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What Does it Take to Make Poverty an Important News Story?

In a world increasingly numbed by sound-bite news items and pictures of atrocities stacked one atop the other, the odds of making poverty an important news story grow ever more unlikely.

Flavour of the day disasters such as Darfur, Katrina or the latest earthquake in China are easily displaced by mansions burning in California and not just this year it seems, but with yawning regularity now, every year.

While the comedians joke about the poor in tornado alley, those in Oklahoma and Kansas as their trailers are tossed by high winds and funnels, and loss of life is also reported repeatedly, the comics are comfortable making endless jokes about this group, saying things such as,... if they know this is the weather pattern, well, why don't they just move...

It doesn't seem to occur to them that the trailer-park folk don't have that option. Poor people can't just up and move; they're poor.

It reminds one of the poor-taste jokes that came out of the African water and food crises wherein comics felt it humorous to take jibes at the number of Africans walking miles each day to fetch pails of water, or bags of flour. Their point being, why didn't they just move closer to the food or water, Why indeed?

Obviously the comedians had done little research into this material or had ignored their findings. These particular folks would have been killed if they had moved closer to the water source and were often, just for making the journey to try and find some. Terrifically humorous, all in all.

The over-riding comic relief here is that where you end up on earth seems, at best, a crap-shoot, at least in some people's estimation. The comedian making the poor-taste jokes might have had as much chance of being born in Africa as he did being born into the wealth of America. At least, that's the judgement of some. Drawing the short straw could be anyone's fate and viewing poverty from that vantage point might give one pause.

On the other hand, while the Malibu mansion crowd are seen bemoaning their palaces crumbling as they clutch their tiny dogs replete with diamond-encrusted collars, few, if any jokes are made about whether they should flee their land, fire-prone or not.

Yet, they often own two or three residences, and could well afford to abandon the one threatened by fire or mudslide with ever increasing frequency, not to mention the very real possibility of it falling off the San Andreas Fault and into the

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