5 - News: Recognizing Calls to Action

Summary

People who are remote, socially or geographically, can afford to be unhelpful. Their reputation in the eyes of those from whom they are distant is of little to no importance to them.

Benedict Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines

Drawing primarily from focus group and life story interviews with audiences and supplemented by expert interviews with media industry representatives, this chapter describes the contours of audiences’ engagement with the news in relation to media ethics debates. News audiences, particularly their capacities to act either as engaged publics or disinterested bystanders, have been the traditional subjects of audience studies on compassion fatigue (Höijer 2004; Kinnick et al. 1996; Kyriakidou 2005, 2008), whilst news texts have been the focal point of arguments about the best and most ethical ways of representing suffering. Whilst the previous chapter presented audience responses to suffering in the genre of entertainment television and challenged some concepts and assumptions made in the news-centric media ethics literature, this chapter presents material in direct dialogue with existing work in the field.

This chapter finds that the news is a complex genre that offers highly varied representations of suffering. Unlike in Wowowee, where programme conventions recognize and reward highly specific claims to victimhood in participants’ ‘strategic suffering’, the news offers diverse forms of suffering: nearby and distant, natural disaster and man-made, individual and collective, pity-based claims and justice-based claims. And again, unlike in Wowowee, which only involved poor people visiting the media centre, the news also (and primarily) involves ‘reverse pilgrimages’ (Couldry 2003, 93), where media people visit ordinary people in their everyday life contexts. By having plural representations of suffering and multidirectional media pilgrimages, the news provokes diverse lay moralities of suffering and lay media moralities of good and bad media conduct in relation to the ‘Poverty of Television’, which in the Philippine context involves media intervening in social affairs in the context of a weak state.

At the same time, this chapter uncovers important continuities in audience engagement across entertainment and news genres. Classed consumption patterns of ‘switching off’ and affective consumption are likewise observed here. Similarly, moralities of authenticity and deservedness are employed in evaluating televised suffering.