Readers of the New York Times can be forgiven for thinking that Gaza suffers from the greatest famine on the planet today, because that paper's coverage bias leaves room for no other conclusion. But a very different picture emerges when consulting the website of the UN World Food Programme (UNWFP), which alphabetically lists 14 territories with a food emergency.
For each of these 14 areas, the UNWFP notes the number of people affected by food insecurity except for Ukraine, where the UNWFP says only that "One in five households is estimated to be food-insecure." If the remaining 13 countries are ranked by the total number of people affected, according to the UNWFP, the resulting list looks like this:
1) Gaza: 1.1 million
2) Sahel: 3.3 million
3) Somalia: 4.3 million
4) Haiti: 4.97 million
5) Congo: 5.4 million
6) South Sudan: 7.1 million
7) Ethiopia: 11.8 million
8 and 9) Syria: 12.9 million
8 and 9) Myanmar: 12.9 million
10) Afghanistan: 15.8 million
11) Yemen: 17 million
12) Sudan: 18 million
13) Nigeria: 26.5 million
So, according to the UNWFP's own reported figures, Gaza has the fewest people affected by hunger. Note that the UNWFP is hardly hostile to Gaza, to which it has already granted statehood (the UNWFP's page for Gaza is called "the State of Palestine").
How does the Times cover the famine affecting the fewest people, compared to the three famines affecting the most people?
A search of the Times website containing the words "Gaza" and "famine" from April 3, 2024 going back to October 7, 2023, produces 205 results. There are 179 days in that date range, so that means the Times has published about 1.1 articles per day mentioning “Gaza” and “famine” (even though the first few........