Compassion Fatigue

How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death

Susan D. Moeller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135963071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

From outbreaks of the flesh eating viruses Ebola and Strep A, to death camps in Bosnia and massacres in Rwanda, the media seem to careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death. First we're horrified, but each time they turn up the pitch, show us one image more hideous than the next, it gets harder and harder to feel. Meet compassion fatigue--a modern syndrome, Susan Moeller argues, that results from formulaic media coverage, sensationalized language and overly Americanized metaphors. In her impassioned new book, Compassion Fatigue, Moeller warns that the American media threatens our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that as seen too much--or too little--to care? Through a series of case studies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--disease, famine, death and war--Moeller investigates how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen and revealing why. Throughout, we hear from industry insiders who tell of the chilling effect of the mega- media mergers, the tyranny of the bottom-line hunt for profits, and the decline of the American attention span as they struggle to both tell and sell a story. But Moeller is insistent that the media need not, and should not, be run like any other business. The media have a special responsibility to the public, and when they abdicate this responsibility and the public lapses into a compassion fatigue stupor, we become a public at great danger to ourselves.

“The Road to Hell,” Newsweek, 21 September 1992
“Moral imperatives may soon take precedence: Starving orphan in the village of Wajid.”

CHAPTER ONE: COMPASSION FATIGUE

1991 was a bad year. Disasters occurred all over the globe: Earthquakes in Soviet Georgia, Iran and Costa Rica killed hundreds and left tens of thousands homeless; a cholera epidemic in Peru killed more than a thousand and infected another 145,000; a cyclone in Bangladesh killed 138,000 and destroyed a million and a half homes; war in Iraq turned two million Kurds into refugees from Saddam Hussein and killed tens of thousands as they fled over the mountains; and famine and civil war in Africa killed hundreds of thousands and left 27 million at risk.

By early May, spokespeople for international organizations and the relief agencies had run out of hyperboles. “We have had an unprecedented spate of disasters,” said Philip Johnston, president of CARE. “We’re dealing with 15 of them at the moment.” “The needs are overwhelming,” said Al Panico, director of international relief for the American Red Cross. James Grant, executive director of UNICEF, said, “These are really the most severe set of problems one can remember coming at one time since the end of World War II.” And Richard Walden, president of Operation USA, called the flare-up of global crises “biblical in proportion.”¹

The international organizations and the relief agencies were forced to practice institutional triage. The Red Cross workers who had experience with earthquakes were tied up aiding Kurdish refugees. Crates of medical supplies, especially intravenous solutions, had been shipped to fight the cholera in Peru, and so were unavailable to send to the cyclone victims in Bangladesh. Blankets and weatherproofing materials needed in Bangladesh had already gone to help the Kurds fleeing Iraq. And food, flashlights, water-purification tablets and water-storage containers were scattered too thinly between famine-stricken regions in Africa and earthquake zones in Central America, the Middle East and Central Asia. Tom Drahman, CARE’s manager for Asia, said, “People that have been doing this for a long time are hard-pressed to recall a time in history where things have been so dramatic. It seems there is a disaster, not only of the week, but of the day. It has to stretch (our) finite resources.”²

Like emergency-room triage, triage of emergencies does not necessarily mean that the sickest case gets the first and most help. Sometimes the sickest case is the most hopeless case, and receives little more than a Band-Aid of care—just enough so the hemorrhaging is not embarrassing. In the spring of 1991, the short-term calamities eclipsed the longer-term and ultimately more deadly disasters of famine and war. Americans viewed the damages caused by the cyclone and earthquakes as one-shot problems with specific solutions. And they felt guilty about the Kurdish refugee situation, remorseful that the United States hadn’t come to the aid of the rebellion. As a New York Times editorial put it: “The plight of the Kurds has priority, since their exodus directly resulted from an American-led war against Iraq.”³ So the refugees and the cyclone and earthquake victims received an outpouring of attention and support. But the starving in Africa, in numbers far greater than the victims of the earthquakes, cyclone, cholera and Persian Gulf War combined, received relatively little political or media attention until late in the summer of the following year.

With not “enough money, manpower or sympathy to go around,” wrote Newsweek, fears for the displaced Kurds and concern for the fate of Bangladesh “submerged an even deeper dilemma: the plight of sub-Saharan Africa…in what Save the Children, a relief agency, calls, ‘the worst famine in Africa in living memory.’” “People worldwide must have the feeling of ‘African famine again?’” said Dr. Tatsuo Hayashi of the Japan International Volunteer Center. “Donors are tired of repetitious events, and Sudan and Ethiopia are repetitious,” said a CARE official in Nairobi. “Every time there’s a famine in Africa…you can always count on somebody asking, ‘Hey didn’t they just do that last year?’”⁴

1991 was different than the halcyon years of the mid-1980s when African famine relief was in vogue. In the eighties, Americans were able to focus on one international catastrophe. A BBC videotape of skeletal Ethiopian children dying as the camera rolled aired on NBC in late October 1984 and galvanized public sympathy. The entertainment industry came onboard en masse with the global hookup of the Band Aid and Live Aid concerts. And the song “We Are the World,” recorded in 1985 by stars such as Michael Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, made famine relief the year’s cause célèbre.

