On August 11, a storm knocked out power across northern Indiana, including Gary, Indiana. Two weeks later, residents were still sitting in the dark in 100-degree heat. On August 14, a NIPSCO utility vehicle was struck by gunfire while crews attempted to restore electricity. The company temporarily paused all repair work in the area.
ABC and NBC both covered the outage. Neither one mentioned the shooting as the reason for the delayed repair. What they did report though was racism.
NBC News reporters Shaq Brewster, Selina Guevara, and Csaba Siemaszko filed a story describing Gary as a "mostly Black city" where residents suffered without power. ABC's Alex Perez covered the same crisis. Both outlets framed the extended outage as a failure of infrastructure and, implied racism is a deciding factor on why Gary residents are still without power.
NBC's report included the line: "On Monday, one of the poorest and blackest cities in America still had no power." It quoted experts noting that "in cases of severe weather, natural disasters and especially extreme heat, the poor are most vulnerable." The framing was familiar: poverty, race, systemic neglect.
What was conspicuously absent from both reports was the reason NIPSCO — Northern Indiana Public Service Company — couldn't get the lights back on. Someone shot at the repair crew. The utility pulled its workers. Restoration stopped.
That's not a minor detail. That's the story. When you're explaining why a city has gone two weeks without power in lethal heat, the fact that armed individuals fired on the people trying to fix it is the single most relevant piece of information. Everything else is context. The shooting is causation.
The local NBC affiliate actually reported the shooting when it happened. The information was available. National desks at both networks had access to their own affiliate's reporting and chose not to include it. That's not an oversight. That's an edit.
The editorial choice tells you everything about how the story was supposed to land. Power outage plus poverty plus race equals systemic failure. Power outage plus poverty plus race plus crews getting shot at equals a different conversation entirely — one about public safety, law enforcement, and community breakdown that doesn't fit the preferred template.
Gary, Indiana has been without power for two weeks. The temperature has been above 100 degrees. And the people who came to fix it got shot at.
One of those sentences didn't make the news. It was the only one that explained the other two.
