I used to be a TV news junkie. When I lived in Los Angeles in the mid '80s, the three network newscasts came on back to back, and I watched each until one night I decided that Peter Jennings did the best job of presenting the news thoughtfully and objectively.
For the rest of the '80s, and then through
the '90s and early '00s, I continued to watch ABC News regularly, but then Peter
died and Charlie retired, and as much as I like Dianne and George, ABC is owned
by Disney and they have to compete with Fox, et al., entertainment trumps objectivity, and
no one seems to know what fair and balanced really means.
I
rarely watch television news anymore, preferring to get real and reliable news
from The Economist or The Christian Science Monitor, but
occasionally, like tonight, I do, and, I still tend to default to ABC. They are doing a series called Hunger at Home: Crisis in
America, and the segment I caught, "More
Americans in Their 50s Facing Hunger," profiled a "hungry"
50-something couple dealing with illness and job loss.
We tend to eat dinner on TV trays while watching the news if we are home early enough, but definitely Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy (are gay couples really so different from straight couples?). Tonight's healthy dinner was curried chicken with carrots and sweet potatoes, brown rice, Tasty Bite Chunky Chick Peas, beet greens, and a nice Rosenblum zinfandel. We settled in and were looking forward to the hunger segment.
Then it started. Usually, I'm the one yelling at the TV, but Jim was in rare form
tonight. Both of us couldn't believe what we were seeing, and he was the
one hurling our horror at the hi-def. How could ABC be profiling two
clearly overweight people in a hunger series?! Were they blind?!
I went to the story at ABC
News to see what others were saying, and we were not alone. The vast
majority of comments reflected our own: ABC, are you effing kidding? Could you not
find a truly hungry family and not just two people with some serious food
dysfunctions? I added my own comment,
but checked back a little while later and saw it had been removed. I didn’t use any foul language, but I did
include a link to The Morton Report.
Maybe their ABC London correspondent, Nick Watt, doesn’t like Andrew,
but I'm guessing I wasn't supposed to put a plug in for TMR or Calorie Ken.
The couple profiled both had undisclosed illnesses, and I tried to give them
the benefit of the doubt—I wondered if their obesity was caused by their
illnesses. I mean, maybe they were just puffy from taking steroids. But, with a refrigerator full of sugar-laden
soda and other empty calories, I knew I was being too kind. A more likely
possibility is that their obesity caused their illnesses, but, what was very
clear is that they didn’t need help paying for food; they needed food
interventions and behavior modification!
Some of the stories in this series are legitimate, and reporter, Steve
Osunsami’s “Reporter’s
Notebook” story about growing up hungry is moving. However, I
can’t imagine what the ABC News producers were thinking when they aired this
segment and then, adding insult to injury, ended it by asking us to give
money to Feeding America. Hunger at home is real, however the crisis in
America is not that people are starving, but that, as a society, we are so
blind to our food dysfunctions that even a respected news organization can't
distinguish between bad habits and real hunger.
