COMPASSION FATIGUE AND THE MEDIA: PART ONE.(Critical Essay)

Contemporary Review, Sept, 1999, by Tom Phillips

The pictures are familiar from news reports. Desolate African scrubland stretches towards the horizon. Lines of pre-fabricated huts reflect sharp shards of light from corrugated iron roofs. In the background groups of apparently orphaned children shuffle listlessly around a dusty compound or sit under spiky thorn trees singing songs. There are a few hardy smiles for the camera.

Although these children are not in immediate danger of starving to death, the threat of malnutrition and disease is never far away. Their lives are fragile. To ensure that the early evening audience doesn't miss the point an instantly recognizable celebrity wonders aloud how anyone who witnesses such a scene could ever feel 'compassion fatigue'.

It's Comic Relief night on the BBC and another marathon televised appeal is underway. A telephone number flashes up on screen and the audience is exhorted to make a donation. Then it's back to a London studio to learn the amount of money raised before some cheering entertainment - a popular song, a comedy sketch - and further conscience-pricking reports from Africa.

At the end of the evening the presenters announce that the public response has been overwhelming. Arguably such events - which use the immediacy of the medium to a positive end and raise millions of pounds for charity are amongst those things which television does best.

There is, however, a problem. No matter how many assertions are made about the impossibility of feeling compassion fatigue, compassion fatigue appears to be having an increasing effect on the ability of relief agencies and charities to maintain adequate levels of public interest and support. Sporadic televised appeals still prompt a response but overall individual and corporate giving are both in long-term decline. Pictures of starving children, it seems, no longer stir the public like they used to.

Why this should be so is the subject of Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (Routledge. [pounds]16.99 p.b. 390 pages. ISBN 0-415-92097-3) - a new and important book by the Director of the Journalism Programme at Brandeis University, Susan D. Moeller.

The argument she presents is simple and clear: compassion fatigue is media induced. Modern news reporting: has fallen into a mt and it is the unfailing predictability of the coverage given to foreign crises and catastrophes - rather than the nature of the events themselves - which encourages the public to turn the page or change the channel. Compassion fatigue is not, in other words, 'an unavoidable consequence of covering the news. It is, however, an unavoidable consequence of the way the news is now covered.'

Moreover, compassion fatigue - or, perhaps, more accurately, the fear of inducing it - acts on the media as a 'prior restraint'. A form of self-censorship, it prevents the media breaking out of the rut which generates it in the first place.

Terrified that precious audience or readership figures will fall if they cover too many foreign crises in too much depth, television companies and news publications only approach those stories which can be dealt with in a predictable, conventional style. Stories which cannot be 'shoe-horned' into any of the media's ready-made models are discarded or shoved to the bottom of the news agenda. The rest become little more than a repetitive mish-mash of stock sensationalist images, dubious analogies and over-used metaphors. The public starts to believe that it really has seen all this before and they stop taking notice.

The evidence to support this critique is comprehensive, detailed and convincing. Examining a series of case studies - which range from 'the archetypal media famine' in Ethiopia in 1984-85 to the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1995 - the author proceeds to show how the way the news was gathered and presented at the time proved conspicuously inadequate to the significance of the story. Although the vast majority of these case studies are drawn from the American media, the arguments raised could just as well be applied to the media in any Western democracy where the desire to push up ratings and sales can deflect the disinterested pursuit of truth.

Of course no news organisation could possibly cover every event in the world and some form of selection and prioritization of stories is inevitable. Events have to be ranked according to their significance and newsworthiness. Although these are nebulous criteria at the best of times, journalists have traditionally applied them in conjunction with their own instincts and experience to decide which stories should run.

Nowadays, however, it seems that economic and organisational concerns are being allowed to determine the news agenda. The limitations imposed by cost, logistics and the need to avoid alienating the public have become increasingly important. To make it into the headlines now, stories no longer have to be newsworthy. They also have to be clear cut, accessible and cheap.

