MediaWatch: January 1997

Janet Cooke Award: Comparing Boston to Rwanda

The reality of poverty in America's inner cities never seems dramatic enough for the network news. The networks have even attempted to suggest poor children are suffering from clinical malnutrition -- the disabling kind of hunger news watchers might associate with sub-Saharan Africa. For filing another story on child hunger that relied on the evidence and advocacy of liberal lobbyists and avoided conservative experts, CBS Sunday Morning earned the Janet Cooke Award.

Charles Osgood introduced the December 8 story: "All children experience growing pains at one time or another. They are a natural accompaniment to natural physical and psychological growth and they're mostly unavoidable simply a part of growing up. But there is another sort of childhood pain that ought not to be a part of growing up, that is very much avoidable if only we could choose to make it so."

Reporter Martha Teichner began her sermon with a literate flourish: "Just before Thanksgiving, winter announced its arrival in the city of Boston with an insult, with a cold wet kiss of betrayal for the children of the city's poor. With winter's onset each year comes a phenomenon Dr. Deborah Frank has come to call `heat or eat.' A phenomenon that can actually be measured on the bodies of the patients she sees at her clinic for underweight children." She asked: "You literally either pay for the heat or pay for the food?" Frank replied: "Right, because food is the only discretionary income they've got. I mean they've got to pay rent or they'll be homeless and that's catastrophic. And they've got to pay utilities or they freeze. And so they stretch."

Teichner explained Frank's work: "By the time children are referred to the Grow Clinic at the Boston Medical Center, by their doctors or by a hospital emergency room, stretching has taken its toll...They are diagnosed with a condition called `failure to thrive,' in the vocabulary of social service-speak. When the same condition is referred to in Third World countries, it's called malnutrition. Yes, malnutrition not only exists but is a significant and growing problem in the United States, in spite of this country's wealth and abundance. Now before any of the changes in the welfare laws kick in, four million, that is one out of five, poor children under 12 goes hungry according to research accepted by the U.S. government. These are the kids most likely to end up at the Grow Clinic."

Are "failure to thrive" and malnutrition synonyms? Dr. Ruth Kava, director of nutrition for the American Council on Science and Health, told MediaWatch: "`Failure to thrive' is a phrase used when you're not really sure what's going on, but children aren't growing as well as you might expect. The child could be marginally malnourished, or suffering from an imbalance of nutrients. But it's not overt, severe malnutrition...not the stark, horrible things you see in the Third World."

And what "research accepted by the U.S. government" was CBS citing? Teichner did not return repeated MediaWatch phone calls, but these figures suggest a hunger "study" performed in Boston by Tufts University's Center on Hunger, Poverty, and Nutrition Policy in June 1993 which claimed its analysis was "based on Census Bureau data for 1991." But Tufts analyst John Cook conceded to MediaWatch at that time: "There is no Census hunger data." The Tufts team extrapolated supposed hunger from Census Bureau poverty statistics. So how can Teichner use this unnamed study to claim malnutrition is a "significant and growing problem" in present-day America when it has no hunger data and its poverty data is five years old?

Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector told MediaWatch CBS is refuted by spending data: "Last year, the governments of the United States spent $205 billion assisting poor children. If you divide that by the number of children under 150 percent of the poverty line, around $23,000 for a family of four, you're talking about spending $9,000 a year per child. And these kids are still going hungry?" Rector's studies of U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics on food consumption of children have shown poor children get the same levels of nutrition as wealthier children, and that the real health problem for poor children is obesity.

Teichner was more interested in Third World hyperbole: "But the way the world responds to this kind of emergency, in say, Rwanda and how Americans react to it at home, enrages Dr. Frank." Frank claimed: "If there was a virus, there would be a public outcry and a major social push to save our children. But when the problem is hunger people get very moralistic. They don't deserve it, their parents don't know how to feed them right. The problem is lack of political will and in fact, more than that, active disowning of public responsibility towards all American children."

The story moved on to a private fundraiser for the Grow Clinic at a fashionable Boston restaurant, which Teichner discounted: "No way, though, that donors' deep pockets can offset social services cuts beginning to take effect."

Teichner explained: "Welfare reform has turned Dr. Frank into an evangelist who doesn't mind courting controversy." Frank declared: "It is so unbelievably, not just cruel but stupid to put the burden of our society's economic problems on our youngest children." CBS did not explain the depths of that evangelism, that Dr. Frank is repetitively featured in Boston newspaper stories furiously lobbying against welfare reforms. Frank told Boston Globe columnist Alan Lupo on September 11, 1994: "We've got privileged white men running for office to see who's tougher on women and babies. We don't lack the resources to do what we have to do. We lack the political will. We need taxes to do this, and we need to tell people that this is a worthwhile use of taxes."

Teichner concluded: "She considers her 12-year track record at the Grow Clinic her license to speak out. But her program can help, at most, 200 kids a year. Its successes are small, measured a pound at a time against the enormous weight of a problem that is growing." She gave Dr. Frank the story's last word: "The safety net is shredding more and more, and more and more small bodies are falling through it. And the shredding isn't over."

CBS never specified where these "shreddings" were taking place in government programs. Rector told MediaWatch that total welfare spending has mushroomed from $183 billion when Ronald Reagan left office to $411 billion this fiscal year. "Spending has more than doubled. It's out of control, and yet the story never changes. It's like a mimeograph from eight years ago. This is truly the most absurd and ridiculous propaganda exercise of the 20th century." Teichner's story packs a propagandistic punch, but it lacked a balance of opinions, any definitive factual evidence for its grand assertions. Call it factual malnutrition.

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