I realize this is a belated observation, but it’s been irking me for a couple of weeks now, and it’s yet another example about how the blogosphere (and the conservative media) is very often guilty of the same kind of feeding frenzy they indict the mainstream media for. It’s about this “stingy” business.

Best that I can tell, the “stingy” imbroglio began with this Bill Sammon article in the Washington Times, which rashly took a few comments by a Norwegian UN undersecretary from the press wires wholly out of context. Here’s what Jan Egeland said:

“It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really. .. Christmas time should remind many Western countries, at least, [of] how rich we have become.

There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy. .. [Politicians] believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It’s not true. They want to give more.”

Here’s how the Washington Times reported Egeland’s comments:

U.N. official slams U.S. as ’stingy’ over aid

The Bush administration yesterday pledged $15 million to Asian nations hit by a tsunami that has killed more than 22,500 people, although the United Nations’ humanitarian-aid chief called the donation “stingy.”

“The United States, at the president’s direction, will be a leading partner in one of the most significant relief, rescue and recovery challenges that the world has ever known,” said White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy.

But U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being “stingy” with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.

Note that the Egeland never even mentioned the United States by name, but refered only more generally to the west.

What’s worse, as (pro-America, right-leaning) blogger Bjorn Staerk notes, Egeland wasn’t even refering to the tsunami, but to foreign aid in general, and in fact followed up by saying the western world and the U.S. in particular is extremely generous when it comes to crises. Here’s Egeland immediately following the “stingy” comment:

“The United States has consistently been among the most generous in disaster relief and humanitarian assistance .. It is by far our biggest donor worldwide for humanitarian relief, disaster relief.” But the U.N. humanitarian chief, an undersecretary-general, said it was also his job to point out that the wealthiest countries are making too little effort to meet goals adopted by all 191 U.N. member states at the Millennium Summit in 2000 to reduce poverty and illiteracy and improve health care.

Egeland’s “stingy” accusation had nothing to do with the tsunami, but with ongoing foreign aid, independent of crises. He had only praise for the U.S. response to the tsunami.

The funny thing here is that regardless of whether or not Egeland is correct, if we are indeed stingy with ongoing foreign aid, we ought to take heart in it, not shame. Government-to-government foreign aid is wasteful, and nearly always counterproductive. It rarely if ever achieves its intent — to bring third-world economies into the devleoped world — and generally proves efficient only at padding the bank accounts of kleptocrats and corrupt regimes ruling the people who need it. Emergency relief, on the other hand, has a pretty good record of reaching its intended target and actually providing short-term aid to the people who need it. The best thing we can do for the developing world is of course open our borders to their goods, particularly agriculture and textiles.

Of course in this regard, we are stingy. We continue to slap tariffs on the stuff the third world most needs to sell here, and we continue to subsidize domestic agriculture, making it difficult for poor farmers to sell crops on local markets, let alone international markets. And yes, Europe is even worse.

Far be it from me to defend a UN official. But Egeland simply never said U.S. tsunami relief was stingy. He never even singled out the U.S. He said the developed world’s ongoing foreign aid programs were stingy. Frankly, if that’s true, it’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, blogs and right-leaning media continue to pile on the guy for something he never said. I suppose it took off because what was attributed to Egeland fits so neatly into what the right already tends to think about the UN. But it’s also the exact kind of transgression bloggers and conservatives regularly jump all over the mainstream media for commiting.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 9:45 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.