Compassion and Media Representations of Suffering Essay

Compassion and Media Representations of Suffering - Essay grammatical caseCompassion Cultivation The decision on how these images are going to be used and how a study is going to be told are left to the decision of the journalists and the editors. These decisions are influenced by different factors which include ethnic standards of the primary reference and the expectations of advertisers. The end product is almost always geared towards what will be warranted as interesting by more people in order to attract more advertisers. Media produce materials that take out compassion because compassion is what calls audience attention. Media positions the audience from a spectators point of view, a passive voice audience that is powerless when it comes to the doing something against the hurts of victims of natural disasters and manmade crimes. To establish a more intimate relationship between the word content and the audience, media use personal stories that are highly focused on the civ ilians. Their losses are highlighted, their separate take the places of actual body count and political analysis. By putting feeding the audience the suffering of people who are supposed to be innocence and the fact that audience are unable to do anything to mediate the suffering, the media creates distant suffering. The audience are being conditioned to take into consideration the condition of strangers thousands of miles away. This theoretical account of distant suffering has been so powerful that it has connected politics, audience, and non-profit organizations towards one cause. The growth of technology has afforded more watchword organizations and even ordinary citizens to access and distribute news and other information. The internet has as well stretched the rules on the extent of suffering one may show. More importantly, this continuous flow of information on suffering has heightened the audiences compassion because of the reinforcement of the fact that they are ultima tely powerless to change to anything and even with the franchise of knowing and watching, they cannot do anything. The audience is not anymore allowed to detach themselves from the fate of other people or take refuge in ignorance because they are never safe from the information. Compassion Fatigue Moeller (1999) believes that this formula is excessively the cause of compassion fatigue. The continuous drive to heighten emotion and ignite interest from the audience is conciliative the very essence of journalism. Journalism is supposed to uphold truths and facts without favouring any side. Journalism is about information dissemination. all of these take an inferior place over profitability. As media companies fight for audience, they continue to raise the stakes on how they present their stories without crossing the legal bounds. As a result, the media companies resort to sensationalism. The result is the ever growing worry on the accuracy of information that the audience obtains and the proper emotion that news is supposed to evoke. Chouliaraki (2006) discussed how adventure news embodies this situation. She mentioned three critical current events shootings in Indonesia, a boat accident in India and biblical floods in Bangladesh. All of these were given no more than one minute of air time. Important information was also not mentioned in the breaking news portion and was not presented in the proper context of the event. This preaching results to a lack of framework for the audience to understand the weight of the event. Th