Gripe of the Day

Today's NY Times has a story on famine in Niger which it introduces/summarizes as follows:

"One child in five is dying - the result of a belated response by the outside world to a food crisis predicted nine months ago."

Now I fail to see how the fact that Niger has not adopted capitalism, nor any of the freedoms and lawfulness of the West, is in any way the fault of the "outside world". Nor can I understand how anyone can identify the problem as the lack of help -- not the lack of food and the means to produce it!

But worse still is that a supposed news organization of the calibre of the NY Times feels it normal and legitimate to smuggle-in such outlandish conclusions and judgments as though they are self-evident -- rather than taking the intellectually honest approach of presenting the facts and then asking "what makes it so?"