PrintThe NYT and the Politics of Famine
Readers of the New York Times can be forgiven for thinking that Gaza suffers from the greatest famine on the planet today, because that paper's coverage bias leaves room for no other conclusion. But a very different picture emerges when consulting the website of the UN World Food Programme (UNWFP), which alphabetically lists 14 territories with a food emergency.
For each of these 14 areas, the UNWFP notes the number of people affected by food insecurity except for Ukraine, where the UNWFP says only that "One in five households is estimated to be food-insecure." If the remaining 13 countries are ranked by the total number of people affected, according to the UNWFP, the resulting list looks like this:
1) Gaza: 1.1 million
2) Sahel: 3.3 million
3) Somalia: 4.3 million
4) Haiti: 4.97 million
5) Congo: 5.4 million
6) South Sudan: 7.1 million
7) Ethiopia: 11.8 million
8 and 9) Syria: 12.9 million
8 and 9) Myanmar: 12.9 million
10) Afghanistan: 15.8 million
11) Yemen: 17 million
12) Sudan: 18 million
13) Nigeria: 26.5 million
So, according to the UNWFP's own reported figures, Gaza has the fewest people affected by hunger. Note that the UNWFP is hardly hostile to Gaza, to which it has already granted statehood (the UNWFP's page for Gaza is called "the State of Palestine").
How does the Times cover the famine affecting the fewest people, compared to the three famines affecting the most people?
A search of the Times website containing the words "Gaza" and "famine" from April 3, 2024 going back to October 7, 2023, produces 205 results. There are 179 days in that date range, so that means the Times has published about 1.1 articles per day mentioning “Gaza” and “famine” (even though the first few weeks of that date range included no events affecting food supplies, so the relevant daily average is actually higher).
Searching the exact same dates and the word "famine" and "Yemen" for the same 179 days yields just 16 articles, and incredibly, the word “Gaza” still appears 9 times in the headlines and/or snippet text summaries below each headline resulting from a search for stories about hunger in Yemen. But in reality only five of the 16 articles specifically focus on Yemen (with “Yemen” or “Houthis” in the headline of the story).
So, comparing just the articles resulting from the search, the 17 million people in Yemen affected by hunger got one Times article for every 3.4 million Yeminis compared to the 1.1 million Gazans who got 205 articles (one article for every 5,366 hungry).
Now for a look at the NYT famine coverage for Sudan during the same period. A search yields just 18 articles and this time the word “Gaza” appears 20 times in the headlines and/or snippet text summaries below each headline. But just three of the 16 articles actually focus on Sudan (with “Sudan” or “Sudanese” in the headline of the story). So, comparing just the articles resulting from this search, the 18 million people in Sudan affected by hunger got one Times article for every six million hungry), compared to the 1.1 million Gazans who got 205 articles (one article for every 5,366 hungry). So one hungry Gazan has the same importance to the NYT as about 1,118 hungry Sudanese.
Finally how much coverage has the NYT given to food insecurity in Nigeria, where a famine emergency affects 26.5 million people -- the most among the 13 territories listed by the UNWFP as having a hunger emergency? A search for "famine" and "Nigeria" yields a whopping six articles. Even more outrageous, “Gaza” still appears four times among the headlines and snippets of the six search results, but not a single article has a headline or snippet mentioning “Nigeria.”
Ironically, this Times article (from the same group of six that result from a search for “famine” and “Nigeria”) indirectly acknowledges the paper’s skewed coverage: “While hunger crises in regions such as South Sudan and Tigray have unfolded with little media attention, there is intense international scrutiny on Gaza.”
Some of the disproportionate Gaza coverage is attributable to Arif Husain, the Pakistani-American head of the UNWFP, who has tweeted more about hunger in Gaza than anywhere else since October 7th. Nearly all of Husain’s feed since October 7th is about Gaza, and his bias stands out even more in his Tweet of November 23, 2023. In that Tweet, Husain notes that “Evil comes in all ways, shapes and forms!” and shares the infamous video of the ex-Obama official harassing a NY street vendor. While such harassment is indefensible by anyone (whether a VIP or not), it’s hardly at the level of raping, burning, beheading, and massacring 1,200 people and abducting another 240; yet Hamas’ atrocities on October 7th never inspired a single tweet about “evil” from Husain. Indeed his Twitter feed is conspicuously silent from October 7th until October 15th, when he reposted about the need to help Gaza.
In one of the six NYT articles resulting from a search for “famine” and “Nigeria,” (with the headline “Half of Gazans Are at Risk of Starving, U.N. Warns”), Husain is quoted as saying, “I’ve been doing this for about 20 years… I’ve been to pretty much any conflict, whether Yemen, whether it was South Sudan, northeast Nigeria, Ethiopia, you name it. And I have never seen anything like this, both in terms of its scale, its magnitude, but also at the pace that this has unfolded.”
But the NYT article negligently takes Husain’s sweeping claim at face value, reprinting it without any further investigation, comparative analysis, or caveats. Both the NYT and Husain apparently forgot about two far bigger famines during Husain’s tenure: the 2003-5 famine that killed about 200,000 in Darfur, and the 2011 famine in Somalia that claimed 260,000 lives.
Moreover, the article notes that, according to Husain, Gaza meets “at least the first criteria of a famine, with 20 percent of the population facing an extreme lack of food,” but he is never asked why that is still more important than the exponentially larger hunger emergency in Nigeria:
“Conflict and insecurity, rising inflation and the impact of the climate crisis continue to drive hunger in Nigeria -- with 26.5 million people across the country projected to face acute hunger in the June-August 2024 lean season. This is a staggering increase from the 18.6 million people food insecure at the end of 2023.”
In other words, in the last few months, the already huge number of Nigerians facing acute hunger increased by 7.9 million, but the 20% of Gaza “facing an extreme lack of food” (i.e., 440,000 Gazans) deserve virtually all of Husain’s Twitter attention and priority in the Times interview. Wouldn’t any responsible reporter striving for objectivity challenge Husain on his moral math? Apparently not at the paper of record, which can’t devote a single article to Nigerian hunger since October 7th.
But division by zero is undefined in mathematics, so -- for the sake of comparison -- suppose that the Times gave one article to Nigeria’s 26.5 million hungry people. Under that assumption, for the New York Times, one hungry Gazan deserves the same level of coverage as do 4,939 hungry Nigerians.
Such a disproportionate emphasis on Gaza inevitably causes the international community to neglect exponentially greater hunger problems. But for the Grey Lady, apparently Black lives don't matter nearly as much as Gazans.
Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic submarine thriller about Iranian nukes, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
Image: Andy Hall/Oxfam East Africa
