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Compassion Fatigue – Generic Link
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Compassion Fatigue – Generic LinkEverything they have said is suspect – the media undertakes a formulaic mode of reporting “reality” which eschews the truth Moeller, 99 Dr. Susan Moeller is the director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA), an academic center that forms a bridge between the College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is Professor of Media and International Affairs in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and an affiliated faculty member at the School of Public Policy. “Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sells Disease, Famine, War and Death” http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/docDetail.action?docID=10054625 pg. 9-12 BJM A simple redactiveness in the images of a crisis can be the most powerful way of calling attention to an issue. The best pictures, said the great 19th-century British historian Thomas Macaulay, “exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole.” But the selection of those parts is a task rife with problems. Commonly, crisis images do not describe epiphanies, but formula. Crisis images feed into formula coverage. Dave Marash, a correspondent for ABC News Nightline, has noted how much television relies on “familiar pictures and familiar texts.” He observed, for instance, the TV code for “hurricane”: “Palm trees bending to the gale, surf splashing over the humbled shore, missing roofs, homeless people showing up in local gyms. You see it once or twice most years.” 112 (On occasion not only is the same code used by various media, but the exact same images are repeated— a consequence of the fact that most of the media subscribes to or has access to the same photo agencies, wire services and/or satellite news services.) Especially when a crisis is a “foreign” event, there is a tendency to fall back on hackneyed images, often revealing more about what the crisis is thought to be than what the crisis actually is. Formulaic images “label” a crisis so that it is identifiable. “Wars,” said photojournalist Eugene Richards, “have to look the same way from picture to picture….” And “when they do,” noted Susan Meiselas, “it can be hard to tell them apart— especially when the people and places look the same, too, as in the conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador or Rwanda and Burundi.” 113 “War” is signaled by photographs of men with guns, not, for example, by images of a barren landscape— even if that landscape is seeded with mines, and is, in effect, as much a war zone as that street filled with guerrilla fighters. Other varieties of crises have their own “look,” too. For instance, photography can give a disease the imprimatur of an epidemic by cueing an audience to formulaic elements, say, doctors in “space suits,” signaling that the disease is highly contagious or, say, the microscopic appearance of a virus, signaling that the disease is aberrant. Images, by design, cannot help but simplify the world. What matters is the quality of their simplicity. Images of crisis and their accompanying metaphors rely on a repertoire of stereotypes: the heroic doctor, the brutal tyrant, the sympathetic aid worker, the barbaric mercenaries, the innocent orphans, the conniving politicians, and so on. The images induce the public to fit these models into the current crisis. Each stereotype employed implies or presupposes a story line which in turn implies or presupposes an appropriate political response. If the images that document a crisis are of starving orphans, the remedy is humanitarian assistance. If the images are of the brutal tyrant, the remedy is military force. There is a built-in inertia that perpetuates familiar images. Without them “reality” becomes more complex, less immediately understandable, more “real”—and perhaps more interesting. But because, other than choosing to watch or not to watch or to read or not to read, the media’s audience has little direct control over the news they receive, the audience can’t easily vote for a more individual style of coverage. The public’s most direct response to coverage that it doesn’t like is to lapse into ennui. In an oft-cited passage in Jonathan Kozol’s book on poverty in urban America, Amazing Grace, a mother with AIDS is told about compassion fatigue among the well-to-do. She says to Kozol, “I don’t understand what they have done to get so tired.” 114 They haven’t done anything. But as they sit passively in front of their TV sets, they’ve been barraged with redundant images. Since we are not typically conscious that news images are being repeated, they have an insidious and usually imperceptible effect. 