Abstract
Drawing on the anthropology of moralities, the phronetic turn in media ethics scholarship, and audience research in media studies, this article explores how media audiences in the global South are implicated in moral dilemmas of bearing witness. Central are the diverse audience practices of engaging with proximal suffering on one hand and distant suffering on the other, where sympathy with or denial strategies towards suffering others are shaped not only by audiences’ geographical distance to tragedy, but crucially by classed moralities that profoundly shape judgments to sufferers and the media that represent them. A synthesis of ethnographic audience research with middle-class and low-income populations in disaster-prone Philippines shows how middle-class moralities of respectability inform social denial to proximal suffering, while low-income people’s personal experiences of suffering lead to the instrumentalization of television narratives as symbolic resources to cope with their own suffering.
Highlights
The mediation of suffering is a distant and a proximal phenomenon and even everyday condition
While the current debate in media ethics remains concerned about the capacities of media to bridge or exacerbate the social divides between the ‘zone of safety’ in the West and the ‘zone of danger’ in the global South (Chouliaraki, 2006: 83), we know little about ordinary people in the developing world acting upon images and stories of suffering – their own and those of others
Drawing on traditions in the anthropology of moralities, the phronetic turn in media ethics scholarship and audience research in media and cultural studies, this article explores how media audiences in the global South are implicated in everyday moral dilemmas of bearing witness: expressing sympathy or indignation toward others’ suffering, tuning into or switching off from a media world that reflects back the harsh conditions of one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, and articulating moral discourses of right and wrong in relation to media conventions of representing suffering
Summary
The mediation of suffering is a distant and a proximal phenomenon and even everyday condition. I explore television consumption and reception here as expressive of audiences’ lay moralities – for instance, in the diverse ways in which people justify their actions (or non-action) towards mediated sufferers, or make judgments of sufferers deserving of media recognition and public attention This approach resonates with the imperatives of neo-Aristotelian phronesis as developed within the media ethics literature. In the case of audiences living within this zone of danger, where disaster is seen as a ‘normal way of life’ (Bankoff, 2003: 53), viewing suffering may not carry the impact of shock or trauma, but instead serve as an opportunity for personal reflection, catharsis and therapy In this light, this article seeks to verify and nuance the many assumptions of media audiences’ engagement with mediated suffering by taking a dewesternizing and ethnographic approach
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