Poverty, Market Fundamentalism and the Media

In the '90s, as poverty and distress deepened, the media turned away. A decade later, only two newspapers bothered to report that India's so-called reform programs caused another 70 million Indians to fall below the poverty line, bringing the total to nearly 400 million.

For the first time since independence in 1947, India is experiencing large-scale hunger-related deaths in some of the richest states of the country. When 37 children died of hunger just outside of the wealthy city of Bombay, the country's leading magazine gave it a measly two pages. In the same issue, nine pages were given to the wedding of cricket superstar Imran Khan.

Each year half a million Indians die of tuberculosis, and more than 1.5 million Indian infants die of diarrhea. Yet you will not find two columns on these deaths because those who die are the wrong sort of people, not deserving of media attention.

India may boast of its young chief executives, new jobs, new technologies and new opportunities. But it is also home to 40 million registered jobless, the total population of the Republic of South Africa. No one's done a cover story or a TV program on that because they're the wrong kind of people.

What happens when the media actually covers poverty? Worldwide, the media tends to succumb to certain stereotypes of the poor as unending victims or romantic heroes. The coverage is always completely lacking in humor, belying the fact that humor is an essential survival mechanism among the poor.

Poverty is generally depicted with a tragic drama that focuses on the shock and agony of witnessing poverty rather than on the poor themselves. Much of the coverage of poverty in the Indian press consists of rhetoric and overstatement. Any journalist visiting a poor village will write: "Here, time has stood still." Time hasn't stood still anywhere except in the writer's brain.

Most importantly, the media treats disparity, distress and poverty as natural calamities -- the rich/poor divide has always been there. Poverty is particularly inherent to the Third World. The poor in the rich countries -- all those guys -- they're basically slackers and welfare cheats and single mothers feeding their alcoholism habit on welfare funds.

According to the media, poverty is not even remotely related to exploitation. If exploitation exists, it's somebody else's exploitation, not ours, because we are the good guys. You see, it's those feudal landlords in the Third World and a few bad people who smuggle illegal immigrants, or it's the outcome of unending tribal conflict in Africa.

A career in the media is conditional on one's acceptance of the notion that poverty is in no way the result of free market capitalism. Insinuate anything else and you don't have space as a journalist. Take my word for it. If the link between poverty and free market exists, it's because we aren't free market enough, or the reforms have not moved fast enough. In short, you may have some space for poverty, but in no way can you question the prevailing ethos of market fundamentalism.

Poverty coverage is also based on the view that the poor need us, the elite. They are useless themselves. They cannot do a damned thing themselves. This myth has mandated 50 years of project development -- at the end of which there are more poor people in the world than ever before. Project development has, however, benefited the rich enormously. You just have to pick up the United Nations Bulletin that comes out 26 times a year -- it's called Development Business -- and count how may billions of dollars worth of contracts there are.

Right now the World Bank and the World Health Organization are behind a wonderful anti-malaria program in India: it's making millions. The program consists of distributing millions of mosquito nets impregnated with anti-mosquito repellent to people who don't have beds. But the Bank and the WHO have said it's a good thing. What do I know?