Its dinner time, the man of the house sits at the head of the table patiently waiting for his loving wife to hand him the pot roast. He dishes himself a fair sized portion and hands the plate onto his wife and down the line to the rest of the family. The meal is enjoyed by all, even the family pet who gets the leftovers. When dinner is finished, the man sits on the sofa and reads the newspaper. The headline reads "Zimbabwe elections a sham". A few kilometers down the road a mother calls her children off the street, it is dinner time. There is no man of the house and no dinner table. The children sit around a make shift table in the make shift house. The mother hands each one a small plate containing a slice of bread each and as she has had a good day digging in garbage bins around the neighborhood, there are a few dry chicken bones with the bread.
As the children very excitedly enjoy their dinner, the mother retires to her corner of the room they live in, tears rolling down her cheeks; she has managed to feed her children for another day. Unfortunately for her there was not enough to go around, maybe she will eat tomorrow. She picks up a newspaper, it is three weeks old, she doesn't care what the headline says, this is her warmth for the cold night. This is becoming a common scenario around the world. Many take for granted the food on the table or a warm bed for the night. Millions more will go to bed hungry and cold and in some cases they will mercifully die in their sleep. The Zimbabwean election have dominated the world headlines since March 29 2008. In all this time, the starving Zimbabweans have been in the back ground. Nobody cares that millions of dollars have been spent on an election campaign that turns out to be a "sham", millions of dollars that could have fed millions of people.
It usually takes a disaster of huge magnitude; that affects the not so poverty stricken, before a report is made and somewhere in the article, the poor may be mentioned. In a very recent flood in South Africa, the headlines were "13 die in heavy flooding", the article went on to describe how all the local business and tourist destinations had been affected. The 13 that died were mentioned somewhere in the article, they were from a nearby poverty stricken area, 7 were children trying to get to school. The main photo's for the article were of a few cars being washed down the main road, yet 1000's were left homeless, no photo's showed their devastation.
On the other side of the country, a huge convoy of expensive 4x4 vehicles escort a top of the range Mercedes into a shanty town, closely followed by the media. This is a government minister of parliament dropping in to try to secure his success in the next elections. The headlines will read "minister promises new housing and jobs for all", something he knows very well will never happen and again he really does not care, all he needs is the vote; after all, if he wins he gets a six figure income for the next five years.
Crime makes poverty an important story, only if the crime has been committed against the not so impoverished, but was committed by someone who comes from the lower end of the poverty chain. Have you ever seen a newspaper headline "destitute man killed for his shoes" or "destitute man found robbed on a street corner". No I guess not, however it is common to read "Destitute man arrested for stealing a cellphone", or "Resident from the local squatter camp (shanty town) arrested for murder of a prominent businessman".
Poverty is important to the media if it benefits a politician or celebrity. Politicians use the impoverished to play on the emotions of the people in order to win elections. The media use this to sell their stories. Yes I must admit, many celebrities do a lot for poverty, however if they were honestly doing it for the love of a fellow human or because they really cared, why does it have to be reported to the world. This is because they benefit from the publicity of the story. The true hero's donating money or food to the impoverished in the world, do it anonymously. There is no story.
So what if Angelina Jolie has adopted impoverished children, so has thousands of other very ordinary people, some who can only just afford to put a meal on the table and a roof over their heads, those are true hero's of poverty, yet they are never mentioned in the media. Let a destitute person try to walk into the house of a celebrity or politician to ask for food. He will make headlines when he is arrested or in countries like Zimbabwe, he will be shot on sight.
If you really need to read stories of poverty, read between the lines of the next natural disaster article or of the latest crime wave to hit an upper class neighborhood. That is where the stories of the impoverished raise their heads.