There's no tragic shipwreck or high-profile legal battle to recount, just ongoing social conditions. Kind of boring. Medical neglect, malnutrition, crummy housing, underfunded schools, and other ills are tedious facts of life that lack glamorous momentum. Sure, we do stories on poor kids once in a while, mostly told with a few numbers and fleeting images, but there's no drumbeat in the national media echo chamber. We might mention that the United States has the highest rate of child poverty among all the industrialized nations, with one in five American kids living below the poverty line.
Black infants continue to die at twice the rate of white infants.
The latest data show that the cause of death for black infants is four times more likely to be related to low birthweight than for white infants, strongly suggesting unequal access to prenatal care. But we don't have to call it anything if we rarely even mention it. One way or another, poverty is killing a lot of children in the United States every day. And it's making life miserable for millions of others. But hey, that's a real downer and we don't want to depress our viewers.