Introduction: The Poverty of Television

Summary

The media may have extended reach, but have they extended understanding?

Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality

This book is about how suffering and poverty are represented on television and how audiences respond to this process of representation. As such, this book situates itself within the current debates in media ethics, such as the question of the media's responsibility to ‘the other’ (Silverstone 2007) and reflections on the best narrative techniques in media production to move spectators to ‘do something’ about faraway tragedies (Chouliaraki 2006; 2013). But unlike most work within the moral turn of media and communications studies in recent years, I approach this set of normative and often philosophical questions from an audience-centred perspective that puts at the heart of analysis the voices of ordinary people who engage with television in their everyday lives.

How and when are people moved by images of suffering on television? In what occasions do they turn away? How do people's social and cultural contexts shape their responses to news about disaster or to the mediated appearance of poor people in genres of entertainment television? And how do poor people and marginalized communities themselves regard the television narratives that journalists and television producers create about them? Drawing from a twenty-month ethnography of television programmes and their audiences in the Philippines conducted between 2009 and 2011, I provide in this book an account of people's ‘actually existing’ responses to mediated suffering that have so far been lacking in recent discussions of humanitarianism, social suffering and media ethics.

Aside from using ethnography to nuance our understanding of media's purported impact on our compassion fatigue and record observations as to how social factors of class, ethnicity and age shape people's interest in or apathy with faraway tragedy, this book retells the story of television as a central institution in which suffering and disaster are represented and resolved and which, to an extent, is also able to make class by reproducing and amplifying class divides in the Filipino society.