nce after regular exposure to media coverage of humanitarian disasters of
natural or human origin (earthquake, flood, famine, war) in the developing world. The
ultimate result is a desensitization to the problems the 70% of the world’s population
that lives in the developing world faces, and a political and moral disengagement with
the world in general. Compassion fatigue encourages cocooning and apathy among the
citizens of wealthier nations. Media, the source of telethons featuring starving children
and images of coups and earthquakes in distant lands, plays a major part in this
phenomenon.
b. how are print and television media implicated in creating compassion
fatigue?
Our sense of the developing world derives significantly from the content of news in
newspaper and television. Compassion fatigue can result not from mere exhaustion on
the part of audiences, but by the way media facilitate that exhaustion in the way the
stories are told. Among the many features of news media that cultivate compassion
fatigue in readers, here are a few of the most effective: one story at a time: the regular reportage of bad news stories from the third
world overwhelms our capacity to absorb such stories; it’s believed that we
have attention span for one major story about Europe or the developing world at
a given time Americans involved? unless Americans (or if the audience is Canadian or
European, them) are involved in the story in some way, 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】it is difficult to attract
and hold American attention for a given story binary morality: the media needs to reduce the moral complexity of real people
and their problems to a simple “black and white” moral code, in which we are
certain who is good and who is bad, e.g., good doctors saving lives, bad rebels
recruiting children as soldiers, etc. shock value: in order for the media to break through our growing numbness
with respect to the problems of the world, they present us with evermore
shocking and graphic stories and images; this escalating presentation of shock
and trauma leads to exhaustion on the part of audiences
suffering sells: journalists know that “suffering sells,” and that the images that
convey the most emotional pain and trauma are those that editors will use in
print and TV news; the result is that many foreign news stories are reduced to
the anguish of a particular person or persons, and this tends to depoliticize the
actual event
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