The Story Behind the Story -Kenneth Cole
Every day we turn on the news or we pick up a paper and we read the headlines, headlines that are crafted to grab your attention to bring you in and get you interested in what's to come. The stories below those headlines are usually assembled from sound-bite-sized pieces of information that we can consume quickly and digest just as quick. The story itself is usually accurate, and almost always compelling. But how often is what we are reading really The Story?
We all read about the fact that amid the violent protests over food shortages in Ethiopia, Egypt, Indonesia -- even Italy -- wholesale warehouses in the United States began limiting rice purchases.
I would imagine that most of us also read that Senator McCain recently visited New Orleans and said, "I have come here and told these people: Never again. Never again will a disaster, either natural or man-made, be handled in this fashion."
What both of those stories have in common, like so many stories we see, is that they bring our attention to the acute, while distracting us from the chronic. And truly, the chronic is not so (a)cute at all.
The acute, when it comes to food, are the riots around the world, and the fact that each of us here in the United States can only buy 80 pounds of rice per visit to Sam's Club.
The chronic is that 840 million people around the world don't get enough food to meet their basic energy needs, and that every 20 percent increase in food prices (and prices have spiked 45 percent in the last 18 months) will push 100 million more people into the ranks of the poorest of the poor - those who live on less than one dollar a day.
So the focus on the current unrest and our own rice actually deprives us of using today's news as feud for thought.
The coverage of Hurricane Katrina also focused on the acute -- a storm that did exactly what a storm of its magnitude was predicted to do: flood New Orleans. The reason we were confronted with a story about a crisis was because we never saw the story about the chronic: the poverty and homelessness that were, literally, flushed out into the open.
When we pay attention to the shocking, the acute (the story), we often miss the chronic issues that demand our attention (the story behind the story).
So I guess we need to always ask ourselves, is what we are reading (or watching) in fact the real story, or is it the story behind the story? Because, above all else, we need to always stay A-WEAR.
That's my story and I am sticking to it (for now).
[Image: WFP/Peter Smerdon]
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It took the actual flooding of New Orleans to expose the chronic problems facing the city, now its up to the American people to stay vigilant - keep it in the news and continue to help. I think mainstream media outlets that have continued to report on the poverty, state corruption, schools, and rebuilding efforts should be acknowledged, though they are rare exceptions.
This being said, I am glad to see that the media has focused recently on another chronic problem - the substandard medical care of immigrants held in detention centers across the country. Could this coverage be because the deaths of immigration detainees are so numerous - 83 since March 2003 (30 of which were "questionable" according to the Washington Post), because it is an election year or because news outlets often pick up each other's stories? One would hope it's because human rights violations are newsworthy, are deserving of coverage and that the media, just once in a while, get it right.
Perri Chinalai
Breakthrough