West Virginia, but no major network probed the issue’s clear implications for environmental justice in poor, rural white communities.

Supreme Court blocks EPA ozone protections

In June 2024, the Supreme Court blocked the Environmental Protection Agency’s implementation of the “good neighbor” provision of the Clean Air Act, a rule designed to curb cross-state ozone pollution from power plants and industrial sources. The rule had already reduced nitrogen oxide emissions by 18% across 10 states and was projected to prevent over a million asthma episodes and thousands of premature deaths, especially in overburdened communities. The court’s decision stalled those benefits for cities across the eastern U.S., where low income neighborhoods and communities of color already experience elevated rates of ozone-related illness. Despite its public health implications for vulnerable populations, the decision received little attention from corporate broadcast news.

PBS News Hour aired 11 environmental justice segments in 2024 — more than the combined total of ABC, CBS, and NBC. The network, which is fighting funding cuts from the Trump administration, not only aired more segments, but often presented them with greater clarity, depth, and connection to the systemic roots of environmental harm.

News Hour reported on a wide range of environmental justice issues, from petrochemical pollution and water infrastructure failure to disaster recovery and regulatory erosion. Several segments explicitly named the racial and economic disparities behind environmental exposure, while others examined how national policy shifts, such as President Donald Trump's appointment of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, threaten the agency's mission and the country's few climate and environmental justice protections.

Notable stories included a segment on new research linking premature births in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley to decades of unregulated pollution, an interview with environmental justice pioneer Dr. Beverly Wright following a federal court decision that limits the EPA’s ability to investigate racial disparities in permitting, and a profile of a South Central Los Angeles climate activist whose organizing work grew out of firsthand exposure to air pollution and food injustice.

PBS News Hour also covered Indigenous resistance to mineral mining, systemic inequities in wildfire and hurricane recovery, and the disproportionate risks faced by communities of color when federal science and forecasting infrastructure are weakened.

PBS’ 2024 coverage showed that environmental justice reporting can be consistent, community-informed, and policy-literate, without requiring breaking news to justify its inclusion. It offers a model for how broadcast news can treat environmental justice not as a silo, but as a lens that sharpens public understanding.

Thirty years of environmental justice policy, including advances in environmental justice, have been dismantled in a matter of months. Since January 2025, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice has been eliminated, and billions in environmental justice grants have been rescinded or frozen. Oil and gas permitting has expanded in communities previously protected by environmental justice screening tools — tools designed to assess cumulative pollution burdens and demographic risk factors — and the broader federal regulatory framework is being reshaped under Project 2025, a blueprint designed to reduce the government’s capacity to track, regulate, or respond to cumulative environmental harm.

These changes are already weakening core protections for communities that have long borne the brunt of pollution to their air, land, and water, such as when the EPA and Department of Justice abandoned a case asserting that a synthetic rubber plant posed an immediate threat to residents in Cancer Alley. The elimination of federal accountability mechanisms makes it harder for residents to challenge hazardous permitting decisions, access public health data, or secure basic investments in safe infrastructure. Without sustained media scrutiny, these shifts will continue to proceed largely beyond public view.

Environmental justice coverage is not just about documenting harm after the fact. When done well, it helps the public understand who makes environmental decisions, if and how those decisions are contested, and what stakes exist for health, equity, and legal redress. It connects federal rollbacks to local realities, from blocked air monitors to unfunded pipe replacements, and restores public understanding of why regulatory power matters.

Broadcast news still has the reach and access to make these changes visible by pressing officials on the erosion of protections, following the money behind deregulatory efforts, and elevating the lived experiences of frontline communities without reducing them to disaster coverage. But to do so, it must treat environmental justice not as a special interest story, but as part of the national interest.

Environmental justice coverage must become routine, not reactive. And this second Trump term marks a pivotal test of whether corporate broadcast networks will continue tracing harm only in hindsight or begin treating environmental justice as a standing obligation of public accountability.

Media Matters searched transcripts in the Kinetiq video database for the national morning and evening news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC for segments that mentioned specific environmental pollution impacts, regulations, or health hazards using any of the terms “chemical,” “pollution,” “air pollution,” “particulate matter,” “ozone,” “smog,” “soot,” “asthma,” “fossil fuel,” “oil,” “coal,” “fracking,” “natural gas,” “air quality,” “carbon emission,” “greenhouse,” “water pollution,” “contaminant,” “Superfund,” “environment,” “health hazard,” “drill,” “contamination,” “Environmental Protection Agency,” “EPA,” “climate change,” “global warming,” “climate crisis,” “carbon footprint,” “pollutant,” “toxin,” “toxic,” “hurricane,” “tropical storm,” “flood,” “environmental racism,” or “environmental justice” from January 1, 2024, through December 31, 2024.

To determine how broadcast news programs told stories about environmental impacts that are overwhelmingly borne by poor and minority communities, we reviewed the identified segments for any mentions of any of the demographic and socioeconomic terms “white,” “Black,” “African American,” “American Indian,” “Alaska Native,” “Latino,” “Hispanic,” “Indigenous,” “low income,” “poor,” or “immigrant.”

To count as an environmental justice segment, it had to connect the environmental impact, regulation, or health hazard to a specific “race, color, national origin, or income,” per the Environmental Protection Agency’s definition of environmental justice. We analyzed the identified segments for whether they mentioned that the environmental pollution impact, regulation, or health hazard affected a fixed community or population.