Conclusions: Mediating Suffering, Dividing Class

Summary

The test of acknowledgment is not the reflex reaction to a TV news item, a beggar on the street, or an Amnesty advertisement, but how we live in between such moments.

Stan Cohen, States of Denial

This book has explored moral problems in the mediation of suffering using an audience-centred approach. Drawing on an ethnographic study of television audiences in the Philippines, this book provided empirical material in dialogue with the normative and often text-centred media ethics literature. Inspired by perspectives within the anthropology of moralities, it sought to be attentive to moral discourses and practices in the context of everyday life whilst keeping these in conversation with normative theory as well as empirical studies of other cultural contexts. At the same time, it has demanded more careful evaluation of television production of suffering – one that acknowledges the diversity of media institutional practices around the world and differences in audiences’ social positions.

As the title clearly made the point, one of the central themes of this book is the discussion of the poverty of television in a class-divided Philippines, anchored from a holistic yet insistently grounded account of audiences’ (dis/) engagement with media and their varied ways of over-representing and even resolving poverty and disaster. This sheds light on particular challenges of the Philippines as a developing country where, social denial strategies notwithstanding, it is most impossible for people to honestly claim ignorance about the plight of vulnerable others (Bauman 2001, 1); after all, suffering exists in excess both on national television and in the ‘liquid mess’ of the metropolis (Tadiar 1996). In this context, the poverty of television thus is not an ‘out there’ phenomenon (‘distant suffering’ in the Western-centric literature) but ‘in here’ – an ever-present social reality that television culture shapes and is fundamentally shaped by. The everyday experience of poverty by the lowerclass majority is crucial to the political economy of mass media institutions, their motivations for legitimation, their programming styles and stories, and the ways in which they invite media pilgrimages from charity-seeking poor people.