News We Didn't Get
Today's Boston Globe had an interesting feature article which asked writers and contributors what stories they felt had been underreported during the last year. The entries were interesting, but the one that grabbed me the most was written by novelist Roland Merullo. Here it is in its entirety:
To my mind, poverty in the richest country on earth was the most underreported story of 2007, as it has been for many years now.
It should have been on the front page of every newspaper once a week. Every day, we should hear radio and TV news announcers reminding us that some 35 million people live below the poverty line; that 10 million Americans - 3 million of them children - experience hunger.
We should flip through the cable channels and find preachers exhorting the people in their stadium-sized churches, "Help them! Share with them!" Political figures should be making pickup-truck tours of the dirt roads of New England, where families live behind plastic-covered windows in temperatures that drop to minus-20 degrees.
But we've come to accept it somehow, as if there is nothing we can do or say, as if it's too much of a disgrace even to read about.
It's not like the press in this country didn't have ample opportunity to report on poverty in America. Somehow those figures didn't get much play when SCHIP got vetoed not once, but twice; or when the WIC budget was funded at the same level as last year, with no accounting for the increase in food prices. I guess the press had more important things to report, like the price of a candidate's haircut or the amount of a tip another candidate did (or did not) leave.
If Mr. Merullo could find those figures, surely our ace press corps could find them and maybe even ask the current candidates what they intended to do about it. I guess that's asking too much, however.
To my mind, poverty in the richest country on earth was the most underreported story of 2007, as it has been for many years now.
It should have been on the front page of every newspaper once a week. Every day, we should hear radio and TV news announcers reminding us that some 35 million people live below the poverty line; that 10 million Americans - 3 million of them children - experience hunger.
We should flip through the cable channels and find preachers exhorting the people in their stadium-sized churches, "Help them! Share with them!" Political figures should be making pickup-truck tours of the dirt roads of New England, where families live behind plastic-covered windows in temperatures that drop to minus-20 degrees.
But we've come to accept it somehow, as if there is nothing we can do or say, as if it's too much of a disgrace even to read about.
It's not like the press in this country didn't have ample opportunity to report on poverty in America. Somehow those figures didn't get much play when SCHIP got vetoed not once, but twice; or when the WIC budget was funded at the same level as last year, with no accounting for the increase in food prices. I guess the press had more important things to report, like the price of a candidate's haircut or the amount of a tip another candidate did (or did not) leave.
If Mr. Merullo could find those figures, surely our ace press corps could find them and maybe even ask the current candidates what they intended to do about it. I guess that's asking too much, however.
Labels: Free Press
posted by Diane at 1:12 PM
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