Six years later, news of African famine evoked a “been there, done that” attitude. “For the most part,” said Newsweek in May 1991, the famine in Africa “has not captured the attention of the world press. Journalists already visited this tragedy, during the sub-Saharan famine from 1984 to 1985 that took more than a million lives. Rock stars threw benefit concerts to help raise almost $300 million in relief aid. That the problem has returned full force might seem a slap in the face of philanthropy.”⁵

“Traditional donors, battered by so many appeals, are weary of pouring money into crises that never seem to go away,” said reporter Elaine Sciolino in The New York Times that same month. “The result,” she added, “is a discouragingly contagious compassion fatigue.”⁶

It all started with an advertising campaign. We have all been cued by that famous series of ads by Save the Children. You can help this child or you can turn the page. The first time a reader sees the advertisement he is arrested by guilt. He may come close to actually sending money to the organization. The second time the reader sees the ad he may linger over the photograph, read the short paragraphs of copy and only then turn the page. The third time the reader sees the ad he typically turns the page without hesitation. The fourth time the reader sees the ad he may pause again over the photo and text, not to wallow in guilt, but to acknowledge with cynicism how the advertisement is crafted to manipulate readers like him—even if it is in a “good” cause. As the Chicago Tribunes 1998 series investigating four international charities bluntly stated, “Child sponsorship is one of the most powerful and seductive philanthropic devices ever conceived.”⁷

Most media consumers eventually get to the point where they turn the page. Because most of us do pass the advertisement by, its curse is on our heads. “Either you help or you turn away,” stated one ad. “Whether she lives or dies, depends on what you do next.” Turning away kills this child. We are responsible. “Because without your help, death will be this child’s only relief.”⁸ In turning away we become culpable.

But we can’t respond to every appeal. And so we’ve come to believe that we don’t care. If we turn the page originally because we don’t want to respond to what is in actuality a fund-raising appeal, although in the guise of a direct humanitarian plea, it becomes routine to thumb past the pages of news images showing wide-eyed children in distress.

We’ve got compassion fatigue, we say, as if we have involuntarily contracted some kind of disease that we’re stuck with no matter what we might do.

But it’s not just the tactics of the advocacy industry which are at fault in our succumbing to this affliction. After all, how often do we see one of their ads, anyway?…unless it’s Christmastime and we’re opening all our unsolicited mail.

It’s the media that are at fault. How they typically cover crises helps us to feel overstimulated and bored all at once. Conventional wisdom says Americans have a short attention span. A parent would not accept that pronouncement on a child; she would step in to try to teach patience and the rewards of sticktoitiveness. But the media are not parents. In this case they are more like the neighborhood kid who is the bad influence on the block. Is your attention span short? Well then, let the media give you even more staccato bursts of news, hyped and wired to feed your addiction. It is not that there’s not good, comprehensive, responsible reporting out there. There is. “Sometimes,” said the late Jim Yuenger, former foreign editor with the Chicago Tribune, “you put the news in and people just aren’t going to read it and you have to say the hell with it.”⁹ But that type of coverage is expensive as well as space- and time-consuming. It rarely shows enough bang for the buck. So only a few elite media outlets emphasize such coverage, and even they frequently lapse into quick once-over reporting. “We give you the world,” yes, but in 15-second news briefs.

The print and broadcast media are part of the entertainment industry—an industry that knows how to capture and hold the attention of its audience. “The more bizarre the story,” admitted UPI foreign editor Bob Martin, “the more it’s going to get played.”¹⁰ With but a few exceptions, the media pay their way through selling advertising, not selling the news. So the operating principle behind much of the news business is to appeal to an audience—especially a large audience—with attractive demographics for advertisers. Those relatively few news outlets that consider international news to be of even remote interest to their target audiences try to make the world accessible. The point in covering international affairs is to make the world fascinating—or at least acceptably convenient: “News you can use.” “When we do the readership surveys, foreign news always scores high,” said Robert Kaiser, former managing editor of The Washington Post. “People say they’re interested and appreciate it, and I know they’re lying but I don’t mind. It’s fine. But I think it’s an opportunity for people to claim to be somewhat better citizens than they are.”¹¹

But in reality, they’re bored. When problems in the news can’t be easily or quickly solved—famine in Somalia, war in Bosnia, mass murder of the Kurds—attention wanders off to the next news fashion. “What’s hardest,” said Yuenger, “is to sustain interest in a story like Bosnia, which a lot of people just don’t want to hear about.” The media are alert to the first signs in their audience of the compassion fatigue “signal,” that sign that the short attention span of the public is up. “If we’ve just been in Africa for three months,” said CBS News foreign editor Allen Alter, “and somebody says, ‘You think that’s bad? You should see what’s down in Niger,’ well, it’s going to be hard for me to go back. Everybody’s Africa’d out for the moment.” As Milan Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai and so on and so forth, until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”¹²

The causes of compassion fatigue are multiple. Sometimes there are just too many catastrophes happening at once. “I think it was the editor Harold Evans,” said Bill Small, former president of NBC News and UPI, “who noted that a single copy of the [London] Sunday Times covers more happenings than an Englishman just a few hundred years ago could be expected to be exposed to in his entire lifetime.”¹³ In 1991, for instance, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the plethora of disasters.