115 Yet this compassion fatigue is a problematic response to read. It may be perfectly evident that readers are not interested in a news event— for example, they may not buy the magazine with Bosnia on the cover— but it is less clear whether the low sales of that issue are due to the public’s lack of interest in Bosnia or just to the style of coverage. So the media’s reaction is often both to pull Bosnia from the cover of all future issues and to change their news style to include more “reader-friendly,” humaninterest content. Compassion Fatigue – Disease LinkCoverage of disease falls prey to sensationalism, causes compassion fatigue and turns the case Moeller, 99 Dr. Susan Moeller is the director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA), an academic center that forms a bridge between the College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is Professor of Media and International Affairs in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and an affiliated faculty member at the School of Public Policy. “Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sells Disease, Famine, War and Death” http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/docDetail.action?docID=10054625 pg. 9-12 BJM Sensationalism, formulaic coverage, reference to metaphors familiar to an American audience. These are the hallmarks of the media’s coverage of outbreaks of disease. Usually the outbreaks don’t last long enough for Americans to lapse into compassion fatigue. A couple of weeks of terrifying coverage and the media is on to the next crisis. But the method of coverage sets the bar higher for the next incident, the method trains Americans to want ever more sensational details, the method prompts the media to consider covering only the most threatening, most aberrant, most contagious epidemics. A new outbreak of disease will have to meet the flesh-eating standard or the “Ebola Standard.” Those illnesses which merely kill in some pedestrian fashion— like diarrhea or measles— will garner no attention at all, and become, ultimately, the casualties of compassion fatigue syndrome. Disease, especially epidemic disease, is not only a biological phenomenon but a social, cultural and political one. 5 How societies respond to catastrophic outbreaks of disease is measured by their level of emotion and fear, their trust in science and medicine, their experience of pain and illness and their reaction to disability and death. 6 The public which generally lacks knowledge about international affairs is at an even greater disadvantage when trying to follow the story of an outbreak of disease abroad, because it often lacks basic knowledge about the functioning of science and medicine as well. Therefore, in these instances, media audiences are especially dependent on the media as information sources and for guidelines about how to feel and how to react. Somewhat surprisingly, despite the potential sensationalist appeal of stories about a disease run amuck abroad, not many of these events make the evening news and the front pages of the newspapers. In 1992– 93, for example, an extremely lethal epidemic of Kala-Azar (visceral leishmaniasis) broke out in southern Sudan afflicting tens of thousands of people. Because the region was held by the rebel forces in a country wracked by civil war, little information was available and few outsiders could get in to confirm the little that had leaked out. The logistics of news gathering, but also the chilling effect of compassion fatigue when considering whether to budget news from a country such as the Sudan, kept the epidemic all but invisible to the world. 7 As William Ahearn, a vice president and executive editor at Associated Press, observed: “I haven’t been at too many newspapers where I’ve heard people in charge ask, Well, what did we leave out today?’” 8 The “epidemics” that have received attention have not always posed the most obvious medical danger, either to the region in which the outbreak has occurred or to the global environment. Why is there little or no coverage of the World Health Organization estimates that 3.2 million children die every year of diarrheal diseases before reaching their fifth birthday? Or of the approximately 2 million people who die every year of tuberculosis? Or of the more than 27,000 American children, half of them under 4 years old, who contracted measles during 1990? One hundred died. Or of the thousands of Americans who die every year of influenza? The answer is compassion fatigue. Body counts alone, even from the United States, do not make the news nor determine the extent of coverage. So whose lives count? How do the media select which epidemics to cover? Preventable tragedies, illnesses which have cures or vaccines, and cause their harm less because of their innate virulence than because of want of money or public will, rarely make splashy headlines. The best predictor of coverage is an indication that some horrible disease is spreading and posing a global— or at least widespread— risk to people of the same demographic profile as the media’s audience (white, middle-class Americans). 9 Joseph McCormick, chief of the Special Pathogens Branch of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), noted: “Again and again, the viruses that emerge from the remote parts of the earth and assail the indigenous population only gain attention when they move out of a small area to affect larger numbers— or when they kill off wealthy people or foreigners, especially Americans. Diseased white Westerners are always a sure bet when it comes to attracting attention. If the right people aren’t infected or dying, outbreaks that occur all the time…go unnoticed.” 