How the media sell disease, famine,war and deathAuthor: Susan D. Moeller
Subject: humanitarian
My rating: 3*
About the book:
Compassion fatigue, also known as a Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a term that refers to a gradual lessening of compassion over time. It is common among victims of trauma and individuals that work directly with victims of trauma. It was first diagnosed in nurses in the 1950s. In this book, Susan Moeller brings a vast amount of evidence and examples of journalism to prove her point: the media has caused widespread compassion fatigue in society by saturating newspapers and news shows with decontextualized images and stories of suffering. This has caused the public to become cynical, or become resistant to helping people who are suffering. It is not an easy book to read, as the information presented is overwhelming; definitely a must read for journalists!
From the book:
"Conflict is our favorite kind of news". Crisis are turned into a social experience that we can grasp; pain is commercialized, wedged between the advertisements for hemorrhoid remedies and headache medicines. In that cultural context, suffering becomes infotainment- just another commodity..'
'The poorest selling covers are always those on international news'.
'The origins of compassion fatigue lie in ignorance. It's easy to run a map indicating where Bosnia is or a graphic clarifying of who's who in Rwanda. More difficult, more time consuming, more expensive in terms of both money and energy is for the media to show their readers and viewers why they should care about Bosnia and Rwanda'.
'There's a very low level of general knowledge of the rest of the world among Americans. A crisis tends to fall into the sort of great pool of things that are subject more to stereotypes and generally being pushed to the back of our consciousness unless we see really grim and grisly pictures on TV. Then it just becomes one of a series of horrible things that happens someplace else'
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