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Now!
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 early this month, citing new
data 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."
Reading this news over a more-than-ample
breakfast, I thought about the limitations of journalistic work
that is often done with the best of intentions. Try as they might,
reporters and editors don't often go beyond the professional
groove of the media workplace. Journalists routinely function
as cogs in media machinery that processes tragedy as just another
news commodity.
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.
News outlets are adept at producing
vivid stories about misfortune. Those stories might be emotionally
affecting or even politically mobilizing in terms of relief efforts.
But the overarching matter of priorities is not apt to come into
media focus. In general, corporate-employed journalists are not
much more inclined to hammer at the skewed character of national
and global priorities than corporate chieftains or government
officials are.
In a world where so much wealth
and so much poverty coexist, the maintenance of a rough status
quo depends on a sense of propriety that borders on -- and even
intersects with -- moral if not legal criminality. The institutional
realities of power may numb us to our own personal sense of the
distinction between what is just and what is just not acceptable.
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.
Journalism, in its prevalent
incarnations, has a strong tendency to blend into that scenery.
And whether you're working in a newsroom or watching in a living
room or reading at a breakfast table, it takes a conscious act
of will to look at the big picture -- and challenge the reigning
priorities that are simultaneously quite proper and horrific.
We're encouraged to see high-quality
journalism as dispassionate, so that professionals do their jobs
without advocating. But passive acceptance of murderous priorities
in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy. It's advocacy of
the most convincing sort -- by example.
A hoary cliche says money makes
the world go 'round. The extent to which that's true may be arguable.
But deeper questions revolve around the priorities that ought
to determine the profoundly important choices made by individuals
and institutions. Journalism can't answer those questions. But
journalism should ask them.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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