{"id":791,"date":"2013-07-27T01:24:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-27T05:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/?p=791"},"modified":"2014-01-31T23:45:59","modified_gmt":"2014-02-01T04:45:59","slug":"a-suggestion-for-the-economist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/27\/a-suggestion-for-the-economist\/","title":{"rendered":"A Suggestion for The Economist"},"content":{"rendered":"

The wonderful magazine The Economist<\/a> has a two-page spread The world this week<\/em> at the beginning of each issue with very short blurbs about the week’s news. I was reading the section this week when an idea came to me.<\/p>\n

In this week’s section<\/a>, there’s an entry for the horrific deaths in India:<\/p>\n

\n At least 22 children died in a village in the Indian state of Bihar after eating a school meal that contained a chemical used in pesticides.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other weeks, too, will contain reports of tragedies that have made the worldwide news.<\/p>\n

I don’t mean in any way to diminish the horrors of these individual tragedies. But the space and attention of readers is limited, so there’s a reason to think about what is most deserving of these lines.<\/p>\n

Why not, instead, do the following? Each day, well over a thousand<\/em> Indian children die<\/a> of malnutrition. Yes, the poisoning—whether accidental or intentional—is horrible, and yes it might reflect on the corruption or ineffectiveness of the government. But imagine, instead, if the Economist<\/em> each week nestled a blurb like the following between the other blurbs:<\/p>\n

\n In the past week, over 10,000 Indian children died of starvation.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Similarly, the deaths at Newton were an unspeakable atrocity. But there have been almost 20,000 shooting deaths<\/a> in the United States since then. What if the Economist<\/em> one week wrote:<\/p>\n

\n Over 30 people were killed<\/a> per day this week by guns in the United States.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or what if it wrote one week the following?<\/p>\n

\n Six thousand black men and women were stopped<\/a> in New York City this week, over five times as many as whites. Over half of such stops involved frisks; only one in nine resulted in arrest or summons.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why don’t more newspapers and magazines do things like this? Harpers does, with its famous Index<\/em>, but that’s all I can think of.1<\/a><\/sup> But this list often feels too political (I’d characterize it as having a bit too much of a certain self-righteous leftist smugness), and feels more like a list of miscellany than a part of the news. Wouldn’t it be more powerful if it were unexpected, in the middle of the “real” news—i.e., the specific, non-anonymous events that get more coverage in the media?<\/p>\n

It’d have to be done right—you’d want it in the hands of editors with wisdom and judgment—but it could be powerful.<\/p>\n

I don’t mean to criticize the Economist<\/em>‘s approach: The world this week<\/em> is an excellent summary of the news, and well-weighed. I’m not necessarily suggesting that the Indian poisoning incident not be covered; it became an important enough part of the news cycle that it might warrant mention. After all, life is about much more than numbers; humans react to stories, and things that speak to us, as certainly a tragedy like this would, should be told. But why not give more of a sense of all the other, unreported things happening each day? (And maybe, too, make them into stories: perhaps begin with the name of a real person, and then list the number afterwards. “This week, [real name] was stopped-and-frisked in New York City while walking home. He was one of 6,000 black men\u2026”)<\/p>\n

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  1. \nThe New York Times<\/em> published a notice of every soldier’s death in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this is restricted to a specific topic. (Also, after the Newton shooting, a few newspapers reported regularly on gun deaths—but that has tailed off.) ↩<\/a>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The wonderful magazine The Economist has a two-page spread The world this week at the beginning of each issue with very short blurbs about the week’s news. I was reading the section this week when an idea came to me. In this week’s section, there’s an entry for the horrific deaths in India: At least … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “A Suggestion for The Economist”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[219,218],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":872,"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions\/872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rafekinsey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}