English Professor
Eric Alterman worries about food insecurity:
Every year for the past two decades, the US Department of Agriculture has released a report on hunger and food insecurity in the United States. You may have read about these in the past. Prior reports have all received coverage, particularly when the news was positive and people could feel good about the progress we were making in feeding folks in need.
But this year’s report—released on September 6 and filled with worrisome trends—has been met with silence. I have not been able to find a single mention of it in the mainstream media: not one national television news program, major newspaper, or national radio show. NPR and the Associated Press have always reported on it in the past, according to Joel Berg, the CEO of Hunger Free America, but both ignored it this year.
There's more:
Coverage of the proposed SNAP cuts suffers from the same “both sides” syndrome that infects most of what we see, read, or hear in the media. The Washington Post featured a debate between Northwestern University economics professor Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, who earned a PhD in the field from Princeton, and noneconomist, non-PhD in anything, and professor at nowhere Robert E. Rector, a “senior research fellow” at the anti-intellectual Heritage Foundation. Schanzenbach offered specifics and statistics, while Rector spouted unsupported assertions mixed with outright falsehoods.
Professor Eric Alterman worries about overweight poor people in America today. No word yet on when Professor Alterman's next paper in American Economic Review will be published.
