Up First from NPR - Indian Railroad Failures, Newsrooms On Strike, GOP Election Denial Coalition

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

A signal error appears to be the reason for the train crash that killed 275 people in India. Hundreds of journalists strike as their employer guts newsrooms across the country. GOP election deniers are pushing states to withdraw from a system that helps voter roll accuracy.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

India has been modernizing its rail network. So how could it be that three trains collided, killing hundreds of people? We have an update on the disaster in a country where millions move by train. I'm Michelle Martin. I'm here with Steve Inskeep, and this is Up First from NPR News. Hundreds of journalists in seven states walk off the job this week. They work for Gannett, a big chain, and they say it's been years since they've seen fair pay. Their employer cut so many employees that some cities have no local reporters. How will company shareholders respond?

Also, why did eight Republican-led states turn against an effort to clean up voter rolls? Our investigation traces the movement to an activist network and a single story on a conspiracy site. Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day. praises the movement to an activist network, and a single story on a conspiracy site. Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day. Support for NPR and the following message come from Indeed. Hire great talent for your business faster with Indeed. Indeed is the platform where you attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Claim your $75 credit now at Indeed.com slash UpFirst.

Terms and conditions apply. This message comes from NPR sponsor Amazon Music. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you could listen to this episode of UpFirst ad-free on Amazon Music. All Prime members get access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime membership. To listen to Up First and your favorite podcasts ad-free, download the Amazon Music app or visit amazon.com slash NPR Up First. More than a lot of other nations, India moves by railroads. The world's most populous country has one of the world's busiest rail systems. Its older trains feature in Bollywood movies. Its newer ones are

a symbol of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's economic modernization. So how did three trains collide, killing at least 275 people? Journalist Shalu Yadav has been following this story from New Delhi. Welcome to the program. Good morning, Steve. Hadn't India just been spending a lot of money upgrading the rail network? I've been reading about this. Yes, Steve. And in recent years, the number of accidents have gone down because Modi government has spent billions of dollars to modernize the system. But even so, Indian railways remain a huge work in progress. You've got to remember, Steve, this is one of the largest and oldest railways networks in the world, most of it built by the British. And so maintenance is a bit of a Herculean task, even if you're spending lots of money. And Prime Minister Modi

has prioritized high-speed trains in particular as part of his idea of connecting India faster. But some critics say that that's come at the expense of maintaining the older trains and the system that they run on. Oh, this is interesting because from the images of this terrible wreckage, these look like the classic, colorful, older Indian trains. Are the older ones on completely different safety systems? Well, most aspects of the older trains, I would say, remain on the older safety system. Not much upgrading has happened to accommodate even the high-speed trains. Now, India's railway minister has hinted that a signal failure is the likely cause that led to this disaster, but he did not rule out a human error.

Authorities say that both trains had approached Balasore District Station under a green signal indicating it was all safe, but it went horribly wrong. A passenger train on route the southern city of Chennai derailed after it rammed into a stationary freight train. Its coaches that fell on the opposite track then got hit by another passenger train that was coming in high speed from the other side, leading to the worst train disaster this country has seen in two decades, Steve. How important is Indian train service, whether it's upgraded or not? Pretty important. It's in fact called the lifeline of the country as it ferries over 25 million people every day. And it connects this vast country of 1.4 billion people. It's often,

you know, the cheapest and fastest medium to get around for most people in the country, especially the working class who depend on it to get to their workplace from villages to the cities. Even milk supplies and petrol supplies depend on trains. And many of the families of the victims and the injured, Steve, they are still dependent on train services too to find their loved ones. And with that service disrupted, some are now taking long journeys by road to reach the spot where officials say that over 100 bodies are still unclaimed or unidentified. How's the recovery effort going? Well, it's still ongoing in full swing as we speak, Steve. It's taken over 1,000 rescue workers

who've been working over 24-7 since Friday night with heavy machinery to try and clear the tons of debris that lay on the tracks. Officials say that the operation should be back to normal by Tuesday night or Wednesday, Steve. Journalist Shalu Yadav is in New Delhi. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Today and tomorrow, hundreds of journalists at newspapers across this country walk off the job. They all work for Gannett, which owns papers across the country, including USA Today. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins us. Hey there, David. Good morning, Steve. How widespread is this strike?

So it's starting this morning in seven states, California, Arizona, Texas, Indiana, New Jersey, near where I live. That includes papers like the Arizona Republic, the Austin American-Statesman, some big ones where journalists are working without contracts. They say that they have not received fair pay and compensation, but more to the point, haven't received it in many, many years. And meanwhile, their newsrooms have been cut back deeply. David, we've paid a lot of attention to the cutbacks in local newsrooms. And in fact, they've been cut so savagely over the years, I was a little surprised there's anybody left in some newsrooms to walk out. What do they want?

