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Compassion Fatigue – Famine Link
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- Famine discourse is surrounded by formulaic media coverage, causes compassion fatigue Moeller, 99
Compassion Fatigue – Famine LinkStatus quo media coverage of famines causes compassion fatigue and prevents future public response 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 Henry Grunwald, the former editor-in-chief of Time magazine and a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, cites images as a key way for the media to “stir emotions.” Images, he said, “now have even greater impact than they did during the Vietnam War. It is the heartrending television pictures of starvation…that helped persuade Americans to police the tribal wars and banditry in Somalia.” 37 The media know that the ultimate heart-tugger is a story or photograph of a child in distress. When the victims are children, compassion fatigue is kept at bay longer than it might be if adults were the only casualties represented. Adults can be seen as complicit in their own demise; it’s difficult to justify the death of a child. A recent study that investigated relief groups’ use of photographs in their fund-raising efforts noted that children were the most credible “message sources,” that close-ups generated reader interest and that a child staring straight into the camera increased the personal appeal for donations. The study, published in the prestigious academic journal Journalism Quarterly, also confirmed previous studies that found that “the most influential campaigns are those reinforcing predispositions.” 38 Using this logic, the media in their coverage of each new famine just tweaks the famine image a little; the coverage is geared to remind the public of previous debacles. If the previous famine garnered attention, so the argument goes, mimicking its coverage will garner attention for the newest crisis. But this conduct encourages compassion fatigue. The conflating of famine stories encourages audiences to believe that a new famine is but a continuation of the past one…only worse. The fundamental continuation of the famine saga tempts an audience into questioning whether caring is futile, whether— if the starving, like the poor, are always with us— it is not debilitating to little effect to care about those threatened. If the intent of the media’s stories is action (as their lack of objectivity would argue), and past action seems incontestably to have accomplished little (otherwise, why would there be another famine?), an audience can’t help but feel that any response on its part is meaningless. This is a recipe for compassion fatigue. Walter Lippmann wrote, in 1922, that the press was “like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” From blackness into blinding glare. And then back into blackness. It’s a problematic way of covering the world. But as distorting as the media’s representation of famine might be, those disasters which manage to cut through the compassion fatigue night to have their moment in the bright lights may be the fortunate ones. “Lucky are the people in Yugoslavia and Somalia, for the world is with them,” wrote a missionary in a letter smuggled out of southern Sudan. “It may be a blessing to die or get killed in front of the camera because the world will know.” Famine discourse is surrounded by formulaic media coverage, causes 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 Famines that kill make for good stories. Journalists can come away with compelling pictures and tales of drama and conflict, complete with heroes, villains and innocent victims. A “‘good famine story,’” observed Alexander de Waal, somewhat caustically, “is that of a family who have [sic] been forced to abandon their home, have lived off nuts and berries, whose children are starving or already dead, and whose only hope lies in the charity of a (preferably foreign) aid programme. This is not to say that journalists deliberately exaggerate the scale of the suffering that is going on (though sometimes they do); merely that their professional priorities lead them to characterize a famine situation in a certain manner.” 20 When covering disasters there is a standard formula to follow. Stereotyped images, stock phrases and common abstractions reinforce an established way of interpreting the news. “Reporters can ‘tell it like it is’ within 60 seconds, rapidly sorting key events from surrounding trivia, by drawing on reservoirs of familiar stories to cue readers,” observed one Harvard academic. Once established, it’s hard for the stereotypes to disappear. Despite the Ethiopians’ success at averting a famine in 1994, for example, they are still often represented as the helpless victims they had been in 1984. The stereotypes even persist in periodicals that make an effort to report on positive stories. In May 1994, for example, the British publication The Economist illustrated an article on the country’s firstever multiparty parliamentary elections with a photograph of a small malnourished child. 21 Numerous observers have noted that there is a “template” for famine reporting. To fit the formula, first, people must be starving to death. Take the Somalia story. For months the media ignored the war in which hundreds of civilians were being injured and killed everyday by the “war lords” and local “thugs.” “The Western media,” said Edward Girardet, a documentary television journalist, “couldn’t care less about Africans killing Africans. There were enough places in Africa with people killing each other. So what? Anything else new? What editors really wanted was a famine. A solid, Ethiopian-style hunger story.” Only when the media “finally had its famine story…was the situation considered news-worthy….” 