Does the news cover water and electricity differently?
Updated: 1 day ago
NB: This article was pioneered by research from FLUSH Alumna, Musa Rahman
Drinking water and electricity utilities are different. Obviously.
Many of these differences are straightforward: different governance structures, different hardware, and different people maintain them. When water and electricity infrastructure fail, they fail in different ways and with different consequences–from direct harms, like flooding or fire, to quieter ones, like illness and disruptions to critical medical equipment.
But beyond these more obvious differences, another layer of difference emerges: how people talk about these issues. In particular, print news media covers failures of water versus electricity infrastructure differently in the US. Media both shapes and is shaped by public understanding. Studying news coverage can offer a window into how the public and policymakers understand water and electricity utility systems.
Understanding perceptions of infrastructure is acutely important in an era of declining natural resources and greater demands on public infrastructure. The American Water Works Association’s 2026 survey of water and water utility professionals found the water sector increasingly strained by rising costs due to aging infrastructure, new regulations, deferred maintenance, and uncertainty about future federal support (such as through State Revolving Funds and Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loans).
Many water utilities reported struggling to cover operating and capital investment costs with current revenue sources, with more raising rates or deferring investments to close those gaps. Meanwhile, climate change poses new challenges and worsens old ones.
The US electricity infrastructure is also under immense strain, with data centers and population growth driving demand surges that require major overhauls. Climate change has significantly increased the number and severity of wildfires, which overheat and melt electric wires. Electric utilities bear the financial risks of their infrastructure starting a wildfire and must plan for the possibility that one will damage it.
Creating supportive and financial governance structures around and for utilities requires action by policymakers and actions of–or at least no opposition from–the public. To shift the discourse in a way that provides utilities with more resources and builds robust governance structures, we must first understand the current discourse.
In particular, comparing water and electrical utilities highlights the assumptions and beliefs about each. Analyzing print media coverage of utility failures is one way to unpack that discourse.
Methods and caveats
For this paper, we define “failure” broadly: any news coverage of drinking water or electricity infrastructure failing to perform its intended purpose, breaking, or harming people or property.
We used the Nexis Uni database to pull newspaper articles published between 2021 and 2024 that cover failures of US electrical or water infrastructure. We chose these years to range from post-peak COVID (to avoid the potentially unrepresentative nature of articles at that time) to the most recent available at the time of analysis. The criteria included 51 articles about water utilities and 33 about energy utilities.
Using a structured coding approach, we analyzed how the articles:
described causes of failure
assigned responsibility or blame for the failure
framed solutions and the aftermath of the crisis
Using these three topics as scaffolding, we identified recurring themes in coverage of both water and electricity utilities and compared them.
Of course, this study isn’t perfect. News–by its very nature–focuses on spectacular events. During a large event, many news articles inevitably cover the same incident. During the period analyzed, flooding in both Jackson, Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, dominated water utility-related coverage. Newark, New Jersey, and Flint, Michigan, also appeared prominently in the article sample. Flint, Jackson, and Atlanta all have prominent histories of racial relations, which inflects the analysis.
In this period, major wildfires in California in 2022 dominated media around electric utilities. These regions have their own histories and contexts–meaning that there is some risk that the discourses identified as being specific to a utility type may be more reflective of the discourse around a region. This is true even with strong evidence that people of color are disproportionately impacted by infrastructure failures of both water and electrical utilities. Future work should involve dissecting this further, but this was not possible within the time and resource constraints of this project.
In addition, this project focuses on discourse. We did not verify or fact-check articles. Future work would benefit from adding dimensions such as whether there were more electrical or water utility problems, who they affected, and comparing those factual accounts with the news coverage.
Because of these constraints, the following analysis should be considered exploratory. But while underlying skews exist, the sample is still representative of what the news covered during this period. So while a different sample of articles from a different time period may yield different thematic and linguistic trends, this work still outlines what kinds of information and discourse the public and policymakers absorbed during these years.
Analysis of the infrastructure discourse
Media portrays the causes of failures in different ways
Social science has long argued that “natural” disasters are not “natural”: they mix external “potentially destructive agents” with “a population in a socially and technologically produced condition of vulnerability.” Similarly, infrastructure failure in the face of (at least mostly predictable) natural events results from both the external shock and a failure to build infrastructure resilient to known environmental stressors. (Some disasters, of course, are difficult to predict fully in scale. But many events, like the flooding of the Pearl River in Jackson, are recurring.)
