by SIMON KUPER
Bulgarian anti-corruption protester dies after setting himself on fire
An actor recently left France after the government tried to raise rich people’s taxes. Gérard Depardieu moved to Belgium (to be near friends, excellent meat and Paris’s airport, he explained), acquired a Russian passport, and made friends with Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile earlier this month an unemployed father became the fourth Bulgarian to burn himself to death since February in despair at poverty. Guess which victim of the economic crisis got more publicity?
The media have probably always ignored the poor, but we continue to do so even as poverty becomes the most pressing problem in developed countries. One in seven Americans now lives below the official poverty line, ever more jobless people kill themselves, and my colleague Gillian Tett recently wrote of a child in Liverpool chewing the wallpaper as hunger rises in the city. Yet the media still look away. I’m as guilty as anyone. But we can change.
Poverty has never been sexy. In 2008, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation analysed 40 hours of British TV, and found that “the word ‘poverty’ appeared only twice, both in Shameless”, a comedy drama. One reference was to the Live Aid concert; the other to Comic Relief. When poor people did get airtime, it was often as objects of derision on Jerry Springer-like shows.
You’d have thought the economic crisis would have made poverty newsy. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a journalistic maxim, and the Cambridge sociologist David Stuckler found sharp increases in suicides in recession-hit European countries after 2008. The crisis arguably caused 1,000 “excess” suicides in England alone.
But they weren’t news. The global poor – 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day – are considered even more boring, due to the triple whammy of being non-white, non-Anglophone and poor. To become news, poor people have to cause disorder. Middle-class people raise issues by writing; poor people do it by rioting. I’ve read columns by prisoners and by people with terminal cancer, but I’ve never seen one by someone living on benefits.
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(Thanks to reader)