The pit(fall) of news

(Sorry, if this sounds insensitive but with due respect to the child and the trauma his family went through, but, from an `average’ newsperson’s perspective, I cannot fathom how a child falling into a pit becomes national news.)
A child who accidentally fell into a pit could rake in lakhs of rupees. The government, I am sure, wanted to splurge more. Like, promising a job when he turns 18. Or, promising a career in medicine or engineering, whichever he decides. The child, when he grows into a thinking adult, would some day surely understand how the pit-fall changed his life.
I was forced to think of the umpteen children who are living their lives in pits, literally.
Be it the pit of poverty or illiteracy or simply the pit of government’s indifference to their plight. Child workers working in hazardous conditions need to be rescued too… but that doesn’t become national news. There are many pits in the form of dingy zari units or the pesticide-saturated cottonseed farms. But, the nation doesn’t pray for them or force the government or the local administration to `spring into action’ and `announce aid and support for them’. There are no cameras to record their plight and air it live.
Their families too are poor, many of them live of the money earned by their children. There is no financial aid for them. These are soft stories and they don’t sell, I hear often. Predictably, they don’t make national news.
A day after the child’s rescue from the pit, a news anchor gushed that reality television had come of age. Well, I would like to see `real rescues' before I can say that.
(Pic: child workers at a cottonseed farm in mahbubnagar district.)