Proximal versus distant suffering in TV news discourses on COVID-19 pandemic

News is central to human communication and has an important signifying power as a particular subsystem within language. This study sets out to comprehensively examine how four major TV global news providers – CNN, BBC, DW and RT – have covered the COVID-19 pandemic from outbreak to mid-crisis. We apply a multi-level content analysis approach that rests on theories of proximization and representation of distant suffering, following a computer-assisted analysis that aids in identifying concepts occurrence and the semantic relationship among the highly frequent clusters. We explore the news representation during 2020 of COVID-19 as proximal versus distant discourses of suffering, safety and compassion conceptualized in light of theories on distant suffering. A total number of 12 dataset reports consisting of 2,017,875 words were analyzed. The results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic news formulates a particular type of discourse on suffering that individualizes the sufferer, sets out the course of action and turns the fast-approaching pandemic into a global cause for action.

Memoriais on-line às vítimas da Covid-19 no Brasil: narrativas sensíveis à dor alheia

À luz de literatura anglófona sobre a mediação da dor alheia (livre tradução para mediating distant suffering) na mídia e sobre testemunhos midiáticos (media witnessing), este artigo reflete sobre as narrativas adotadas por jornalistas em relação às vítimas da Covid-19, após o aumento acelerado de mortes pela doença no Brasil. Parte-se do impacto midiático causado pela criação do site Inumeráveis, construído de forma colaborativa, para analisar o tratamento adotado pelo hotsite Memorial Covid-19 do portal G1, criado um mês antes e alimentado por profissionais das emissoras afiliadas à Rede Globo de televisão. Argumenta-se que ambos os memoriais são fruto de uma “guinada moral” em relação à cobertura jornalística da pandemia, que até certo momento supervalorizou os números de doentes e mortos, sem considerar as experiências de vida por trás desses acontecimentos. Assim, conclui-se que os memoriais substituem os relatos baseados em índices racionais da pandemia pelas narrativas sensíveis ao sofrimento dos por ela afetados, pautados por testemunhos e pelo princípio de proximidade.

Virtual reality and celebrity humanitarianism: Rashida Jones in Lebanon

The paper brings together two segments of contemporary humanitarian practice – celebrity advocacy and virtual reality (VR) – in order to more fully comprehend the relationship between emergent technologies and humanitarian advocacy efforts. Numerous VR documentaries intended to immerse audiences into the full experience of “distant suffering” have been crafted for audiences in the global North. Between 2015 and 2019, the United Nations invested in at least 21 VR documentaries covering crisis situations around the world. VR’s popularity is premised on the promise of bringing spectators and “distant sufferers” together through immersive experiences. Performances of humanitarian advocacy use traditional representational tools of Western humanitarian discourse. This leads to the question whether advocacy efforts using immersive VR flatten real and material differences that exist between sufferers and spectators in safe zones through the “illusion of co-suffering”? To what extent do such experiences risk “improper distance” by translating the irreducible alterity of other lives into familiar terms?

Humanitarian Emotions through History

This chapter explores how the emotional dimensions of witnessing human hardship play a key role in shaping humanitarian practices. While images of suffering have evoked a range of emotions, contemporary commentators lament that a “politics of pity” fuels Western humanitarian practices. Even if it could seem a recent phenomenon, these emotions have a history. This chapter examines the emergence of humanitarian emotions by linking early modern depictions of suffering with contemporary media images of crises. Furthermore, it analyses how representing distant suffering has led to a “politics of pity.” Exposing the contingency of such emotions, this chapter concludes by emphasizing how feelings hold immanent possibilities for political transformations.

Communicating Cosmopolitanism During Times of Crisis: UNHCR and the World Refugee Day Campaign in the UK and Bulgaria

How can a cosmopolitan message about refugees be communicated in an international political context characterized by growing hostility to outsiders at the national level? This article provides a detailed analysis of a specific World Refugee Day campaign based on extensive access to internal data from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and interviews with key informants alongside case studies of the campaign in two European countries: the United Kingdom (UK) and Bulgaria. While internal UNHCR assessment suggested successful meeting of pre-set targets, a series of issues around the implementation of message framing and the potential for this to generate action are identified. The article applies ideas about the communication of distant suffering to explore how World Refugee Day campaigns operate as interventions into global public discourse. The analysis of the campaign framing finds that it maximized space for solidaristic understanding of the refugee issue and reflexivity. However, the article argues that the communication of these ideas is impacted by the practical and organizational challenges (and opportunities) of developing a professional communication strategy in the context of a rapidly changing media and political environment.

Transnational news media coverage of distant suffering in the Syrian civil war: An analysis of CNN, Al-Jazeera English and Sputnik online news

This study analyzed news stories published on the online sites of CNN, Al-Jazeera English, and Sputnik to investigate how the transnational news outlets framed the human suffering associated with the Syrian war. Unlike prior studies that have tended to be based on traditional nation-state paradigms, this research approached the analysis from a cosmopolitan perspective. The findings revealed that in concert with standard journalistic routines and news values, all three news outlets commonly employed a mass death and displacement frame to depict human suffering inside Syria. The adoption of this frame suggests that in telling the story of human suffering, the three media outlets focused on brief facts and shocking statistics without detailed depictions of the human suffering. The meager presence of a cosmopolitan outlook in the news coverage indicates that although transnational media target a global audience with English as Lingua Franca, they cannot be completely independent of geopolitics.

How Media Portrayals of Suffering Influence Willingness to Help

When we hear stories of distant humanitarian crises, we often feel sympathy for victims, but may stop short of taking action to help. Past research indicates that media portrayals of distant suffering can promote helping behavior by eliciting sympathy, while those that prompt a more rational response tend to decrease helping behavior by undermining sympathy. The authors used an online experiment to test whether certain media frames could promote helping behavior through a more rational, rather than emotional, pathway. The study tested whether framing distant suffering as either solvable or unsolvable might promote helping behavior if a rational evaluation of a crisis leads one to determine that help is efficacious in solving the problem. Survey respondents were randomly assigned to read one of three messages: a high solvability message, a low solvability message, or a control message. Contrary to expectations, both low solvability and high solvability conditions increased participants’ intentions to help. The results suggest that this is because framing problems as unsolvable drives up sympathy, thus promoting willingness to help, while framing problems as solvable drives up perceived efficacy, also promoting willingness to help. The authors conclude that, in contrast to earlier studies, and to the assumptions of many of those working in media, emphasizing rationality can promote helping behavior if audiences rationally interpret the problem as solvable. Implications of the findings for ethically portraying distant suffering in the media are discussed.