Big oil has entered the chat.

tl;dr: The Cuyahoga river caught on fire many, many times over the years. However, a fire in June 1969 spurred legislative action that finally solved the problem, even though that fire was not the most destructive nor the most deadly. The difference was society had changed, and that fire struck a nerve when the previous ones hadn't.

The moral of the story is: past performance is no guarantee of future results.

It's related because it's a nice clear example of "bad press [eventually] forcing change in laws and companies," on an issue that's settled enough that one would be hard-pressed to argue the end result was wrong. The swipe at local news isn't exactly relevant, given this recent is a national one that did get coverage and the river fire spurred a federal, not local, legislative solution.