Last week, corporate media journalists melted down over a video of a man allegedly stealing ten packages of meat from a Trader Joe’s grocery store in New York.

It was no surprise that Fox News sought to exploit the video from the New York Post, but the millionaires on MSNBC’s Morning Joe panel show did, too. Meanwhile, Inside Edition, a CBS show syndicated by local networks, blasted the video out all over the country. The outlets framed the incident as further evidence of a surge in lawlessness in big cities involving petty thefts from retailers, chain pharmacies, and grocery stores.

While there’s not much evidence to justify the crime-spree narrative, even if it were true, portraying it only as a law-and-order parable reflects a deep class bias excluding the other part of the story: a sharp increase in the number of people in New York City facing food insecurity and starvation.