22 Second, the causes of and solutions for the famine must be simplified. There is a tendency for the media to view a famine as if it was a natural disaster, beyond the control of people. That allows the media to avoid a serious assessment of the factors that created the famine. Instead the media typically distills a famine’s multiple causes into single problems: for example, drought, as during the 1984– 85 famine in Ethiopia, or general chaos, as during the 1991– 92 famine in Somalia. Simplistic causes suggest and make plausible simplistic solutions— such as the giving of money— and tend to exaggerate the agency of Western aid and to minimize the involvement and efficacy of indigenous efforts. The stories rarely challenge the notion that Western money and technology are the key missing factors in the famine equation; instead they focus on the threats to the correct usage of the foreign aid. 23 Third, the story of the famine must be told in the language of a morality play, with good and evil fighting for ascendancy, and characters fit into the parts of victim, rescuer and villain. Victims must be sympathetic— usually women and children— and credible for the American public— not aligned with known terrorist or “extremist” political groups. Intermediaries— such as humanitarian workers— who are perceived as being above partisan politics or self-interest must be available to “interpret” the ongoing scenario. And four, there must be images— ideally available on a continuous basis. Any cutoff of pictures, whether caused by problems of access or censorship, shortfalls in the media’s budget or glitches in the communication technology, risks severing the entire story. Generally this stereotyped reporting occurs once a famine has become a big story. But there are earlier stages in coverage. Famine stories commonly follow a four-step chronological pattern. 24 1. The first time news of a famine appears is when the famine is “imminent.” This “early predictor story,” as Michael Maren, a journalist and former aid worker has identified, is typically a news brief, a very few column inches of story, buried deep in the elite print press under a catchall “World Wrap-Up” section. Usually a wire service story— often from the British service Reuters when the famine is African— the dateline is commonly Geneva, Rome, Paris or Brussels, sites of the headquarters of various U.N. agencies and relief organizations, the originating source or sources for the news of the famine. The thrust of these news briefs is that huge populations are at risk of starvation. But because that can be said of many peoples in many regions of Africa at any given time these news briefs do not make much of a stir. The story remains an international organization story (“The World Food Program of the United Nations today announced that…”) rather than an African story (“Hundreds of members of the Dinka tribe…”). 2. If the “starvation” continues to progress, it is likely that some correspondent covering Africa for the elite press— occasionally a freelancer with impeccable credentials in the region— will, on a sweep through the territory, do a lengthy “trend” story featuring the famine. Coverage of the famine will be one part of a larger article on government corruption, civil war, international aid and/or ecological conditions in the affected region. The story will heavily cite official sources of information. During the next weeks or months, this initial trend story will inspire several more scattered features, all concluding that famine in Africa is periodically endemic, that there is too much to do, that little’s changed. However, in order to justify the writing of the articles at this time, comparisons will be drawn between this new confluence of problems and recognized crises in the past— saying, for example, that Mogadishu, Somalia, is “Africa’s Beirut” 25 — or between this new famine and catastrophic past famines, such as the Ethiopian famine of 1984– 85. Numbers in the millions will be cited for people at risk of starvation and death. Photographs will often appear with the stories, but not all of them will be of the starving— some will be of soldiers or aid transports, and so forth. As a result the images will cause little more than a ripple of attention. 3. If the coverage is to continue and grow, it does so because of some precipitating event, usually involving Americans— for example, a tour of the area by a highprofile Congressional delegation or a moral call-to-action by some major international player or celebrity. Almost over night, the famine will become a front-page, top-of-the-news story. Print and television reporters, photographers and camerapeople flood the area. At this point, the story is grossly simplified: clear victims, villains and heroes are created; language such as “harrowing,” “hellish,” “unprecedented,” “single worst crisis in the world,” “famine of the century” is employed; huge numbers are tossed off frequently and casually, with few references to sources. As one disaster reporter noted, there is “a common peril in disaster reporting— exaggerating the immediate and long-term impact. We will always gravitate toward the largest kill count…. We will always speculate (and sometimes predict) the cosmic consequence.” 26 And grim and graphic photographs, especially of dying children, become ubiquitous. 4. Partly through happenstance— the climaxing of step-three coverage at a time when there is no other major international event, no wars with Americans engaged, no dramatic terrorist action, no devastating natural disaster— the famine becomes an American crusade. The famine dominates the media’s coverage of international news, and for a while even domestic events. It becomes the focus of presidential and congressional debate and action. It becomes a cultural and moral bellwether for the nation. The blanket attention drives a massive outpouring of charitable donations; newspaper articles and television programs— even the elite ones— list the addresses and toll-free numbers of the involved humanitarian agencies. By this stage, the story has become a runaway engine. As Michael Maren argues, it is now “impervious to facts that do not fit the popular story line.” 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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