The Media Ignores a Hunger Crisis. (Food Prices and the News Media Today.)

Recent years have seen what has been universally acknowledged by all but the most idiotically committed deniers of hard quantitative fact as spiking food prices, with an effect on the public worse than what is usually reported given the reality that the cheapest items are susceptible to higher-than-average price shocks (the margins were already slight to begin with), with all that means for those who can afford prices least; and what a great many consumers report as a degradation in the quality of many familiar food products (for example, supermarket bakery bread increasingly stale, prone to rapidly molding, etc.), such that the drop in value for the money has fallen relative even to the higher price; neither of which situations gets much coverage. (The price shock at the bottom end of the market tends to be a side remark in the news story if it rates a mention at all, while the signs of lower quality going with the higher prices are the kind of thing you see consumers discussing so much in fora like Reddit or TikTok that "everyone knows" that it's "not just me"--but so far the media hasn't deigned to acknowledge it in any significant way, and at least as yet no attempt at a comprehensive government or academic or other research study has substantiated it.)

Also not getting much coverage is what this really means for the consumer. The media treats us to plenty of grumbling about the price of staples like eggs--but just grumbling, as if it were all a case of essentially comfortable people irked at having to shell out a little more cash for superfluities of life ("You don't really need that!" they are ever quick to tell us), and (certainly if you believe the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" line editors of the Times shovel out to you) this mostly a matter of their being clueless or graceless because the rise in incomes leaves them no worse off. However, with all this coming after a half century of the American worker's purchasing power consistently falling relative to the essentials of everyday life (halved or worse in relation to the price of a home, the price of transportation, the price of health insurance, etc.), one would expect this to mean more hardship out there. And indeed that expectation has actually been affirmed by the statistics of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show the proportion of U.S. households suffering "food insecurity" (and the more severe "very low food security") in 2021-2023 shooting back up toward the level we saw in the wake of the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008, all as there is reason to think things got no better in 2024. (Indeed, given the trend in income among the less affluent, cutbacks to the social safety net, and associated factors, they probably got even worse.)

Even granting that the news media has, in line with its Big Business character, elite staffing, pandering to the affluent reader and viewer, centrist-neoliberal prejudices and general obsequiousness to the powerful and the status quo they favor, never taken much interest in the lot of those who would be represented in the figures just discussed, its disconnect with economic reality seems ever more extreme, and ever more blatantly Agenda-driven. For even as the public faced the sort of hardship that hit it in the immediate wake of that Great Recession that never truly ended their functionaries sneered in our faces "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"--when it is really the case that the measure of stupidity is one's readiness to believe their propaganda.