George Hussein Onyango Obama

Yesterday Vanity Fair Italia published an article about the poorest brother of Senator Barack Obama. George Hussein Onyango Obama is the youngest of the presidential candidate’s half-brothers — the father was a polygamist, as most of men in Kenya — and lives in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi.

I won’t go into details about the article itself — you can read a summary in Italian language on "Corriere della Sera" or in English language on "The Telegraph". I just wish to point out that only few traditional media, mostly Italian ones, published that piece of news. If today you search by Google for "George Hussein Onyango Obama" and "brother" you get only 403 result, whereas you get only 170 results for "George Hussein Onyango Obama" and "fratello" (the Italian word for brother). Most of those results are related to blogs, that is, blogs published a piece of information that was mostly ignored by most newspapers and magazines, especially the USA ones.

That is curious, isn’t it? Barack Obama is perhaps the most popular personality for media in this moment, but the news that a brother of his lives in Kenya with less than a dollar per month is simply ignored. I live in Italy, and in my country family is a value. Perhaps it is different in USA. Perhaps, in USA, people is not interested in the fact that some brothers and sisters of a candidate to one of the most important and powerful seat of the world live in poverty (Obama’s father had four wives and eight children). Or maybe, since that article was published on an Italian newspaper, it is simply ignored. Most of American newspapers and blogs are a self-referential publishing world, that is, the English news and blogsphere only speak of the English news and blogsphere. They simply ignore what is published in the rest of the world. In any case, it is a sad story.