You know, and by the way, that's literally true in some cases. Salinas, California, a city of 150,000 owned by Gannett, has no local reporters, or at last check, none locally based. Journalists want to draw attention to their circumstances, sure, but it's a more profound critique. Today is the day in which shareholders are meeting. They want to draw attention to, among other things, the compensation of millions of dollars in pay and shares to Chief Executive Mike Reed. He's been at that helm at a time where, for the last four years, you've had this merger of these two large newspaper companies, Gannett and former Gatehouse

community newspaper company. They merged together, according to the president of the union I talked to in recent days. He says those newsrooms have been cut since that merger by 56 percent. And you see it throughout the properties, the meagerness of the report at times. Sometimes, as I said, just one or a handful of staffers are intended to report on the texture of lives in all these cities and communities. One newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, where the editor is based and also overseeing the editor in Lakeland, Florida, several states away. And another small one nearby. If you look at the top five stories on any given day, it looks like two or three of them are going to be about Powerball winnings. That is something that could be produced by bots. How does Gannett explain itself? Well, they talk about the tough times of the news business, which have been significant and real. They talk about a new news leader they brought over from McClatchy, and they say this will be part of a new strategy to infuse real life and vigor into their local reporting. But the financial realities of that merger that I talked about a few moments ago are such that they were required to cut. Initially, it looked like between two to three hundred million dollars.

Now it looks like it's more like four hundred million dollars in cuts. And I think that scythe cutting across the newsrooms across the country is what you're seeing really as much more as a result of that. Well, the short-term walkout is being led, I know, by the News Guild, which represents staffers at a lot of news outlets. Do they have very much leverage? Well, you know, they've won some wins. They've been organizing at digital and print newsrooms around the country in recent years because of these pressures on the industry. You know, in Pittsburgh, there's been a many months long strike at the Post-Gazette that has not really yielded any more advances for the workers than what they were experiencing in the years that negotiations were taken there to achieve. But meanwhile, at the New York Times, you know, most august name in news after years of sort of conflict, you saw a recent pact in which there was a 10 percent

minimum increase for all newsroom employees and a 7% signing bonus and a lot of other concessions as well. So I think you're seeing, to some degree, wind at the back of these News Guild workers, even as I think the greater dynamics in the industry, and especially at Gannett, are very daunting. That's NPR's David Volkenflik. Thanks so much. You bet. We now have the backstory to an unusual move against voter fraud. For some time now, Republicans have been making an issue of the accuracy of voter rolls. And even after thousands of election officials and dozens of courts affirm the results of the 2020 election, some officials say they are still concerned. And some have turned against a bipartisan system used

to clean up voter rolls. Eight Republican-led states have now abandoned this system that helps keep voter registration information up to date. The NPR investigations team and our voting correspondent Miles Parks found out how this happened. Hey there, Miles. Hey, Steve. What is this system? Essentially, it's a partnership. It allows states to share data to keep their voter rolls up to date so election officials can know when their voters move, when they die, and occasionally when they vote illegally in more than one state. And for the past decade, it has worked as something of a bipartisan success story. Doing the work that Republicans want, along with a lot of Democrats, states collaborating in this thing known by the acronym ERIC.

So how did so many Republicans turn against ERIC? It all goes back to a far-right website called the Gateway Pundit. This is a website that has published a number of conspiracy theories in the past, including the birther theory about former President Barack Obama, COVID vaccine misinformation. Last January, they started targeting Eric, saying that it was funded by liberal billionaire George Soros. He's a common thread in a lot of conspiracy theories, saying it was a far left plot to steal elections. None of that is true. Still, we found that it motivated effectively a number of Republican election officials to act.

Including in the first state, Louisiana. Right. We centered in on Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, who was the first secretary of state to pull out of Eric. We found that he announced his decision quietly in a press release at the time. But we found video on Facebook that showed he actually brought the decision to a small election integrity group. This week, I sent a letter to the election registration information suspending Louisiana's participation in that program. So these sorts of groups have popped up all over the country since 2020, motivated by former President Trump's lies about voting. And you can hear in that clip

just how thrilled they are about Ardoin's decision. So he's responding to this small, relatively small group of voters, but it's a kind of group you could find in many states. Is that how this spread? That's exactly right. We saw a common thread with a lot of these states. One, Ardoin was gearing up to run for reelection, and a number of the Republican officials who have pulled out of Eric are now gearing up to run for reelection, and a number of the Republican officials who have pulled out of Eric are now gearing up to run for higher office.

Secondly, we saw a trend with these sorts of local election integrity groups. We found callouts across the country where these groups mobilize their members to pressure state lawmakers and election officials to pull out of Eric. Which brings me to a woman named Cleta Mitchell. You might remember her. She's an influential Republican election attorney who worked really closely with former President Donald Trump in 2020 to try to overturn that election. She started a coalition of these local election integrity groups across the country, and she's used her podcast to push a lot of anti-Eric narratives. We want more citizens to say to their legislators, do not continue your membership, withdraw their membership. OK, so the election denial movement has scored some successes in eight states, might do it in some more. What does all this mean for the 2024 election? Election officials tell me two things.

One, the voting lists in these states will almost certainly be less up-to-date, which means less secure elections. And that can have downstream effects on voters. It could potentially mean mail ballots getting sent to the wrong places. It can mean longer lines of precincts. Creating less secure elections, which they say they're against. Miles, thanks. Thanks, Steve. And here's Miles Parks.

And that's a first for this Monday, June 5th. I'm Stephen Skip. And I'm Michelle Martin. Up First is produced by David West and Ziad Butch. Our editors are Michael Sullivan, Emily Kopp, Ben Swayze, and Alice Wolfley. Our technical director is Zach Coleman. Start your day here with us tomorrow. And remember that your NPR station makes Up First possible each morning,

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