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Overview
From outbreaks of the flesh eating viruses Ebola and Strep A, to death camps in Bosnia and massacres in Rwanda, the media seem to careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death. First we're horrified, but each time they turn up the pitch, show us one image more hideous than the next, it gets harder and harder to feel. Meet compassion fatigue--a modern syndrome, Susan Moeller argues, that results from formulaic media coverage, sensationalized language and overly Americanized metaphors.In her impassioned new book, Compassion Fatigue, Moeller warns that the American media threatens our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that has seen too much--or too little--to care? Through a series of case studies of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"--disease, famine, death and war--Moeller investigates how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen and revealing why.
Throughout, we hear from industry insiders who tell of the chilling effect of the mega-media mergers, the tyranny of the bottom-line hunt for profits, and the decline of the American attention span as they struggle to both tell and sell a story. But Moeller is insistent that the media need not, and should not, be run like any other business. The media have a special responsibility to the public, and when they abdicate this responsibility and the public lapses into a compassion fatigue stupor, we become a public at great danger to ourselves.
Editorials
Tom Goldstein
Criticism of the press for its foreign coverage is hardly novel, but in this unrelenting, uncompromising book, Moeller, an assistant professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, manages to cast a fresh, unwavering eye on journalism...&151;Columbia Journalism Review
Dante Ramos
Forget the misleading subtitle of Susan D. Moeller's book, for if American news outlets are trying to "sell" international crises, they are doing a terrible job. The cameras rolled as people starved to death in Somalia. Reporters sent back passionate dispatches from Bosnia. Yet sensing little public interest, the network news shows have drastically scaled back their coverage of world news. When the cover of Time or Newsweek features the foreign tragedy du jour, the magazines gather dust on newsstand shelves.
Can the American public really be so callous? "Why, despite the haunting nature of many of these images, do we seem to care less and less about the world around us?" asks Moeller, a professor at Brandeis University. The premise of Compassion Fatigue is that it isn't the public's fault. Moeller suggests that Americans are plumb worn out from lousy coverage of world events and are tuning it out entirely -- and that some news organizations are responding by reporting only the most salacious foreign news.
As evidence, Moeller lists crises during which news outlets disserved their audiences with reductive or overly graphic coverage. For instance, the Ebola virus and flesh-eating bacteria captivated reporters; meningitis and sleeping sickness kill far more people but aren't shocking enough to get much ink, Moeller says. She has a point. It can't be healthy when dozens of newspapers and three 24-hour cable news channels reduce complex international crises to melodrama again and again. But Moeller's long catalogue of overheated quotes and desperate situations is likely, on its own, to drive most readers to compassion fatigue (and also to Compassion Fatigue fatigue, since the book is often as repetitive as the news reports it criticizes).
Moeller views Americans' disengagement from foreign affairs as a new problem, and she finds a new culprit: profit-minded media giants and the substitution of readership surveys for news judgment. It's a reasonable hypothesis. In Hollywood, marketing techniques produced Batman Forever; in Washington, they produced Dick Morris and the Contract With America.
Though Moeller notices that the media have put less emphasis on world news since the collapse of the Soviet Union, she refuses to entertain the idea that Americans actually are less interested in world affairs. She overlooks one of our most ancient traditions: Except during wartime, Americans have unfortunately heeded George Washington's warning against foreign entanglements. It's no coincidence that, like the new isolationism of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, compassion fatigue became rampant when the Cold War ended.
Take another look at Somalia: People there had been starving to death for a year -- and living in political anarchy for longer -- by the time American cameras arrived in 1992. Media pictures convinced George Bush to send the Marines to Mogadishu with humanitarian aid, but most Americans were surprised when a warlord's forces started killing U.S. soldiers. Suddenly, images of a Somali mob jeering at a dead serviceman flooded American TV. "And so was born the 'Somali doctrine,'" Moeller writes, "the inheritor to the 'Vietnam syndrome' that argued that the United States should not get involved in faraway crises when its own security is not in danger." But that doctrine has nothing to do with tuning out news coverage and everything to do with bad old American isolationism. -- Salon