This is where we can see a divide in how electricity and water talk about causes. Coverage of electrical and water utility failures usually includes this two-part assessment of disaster construction: the external shock and a human-caused failure. However, each case characterizes the human-caused failure differently. Water failures are characterized by impersonal neglect and the passage of time; electric grid failures are characterized by planners' choices.
External shocks are described similarly in water and electricity
The concrete external shocks are (of course) different between the two utility types. For electricity, the external causes could be storms, hurricanes, or earthquakes:
For the coverage of water utilities, flooding and winter temperatures were often the culprit:
The difference between the two utilities lies in how the articles characterize the human part of the equation.
Human-created vulnerabilities are described differently
Water utility failures are attributed to abstract and unstoppable forces. Under-resourced water infrastructure and neglect are still choices by planners and politicians. Yet many articles frame the damage caused by those choices as inevitable and disembodied as weather:
In these examples, time is framed as the enemy, not decision-makers who chose not to update the systems. Even when articles explicitly attribute water crises to “decades of underinvestment and neglect” (a phrase–or versions of it–spread across multiple articles), it is framed passively, not as an active choice by specific responsible individuals. Specific people aren’t neglecting the infrastructure: like time, it is just something that happens.
Most of the water articles concerned the southern cities of Atlanta and Jackson, which are cities with acute and deep histories of racial discrimination. A few articles connected the water infrastructure problems to racism, but did not necessarily assign the responsibility to specific people or decision-makers: “White flight, an eroding tax base and poor management have left the remaining residents with old and broken pipes, but without the public funding to fix them.”
Electric failures could be blamed on specific utilities or people. In contrast to anonymity, inevitability, and disembodied actions, reporting on electricity infrastructure failures was more likely to directly attribute failures to active (and currently alive) utilities or actors:
In these examples, the “utilities” and “Southern California Edison” were active agents in the failure. In another article, the blame was less specific, but still pointing to human actions: “[T]hese were complete man-made failures.”
In our sample, we found that water infrastructure failures are more likely to be attributed to inevitable, depersonalized forces, whereas electrical infrastructure failures are more likely to be attributed to specific companies, regulators, or people.
Solutions are framed at different levels of feasibility
Electrical and water failures require immediate, acute responses, like tamping down wildfires and issuing boil water advisories. The news articles did tell those stories. But the news media also presented long-term solutions to infrastructure challenges quite differently between the two types. In their framing, water requires money to bring the infrastructure up to the present, and electricity requires policy change or innovation to look to the future.
Fixing water problems appeared daunting and grinding. The solutions to water infrastructure challenges are framed as a near-infinite amount of money, a black hole to fix a decaying infrastructure. Solutions rarely appear in ways that encourage specific actions, even though active options exist: governments raising taxes or rates, increasing funding for federal grant programs, or proactive water conservation. Innovative or technology-based solutions–such as desalination or wastewater recycling–are also usually missing from the discourse. New, more resilient infrastructure is not positioned as exciting or innovative, but as hauling the old into the modern era: “Modernizing the city's water infrastructure could cost $2 billion.”
Some articles, however, framed water infrastructure challenges more forward-looking, presenting them as a way to build resilience to climate change. One New York Times article contextualized the infrastructure collapse in Jackson in terms of a (then-recent) federal law: "The infrastructure law pledged some $50 billion for climate resilience." However, this quote also illustrates another trend in water infrastructure coverage: the idea that water funding should come from external and federal sources.
Coverage of energy infrastructure was more aspirational. Our sample of electricity coverage, by contrast, was more likely to include articles that weren’t even explicitly about failures. While out of scope, we found articles that spoke of innovation, like solar and microgrids, and big-picture goals, like 100% carbon-free energy generation in California by 2045 or energy independence.
Conclusions: why infrastructure storytelling matters
News coverage shapes how people and policymakers view their own challenges, their communities' challenges, and the challenges of people far from them. While much journalism seeks objective coverage of an event, choices about which words are used, which facts are included, and which solutions are presented reflect and reinforce deep-seated beliefs about the topics covered.
