On Hunger and the Failings of Journalism

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On Hunger and the Failings of Journalism
By Norman Solomon, AlterNet. Posted May 10, 2006.

(excerpt)

We see this kind of news story now and again. Sometimes we try to imagine the people behind the numbers, the human realities underneath the surface abstractions. But overall, the responses testify to journalism's failings -- and our own.

"Poor nutrition contributes to the deaths of some 5.6 million children every year," an Associated Press dispatch said days ago, citing data released May 2 in a report from the U.N. Children's Fund. And: "In its report, UNICEF said one of every four children under age 5, including 146 million children in the developing world, is underweight." The future is bleak for many children who will be born in the next decade. As AP noted, "the world has fallen far short in efforts to reduce hunger by half before 2015."

(snip)

Many people are troubled by the patterns of negative events around the world. And hunger is especially disturbing; in an era of prodigious affluence for some, the absence of basic nutrition for huge numbers of human beings is a basic moral obscenity. Across the spectrums of culture, faith and ideologies -- whether remedies might seem to lie in religious charity or governmental action -- heartfelt desire to reduce suffering is very common.

(snip)

On this planet in 2006, no greater contrast exists than the gap between human hunger and military spending. While international relief agencies slash already-meager food budgets because of funding shortfalls, the largesse for weaponry and war continues to be grotesquely generous. The globe's biggest offender is the United States government, which at the current skyrocketing rate of expenditures is -- if you add up all the standard budgets and "supplemental" appropriations for war -- closing in on a time when U.S. military spending will reach $2 billion per day.

This is what Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about in 1967 when he warned: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Such an occurrence isn't sudden; it overtakes us gradually, becoming part of the normalized scenery.

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/36109/