Aug. 2, 2011 at 10:58am with 279 notes
Reblogged from theatlantic
theatlantic: With Media Distracted, There’s No Rush to Aid Somalia Today’s New York Times tackles an important dimension of the faminebattering drought-stricken Somalia: With the media focused on stories like the U.S. debt ceiling debate, the U.K. phone hacking scandal, and theNorway shooting rather than hunger in east Africa, relief organizations are having a hard time raising money. “The overwhelming problem is that the American public is not seeing and feeling the urgency of this crisis,” a Unicef executive tells the paper (a cartoon in The Times of London recently made a similar point more controversially, depicting a starving Somali child saying, “I’ve had a bellyfull of phone hacking”). The data does appear to back up the claim, though the famine is certainly generating coverage. In the two weeks since the U.N. officially declared a famine in parts of Somalia, the story hasn’t registered on Pew’s News Coverage Index, with the debt crisis, phone hacking scandal, and Norway shooting driving the news cycle instead. Read more at The Atlantic Wire

theatlantic:

With Media Distracted, There’s No Rush to Aid Somalia

Today’s New York Times tackles an important dimension of the faminebattering drought-stricken Somalia: With the media focused on stories like the U.S. debt ceiling debate, the U.K. phone hacking scandal, and theNorway shooting rather than hunger in east Africa, relief organizations are having a hard time raising money. “The overwhelming problem is that the American public is not seeing and feeling the urgency of this crisis,” a Unicef executive tells the paper (a cartoon in The Times of London recently made a similar point more controversially, depicting a starving Somali child saying, “I’ve had a bellyfull of phone hacking”).

The data does appear to back up the claim, though the famine is certainly generating coverage. In the two weeks since the U.N. officially declared a famine in parts of Somalia, the story hasn’t registered on Pew’s News Coverage Index, with the debt crisis, phone hacking scandal, and Norway shooting driving the news cycle instead.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire

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