In our analysis, failures in water infrastructure tended to be framed as a consequence of age, decay, and impersonal forces like white flight. They are described as chronic and rooted in decades of neglect, but responsibility for the failures is so diffuse that no entity or person is named as responsible for making change. Water infrastructure needs to be saved by dragging it into the modern era using external funding sources.
Electricity infrastructure, by contrast, is framed as having new technologies and visions for the future, such as climate goals or solar power. Specific individuals and entities (utilities, regulators) are culpable for failures and can use specific levers of power (rates, lawsuits, policies) to address the challenges.
This analysis is just the start. Additional analysis of a wider range of media (such as television coverage), wider search parameters (such as including articles beyond failures), and a more detailed coding scheme with more coders could provide a more precise accounting of the differences.
Additionally, future research could better control for regional differences in coverage. Matched case studies–such as reviewing coverage of water failure in two different cities and electrical failure in the same cities–could give the analysis greater precision.
In spite of the preliminary nature of this analysis, we think that it provides instructive takeaways for water professionals and utilities:
Stay in tune with news coverage of your local infrastructure. While professionals may learn about the important events around the proverbial water cooler, it’s important to keep a careful, thoughtful eye on media coverage–not only the events that are covered, but how they are covered. Water Hub releases an annual report that examines trends in media coverage around water.
Use the news cycle to clarify lines of accountability. When infrastructure fails, reporters interview experts, community members, and policymakers. Use that opportunity to lay out solutions or identify who is accountable. If coverage doesn't point to solutions or accountable entities, step forward to fill the gap.
Water infrastructure is not an intractable problem; community members, advocates, and policymakers can pull levers of power and accountability, and thoughtful communications strategies and storytelling can educate and mobilize communities to hold people accountable for infrastructure systems that don't fail. FLUSH can help prepare you for these conversations and think through how to strategize your storytelling to better engage the people who count.
Build a two-way dialogue with your community before disaster strikes. Trust helps you understand the causes of failure and makes communities more amenable to ballot issues that could provide much-needed funding. It can also help you identify vulnerability early and plan for it. A disaster starts before floodwaters rise, and it depends on both vulnerability and an external event. Incorporate human vulnerability into emergency planning. We know people are hard to manage, and water dialogues can be painful and often contentious, but we promise it’s worth it. We built a free trust-building resource to help you get started.
Reframe water infrastructure as a space for exciting, forward-thinking, and innovative solutions. There is a significant difference between "fixing something old and dilapidated" and "building the future." Shifting the framework to resemble electricity's may bring more attention and resources to the sector.
Above all, we believe that people working in infrastructure should ask themselves: How can we be more thoughtful in our word choices around infrastructure, and what stories are we telling? As this article indicates, how we tell stories about infrastructure matters–they can present solutions, set the boundaries of a problem, create hopelessness, or mobilize communities. When we are thoughtful about how we talk about our challenges, we can be more thoughtful about how to solve them.
A personal note from Musa
I grew up in Bangladesh. Safe drinking water from the tap was not something you took for granted. You thought about it daily: boiling, filtering, storing, questioning. When I moved to the US to study and work, I quickly noticed that Americans have a complicated relationship with their tap water, too. Many distrust it. Many have stopped using it. But unlike in many parts of the world, the infrastructure in most US cities can deliver safe water. The problem is not always the water. Sometimes it is the story being told about the water, a story that has made distrust feel rational even when the tap is safe, and resignation feel inevitable even when the system is fixable.
This analysis started as an academic exercise. It became more personal the deeper I went into the data, reading account after account from residents in Jackson, Flint (MI), Newark (NJ), and dozens of other cities describing what it is like to live with a water system you cannot trust. The data analysis is in the pages above.
But what stays with me is simpler than any word frequency count: electricity stories feel like they are going somewhere. Water stories feel like they are going in circles. That difference is not just about how bad the infrastructure is. It is about how the infrastructure is talked about and who gets to do the talking. The water sector has the evidence, the expertise, and in many places a genuine record of investment and improvement that could anchor a very different kind of story. What it needs is the willingness to tell it, in plain language, with accountability, and with enough consistency that the public comes to expect repair rather than endurance.
