SOC 207 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Mengistu Haile Mariam
Document Summary
A child or an adult dies every 20 minutes. Since the media typically only reports on famine after the dying begins, by the time the media has riled up their audience to do good, it is too late for many. Fear in compassion fatigue drained the media"s interest in telling another famine story. For at least two years, ethiopians had been at risk of starvation and few in the western media had bothered to report it. The amin/buerk tape made famine a political priority, and negated the compassion fatigue. The usa and other western powers were reluctant to send aid to a country that was closely aligned with the soviet union. The ethiopian government spent 46 percent of its national budget on arms the marxist government of mengistu haile mariam dictated that news of famine should not get out, so that it wouldn"t overshadow his political agenda.
