Last week I thought about the famine in Somalia for the first time in weeks. Googling it, I discovered a BBC News article from Sept. 5 detailing a U.N. report which warned that as many as 750,000 Somalis could die from starvation in the coming four months.
Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times began an article published Sept. 15 with the following question: “Is the world about to watch 750,000 Somalis starve to death?”
While I can’t predict whether or not the rest of the world might watch 750,000 Somalis starve to death, most Americans certainly won’t.
Why? The American news media have been too busy obsessing over the elections, filling our heads with buzz phrases like “job creator” and “class warfare.” In the time since Gov. Rick Perry entered himself in the campaign, the domestic news media have been humming over the primary race, even as the general election remains more than 13 months away. Is this all we’re going to be hearing about for the next year?
If I were to actually use TV news as my primary source of news information as many Americans probably do, it would seem as if the rest of the world had stopped spinning and America the Island was whirling along on its own through the vastness of our solar system. If Fox News and MSNBC were indicators of what was happening in the world, one would have to assume that the Somali famine, the war in Libya, the euro crisis and the Palestinian statehood bid all got together and said to our domestic issues, “Go ahead, we’ll take the month off so that you can have the spotlight.”
But, of course, that didn’t happen, and all of those crises and many more continue to exist but fall from our collective consciousness as the media chooses for us what is important and what isn’t. It’s not that international issues aren’t covered at all; many times they are crammed into end-of-the-hour news bulletins using Associated Press and Reuters footage of angry Palestinians and rocket-firing Libyan rebels, as if the American audience would somehow be able to contextualize complex international issues based on 30-second news clips, but wouldn’t understand the politics of their own country without 55 minutes of spoon-fed election “analysis” each and every hour.
If the rest of the world had indeed solved all their problems and the elections were the only thing to worry about, I would certainly find them entertaining (apart from when crowds are cheering executions and the preventable death of the uninsured), and I’ve spent a lot of time flipping between Fair and Balanced Fox News and Lean Forward MSNBC. However, this type of obsessive, one-topic coverage is not only lazy and cheap, but also damaging.
If the media fails to inform us on issues like Somalia, how can we effect change? In a just world, there would be millions of people in the streets of Washington chanting their support for increased aid to the impoverished nation.
But we don’t care, and neither do the media. We are too busy deciding who we think was best dressed at the Emmys and arguing about whether or not millionaires and billionaires should have to pay more taxes. In the meantime, thousands have died, thousands more will die, and we will have sat back and forgotten about it.