In the early 1990s, for example, Sudan and Somalia were badly affected by civil war and famine. The situation in both countries had been worsening for several years but, eventually, in 1992, one or two journalists began to take notice. Although, as Susan Moeller points out, it took another 'year of famine for starving Somalia to overcome the compassion fatigue hurdle and make the front pages and the evening news programmes in the United States', there was no shortage of media interest in the Horn of Africa from then on especially when American troops and aid workers became involved.

Sudan, meanwhile, was virtually ignored. Not only was it relatively difficult for journalists to travel to the country's troubled southern provinces, the Khartoum government was also out of favour with the West following its support for Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Moreover, the crisis there seemed intractable - a catastrophe without end.

Sudan had been at war with itself for 30 of the preceding 40 years and in a country riven with religious and political factions there were no obvious 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. The country was effectively written off. No amount of food aid, it was assumed, or military intervention - both of which were tried in Somalia - could possibly deal with that degree of chaos. In any case, the story was remarkably similar to the one running in Somalia: covering both would have entailed massive expense on the ground and generated compassion fatigue at home. There is only ever room for one crisis at a time. Sudan would have to wait. The media stayed put in Mogadishu.

Other examples of this kind of failure are depressingly easy to find. The genocidal 'anfal' campaign waged against the Kurds by Iraq was rarely covered before the outbreak of the Gulf War - and only briefly became news in 1988 when poison gas was dropped on the Kurdish city of Halabja. Alerted to Iraq's illegal use of chemical weapons by the Iranians who, at that time, were on the 'wrong side' in the Iran-Iraq war - the media didn't really know what to do with the story. There were no obvious heroes and Saddam Hussein had not yet become an international pariah. There was no easy way to explain the situation. It didn't fit the news agenda. It rapidly turned into a story about chemical weapons proliferation rather than one about the deportation, execution and gassing of thousands of Kurds. Only after the Gulf War did the repression of the Kurds become a story in its own right. Then at last there were easily identifiable heroes and villains. For a few months at least, the Kurds became the media's 'chosen people'.

In Rwanda, the genocide and refugee crisis of 1994-95 was even more complex and, in many ways, the media's failure to grasp the essence of the story even more glaringly obvious. In fact, you could say the media got hold of the wrong story altogether.

At its height in April 1994 the genocide of the Tutsi population by the Hutus and their powerful interahamwe movement attracted what Susan Moeller describes as 'moderate media coverage'. On the big three American television networks it accounted for one and a half per cent of the total news time for that particular month. The content of this coverage was unusually graphic. There were pictures of bloated corpses choking the rivers out of Rwanda and in one particularly horrific sequence a group of Hutu villagers beat four men and women to death and casually beheaded the corpses.

The genocide, though, proved a difficult and dangerous story to cover. The largely Hutu government's war with the insurgent RPF and the dubious notion that this proved the Tutsis and the Hutus were as bad as each other only served to complicate matters. Here was another crisis which seemed intractable. Who were the heroes? Who were the villains? Not long after it broke, both public and media interest began to wane. It was only when thousands of refugees arrived on the Zairean border and congregated on the lava fields around Goma that the Rwandan story revived. This time, though, it was all about refugees and there were tried and trusted formulae into which the media could fit it. Within a few days, the refugee story had eclipsed the genocide story.

The problem, of course, was that this particular refugee story wasn't as straightforward as it seemed. Who were these refugees? Where had they come from? And why were they massing on the Zairean border? Conventional wisdom had it that they were Hutus fleeing from the vengeful forces of the Tutsi-dominated RPF and that, in the simplistic moral universe the media like to inhabit, they were consequently portrayed as spotlessly innocent victims.

However, as writers such as Philip Gourevitch have subsequently shown, not all these refugees were as innocent as they looked. Many of them were, in fact, members of the interahamwe - Hutu activists who had actively participated in the genocide. Had this been properly investigated before cholera struck the camp at Goma and initiated a flood of relief aid from the West far greater than that prompted by the news of the genocide the month before, the coverage might have actually begun to reflect the full human complexity of the situation. Generic reporting would certainly have been out of the question.

