What does it take to make poverty an important news story?
by Petra Newman
The reporter warned us the scenes we were about to see would be disturbing, yet millions watched with shocked fascination and horror at the macabre scene of hundreds and thousands of displaced people in refugee camps where starvation and disease took a life every few minutes. Lack of protein bloated children's stomachs, and images of stick thin arms and legs portrayed them in an abstract manner. People had become so emaciated they barely cast a shadow on the hard parched ground. Hollow eyes mirrored their despair, hopelessness and grief.
My heart went out to them. I cried for the mother who held her dead baby to her empty breast. I cried for the father who brushed the flies from his dying son. Under the canopy of a make shift Red Cross hospital a French doctor holds what I thought to be an infant but in fact was a five year old girl. He stated it was too late for her and she only had a few hours to live. The child stared into the camera. It broke my heart; I wanted to hold the child, I wanted to protect her, I wanted to save her. Her beseeching eyes still haunt me today.
That news report was over thirty years ago from Biafra. A million people died in Biafra because of famine, war and disease. Headlines of poverty and starvation were an important news story then because it shocked us; viewers felt empathy and donated to charitable organizations wanting to help their fellow man.
What about today, what turned empathy to apathy? Why don't stories of poverty grab the public as it did over thirty years ago? What does it take to make poverty an important news story today?
The same source that brought the news of poverty is also partially to blame for our indifference, our waning interest of impoverished crises of the world today. People are fickle creatures; we have to be stimulated everyday to keep our interests peeked, especially in this day and age of modern technology.
Headlines scream every day of murders, beatings, drug dealers, terrorists, etc. We've come to except this as the norm of our daily lives. We've come accustomed to violence though movies, video games and television programs so much so that we've become desensitized to violence. We've come accustomed to scenes of children living in squalor on garbage dumps, or child carrying water from a contaminated river. We've all seen these disturbing scenes on TV from the comfort of our living-rooms every day. But do we do anything about it? Do these scenes still have the same shock value as it did when first aired? Unfortunately the majority of us have become desensitized and complacent, defeating the purpose that was intended of these commercial.
If you experience or see the same thing every day, you become desensitized to that particular occurrence or situation. For instance; about thirty-five years ago I had to go to Toronto's Sick Children's Hospital with my daughter. Every day I walked from our rooming house to the hospital. Coming from a small community I encountered things in the city I had never seen before. I encountered people sleeping on the streets, people begging for money. I gave what change I had but ran out of money before I reached the hospital. What shocked me was that people walked past these street people as if they were invisible. They walked around them without as much as a glance. What was new to me had my empathy, what was an everyday occurrence to the people who lived in the big city created apathy and desensitization towards the problems of their fellow man.
So what does it take to make poverty an important story today? The media has to shake the public from their reverie, give them a wake-up-call to the facts of poverty.
When Immigrants first saw the Statue of Liberty, they wept with joy. Lady Liberty meant just that. It liberated them from poverty, tyranny and persecution. The inscription on the statue from the poem by Emma Lazarus gave them new hope for a future.
"Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
That was then; today the demographics have changed around the world and in America. Capitalism dominates nearly every part of the world; everyone wants to achieve the U.S. middle-class life. People from third world countries have as much right to the same standard of life as Americans. Thus there is an influx of immigrants. They all want a piece of the American pie. It was thought the U.S. standard of middle class was easily achieved, where a poor person could better their standard of living. But alas, today the gap between the poor and wealthy is increasing, middle class is slowly sliding towards poverty.
Out of approximately 6 billion people in the world, half live on less than two dollars a day. I billion live in slums which is estimated by the UN Human Settlements Program to increase by 300 percent over the next 50 years.
In the United States, 12 million families are considered "food insecure" and 9 million people skipped a meal because of lack of food. Spiraling oil prices, food, housing, health care, medications, etc., all contribute to a quickly falling economy.
In order to make poverty an important news story, we have to show that no one is safe from its grip. Life can change in the blink of an eye. The media should have a special segment each day on poverty in our evening news. Interview an impoverished person each day; film their habitat and routine of a typical day. Show the domino effect of poverty such as starvation, disease, homelessness, violence, inferior education standards and medical care, economic collapse, war etc. Remind world leaders to keep their promise to make poverty history by the year 2015.