10 Plague discourse attaches historical baggage to policy responses, causing compassion fatigue Moeller, 99 Dr. Susan Moeller is the director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA), an academic center that forms a bridge between the College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is Professor of Media and International Affairs in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and an affiliated faculty member at the School of Public Policy. “Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sells Disease, Famine, War and Death” http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/docDetail.action?docID=10054625 pg. 9-12 BJM But sometimes the most compelling metaphors in the media’s coverage of disease outbreaks are analogies to other diseases. 27 When a medical story breaks out of the back pages of the professional journals and goes on the wires there is a need to develop the scientific context. By reference to more familiar elements of medical experience, expectations are created. Analogous illnesses offer cues as to how a new threat should be viewed; the media suggest how one disease is like and unlike others. Is this new disease invasive like cancer or insidious like AIDS? Is it like the Black Death? There is power in naming— the reason why many doctors don’t tell their patients they’ve contracted AIDS or cancer. As one French physician explained, “When you tell them they have the [AIDS] virus, you kill them.” 28 Analogy and metaphor turn into analogue. A disease is not only like the plague, it shares all the characteristics of the plague. A disease is not only like the Black Death, it is the Black Death. Few epidemic diseases are spread by casual contact; Ebola, CJD, yellow fever and cholera, for example, are transmitted by bodily fluids or an exchange of tissue, not by shaking hands. But Americans, who don’t know much about science and medicine, 29 imagine that all epidemics are like the mythic epidemic— highly infectious and usually fatal. That description describes the collective memory of the plague. Historically, of all diseases, the plague, which felled millions and repeatedly changed the course of history, reverberates most dolefully: the plagues of the Old Testament, the plague of Thucydides, the plagues of medieval Europe. Today, even though plague outbreaks in lesser-developed nations, such as the one in India in 1994, can be controlled with antibiotics— even the airborne pneumonic plague is not invariably fatal— the historic meaning survives. The plague continues to be mentioned in the same breath as AIDS and the trendy “emerging viruses” of Ebola, dengue and Lassa fevers. As Robert Preston, the best-selling author of The Hot Zone wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times during the Indian plague crisis, “Even with all of the advances of the last 100 years in medical technology, the world may be closer to the Middle Ages than policy makers realize.” 30 “Plague” as a late-20th-century disease is upon examination no more threatening than many others and much less threatening than some. Thus the reality of the disease is less scary than the history of it; the Black Death is a more terrifying image than the modern-day plague. “Plague” has come to have a generic meaning, according to The American Heritage Dictionary: “a pestilence, affliction, or calamity, originally one of divine retribution.” All feared diseases have come to be plagues— and once labeled as such they assume the features of the plague. Calling a new disease a “plague” adds context to a media story on its outbreak and signals to readers and viewers the gravity of the situation. But it also infuses the new disease with overtones of godforsaken inevitability. Susan Sontag noted in her work Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors that “disease occurs in the Iliad and the Odyssey as supernatural punishment, as demonic possession, and as the result of natural causes.” Most of us, at the end of the 20th century, think that those first two characterizations are quaint ways of looking at illness. But if at some level we didn’t believe in part in those causalities, there would be no stigma attached to certain diseases. Media stories on epidemics would not satisfactorily report that certain victims are promiscuous or touchingly linger on pathetic images of victims who are children or nuns. Our instinctive response to such reports is that promiscuity reaps what it sows but that the felling of the young or the clergy is not fair. But, of course, in a world completely dominated by the viral or bacteriological origin of disease, fairness does not enter into the picture. Even diseases on an epidemic scale are natural phenomena, not events “with a moral meaning,” as Harvard historian of science Steven Jay Gould has said. There is— or at least there should be—“no message” in their spread. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.86 Mb. Share with your friends:
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