Choosing not to look too deeply was easy, however, and the standard refugee formula was passed off as in-depth reporting. Even the lessons of post-Communist Eastern Europe - where good guys became bad guys and vice versa at the drop of a hat - do not appear to have had any effect on the media's 'report now, think later' approach to foreign affairs.

For peripatetic foreign correspondents, of course, dealing with a crisis on the scale of the Rwandan genocide or the Somali famine does cause immense practical and ethical problems. They are often the first outsiders to witness the devastating consequences of violence, starvation or disease. They have to try to make sense of the bewildering, grotesque or plain nonsensical situations which exist on the frontline, in a refugee camp or at a feeding centre. They also have to sift through the propaganda delivered up as the truth by local officials and then decide whose story they should believe. We saw the same trends at work in last month's coverage of the Turkish earthquake.

Susan Moeller is not unsympathetic to journalists in this position. As she explains in her introduction, the problems she describes 'stem from faults inherent in the news-gathering process.' Reporters are now being placed in impossible situations. Few major news organisations can afford to run a network of foreign bureaus any more. Instead they resort to 'parachute journalism'. Correspondents are flown from one crisis to the next and are expected to pick up the gist as soon as they arrive on the scene. There is no time to research the background, the history, the context. With little or no knowledge of the local language, reporters have to rely on translators and other intermediaries and are usually unable to communicate directly with survivors and eyewitnesses. Working to ever tighter deadlines, they often only have a few hours in which to come up with a story which captures the essence of the events still unfolding around them.

The resulting journalism is almost always shallow and formulaic. And the correspondents themselves almost always resort to 'Westernizing' the story. English-speaking aid workers and officials are quicker and easier to interview than refugees. Only those aspects of a situation which affect - or reflect - Western interests or directly involve Americans and Europeans tend to reach the headlines back home.

According to Susan Moeller, American journalists are particularly prone to this habit and it can sometimes seem as if 'foreign news' is only 'home news' which happens to take place abroad. When American troops landed near Mogadishu in December 1992, for example, the story of the famine faded into the background while the actual media presence in Somalia dramatically increased. In fact the troops made Somalia the big story and the landing itself became a media - rather than a military - event. Invited by the Pentagon, more than 75 reporters were waiting on the beach to film and photograph it through infrared cameras. In the end Pentagon officials had to complain about the irresponsible use of television lighting which, they claimed, 'could temporarily blind helicopter pilots and reconnaissance troops using night-vision goggles.' Looking back on the landing, one journalist described it as 'a beach party' - a beach party, that is, which was held in the middle of a famine.

Susan Moeller, of course, is not the first commentator to examine the failings of the media's coverage of foreign affairs and, in many ways, her perspective is similar to that of John Pilger or Noam Chomsky - both of whom have written about the omissions and imbalances of international reporting. Her analyses are certainly as sharp as theirs and her conclusions about the superficiality and partiality of the media are equally disturbing. In explaining why the media behaves in this fashion, however, she is less overtly partisan than some of her eminent predecessors and in developing her concept of compassion fatigue as both the cause and effect of shoddy journalism she offers a fresh way of understanding the media's decline into mere 'infotainment'.

Compassion Fatigue, though, should not be read as an entirely negative attack on the media. It also contains praise for those - admittedly very few - journalists who work against the grain. Jim Hoagland, who wrote about the anfal against the Kurds for the Washington Post, and Fergal Keane, who covered the Rwandan crisis with unusual clear-sightedness for the BBC, are both singled out for their integrity and for their determination to 'bear witness' rather than simply peddle the cliches of the day. Good serious journalism which really does stir the public is not an impossibility and, Susan Moeller argues, the compassion fatigue trap is not inescapable. The media could get out of it if only news organisations invested properly in international reporting, allowed correspondents on the ground 'the freedom to define their own stories' and worried less about profit and loss. 'The solution', in other words, 'is for the media business to get back to the business of reporting all the news, all the time.'

Tom Phillips is a freelance writer living in Bristol. In Compassion Fatigue: Part Two, he will examine the British media's coverage of the Kosovo crisis.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. in association with The Gale Group and LookSmart.
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