So compassion fatigue may simply work to pre-empt attention of “competing” events. Americans seem to have an appetite for only one crisis at a time. The phenomenon is so well-known that even political cartoonists make jokes about it, such as the frame drawn by Jeff Danziger of a newsroom with one old hack saying to someone on the phone: “Tajikistan? Sorry, we’ve already got an ethnic war story,” and another old warhorse saying on another phone: “Sudan? Sorry we’ve already got a famine story.”¹⁴

Even during “slower” disaster seasons, there is always a long laundry list of countries and peoples in upheaval. Many and perhaps most of the problems are not of the quick-fix variety—the send-in-the-blankets-and-vaccination-supplies-and-all-will-be-well emergencies. Most global problems are entrenched and long-lasting, rarely yielding to easy solutions available to individuals or even NGO and governmental authorities. “The same theme just dulls the psyche. For the reader, for the reporter writing it, for the editor reading it,” said Bernard Gwertzman, former foreign editor at The New York Times.¹⁵

Tom Kent, international editor at the Associated Press, noted the same problem in covering ongoing crises. “Basically, in our coverage we cover things until there’s not much new to say. And then we back off daily coverage and come back a week or a month later, but not day-to-day.” He could tell, he said, when the sameness of the situation was drugging an audience into somnolence.

We can certainly get a sense for the degree that people care about a story in the public. For example, when Bosnia started, people were calling up all the time for addresses of relief organizations and how we can help and all that. We did lists, and then requests dropped off. And in the first part of the Somalia story we heard “How can we help?” “How can we get money to these people?” We sent out the lists, then those calls dropped off Either the people who wanted to contribute had all the information they needed, or there just wasn’t anybody else who was interested. In Rwanda, we got practically no inquiries about how to help, although our stories certainly suggested there’s as much misery in Rwanda as anywhere else.¹⁶

Sometimes to Americans, international problems just seem too permanent to yield to resolution. Sometimes even when problems flare out into crisis—by which point it is too late for the patch-’em-up response—the public is justified in believing that outside intervention will do little good…so what’s the use in caring?

It’s difficult for the media and their audience to sustain concern about individual crises over a period of months and maybe even years. Other more decisive—and short-term—events intervene, usurping attention, and meanwhile, little seems to change in the original scenario. There is a reciprocal circularity in the treatment of low-intensity crises: the droning “same-as-it-ever-was” coverage in the media causes the public to lose interest, and the media’s perception that their audience has lost interest causes them to downscale their coverage, which causes the public to believe that the crisis is either over or is a lesser emergency and so on and so on.

Another, especially pernicious form of compassion fatigue can set in when a crisis seems too remote, not sufficiently connected to Americans’ lives. Unless Americans are involved, unless a crisis comes close to home—either literally or figuratively—unless compelling images are available, preferably on TV, crises don’t get attention, either from the media or their audience. Some of the public may turn the television off when they see sad reports from around the world, but unless the news is covered by the media, no one has an opportunity to decide whether to watch or not. “Thanks to the news media,” noted Newsweek, “the face of grieving Kurdish refugees replaced the beaming smiles of victorious GIs.” Publicity, Newsweek argued, “galvanized the public and forced the president’s hand.” In just two weeks, the Bush administration sent $188 million in relief to the Kurds.¹⁷ It’s a bit like that tree falling in the middle of the forest. If it falls and no one hears, it’s like it never happened. The tree may lie on the forest floor for years, finally to rot away, without anyone ever realizing it once stood tall.

If the public doesn’t know, or knowing can’t relate in some explicit way to an event or issue, then it’s off the radar. And that is the most devastating effect of compassion fatigue: no attention, no interest, no story. The lack of coverage of starvation in Africa in the spring of 1991, for instance—even though the famine was potentially more severe than the one in the mid-1980s—meant that there was no understanding of the crisis, no surge in donations and no public pressure on governments or international organizations to do something. Africa was not a “headline event.” Public response, humanitarian agencies believe, is in direct correlation to the publicity an event receives; the donor community depends on the media to spotlight the world’s disasters. But the problem with famines, for example, is that they just aren’t considered newsworthy until the dying begins. Before the massive die-off, relief agencies searched, said Joel Charney from Oxfam America in early May 1991, “to find a way to dramatize the situation in the Horn of Africa to the point where the media will begin to pay attention.”¹⁸

Some crises are reflexively covered in the media. The media, print and broadcast a...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION: RIDING WITH THE FOUR HORSEMEN
• CHAPTER ONE: COMPASSION FATIGUE
• CHAPTER TWO: COVERING PESTILENCE: SENSATIONALIZING EPIDEMIC DISEASE
• CHAPTER THREE: COVERING FAMINE: THE FAMINE FORMULA
• CHAPTER FOUR: COVERING DEATH: THE AMERICANIZATION OF ASSASSINATIONS
• CHAPTER FIVE: COVERING WAR: GETTING GRAPHIC ABOUT GENOCIDE
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS