Distant compassion: CNN and borioboola gha.

• Author: Orwin, Clifford
• Position: Effects of television news coverage of sufferings

As human beings have always suffered, so have they responded to the suffering of others. Compassion is as old as the human race. What is new is our window on the distress of fellow human beings no matter how remote from us. Thanks to the impact of the information revolution, there is no instance of suffering anywhere that is out of range of the camera or that, once recorded, is not instantly available for display everywhere. Often we view these reproductions "live" as the suffering actually occurs. Should we miss them the first time around, we can count on the most gripping ones being replayed again and again. Without leaving our living rooms we have the sorrows of the world at our fingertips. As the French commentator Pierre Hassner has noted, the power of televised horrors has vindicated kin a manner of speaking) Immanuel Kant's hope that a violation of right anywhere on earth would be felt everywhere on it.(1)

Naturally this development has been widely noticed. People speak of the "CNN factor." The theory is that thanks to the immediate and insistent diffusion of such images of suffering, democratic governments have come and will continue to come under pressure from their peoples to undertake humanitarian interventions. Thus may the gods of television pride themselves on furnishing their viewers with an education in humanity more universal, more vivid, more effective than any earlier one. This is a beautiful hope -- but how plausible is it?

The Need for Images

It is a fact that many viewers credit television with having awakened their concern for distant sufferings to which they would otherwise have remained indifferent. There is even a reason why television might seem particularly suited to such a role. Compassion depends on the imagination. Only insofar as we can imagine the sufferings that we ascribe to the other -- and perhaps even only insofar as we can imagine those sufferings befalling ourselves -- do these kindle our compassion for him. (It is for both these reasons that most children exhibit so little compassion.) Imagination, in turn, requires images, the more concrete the better. What will excite our sympathy for the people of Rwanda is not the grim tally of the dead or displaced, however horrific that may be. As the French sociologist Luc Boltanski has noted in his valuable study, La Souffrance i distance (Suffering at a Distance), a table of statistics on poverty, however grim, does not evoke compassion with the plight of the poor.(2) What is needed are images of particular victims, pegs on which to hang our imagination. As Kant once remarked, "a suffering child fills our heart with sadness, while we learn with indifference the news of a terrible battle."(3)

Of course, as we may as well admit at the outset, televised images of suffering trade at a substantial discount. The first point about such images on which to insist is also the most obvious. As with everything televised, we can always turn them off or tune them out, i.e., watch without seeing and listen without hearing. In the many households in which television serves as a permanent background din, the horrors that it displays remain in the background also. As for those viewers who do pay attention, they are always free to change the channel. The five hundred-channel universe will offer plenty of alternative fare. Recently, advertising campaigns for foster parent programs have begun to challenge the viewer directly either to respond to the suffering displayed before him or just to switch channels as he has done so often in the past. I would be curious to know the success of such campaigns.

Let's assume, however, that as good citizens we do watch the news each night. We then experience the rhythm of the typical newscast, which follows grave matters with trivial ones (e.g., weather, sports, "lifestyles", and entertainment news). Whatever sufferings may have assailed us at the top of the hour, our minds are eased back into the usual preoccupations of everyday life in a consumer society. Television producers tend to remember--they have confessed it to me -- that their audience wishes to be entertained. And the right amount of suffering is entertaining -- but only the right amount. Even within the realm of televised pathos, the actual misfortunes of distant peoples must vie with talk shows, soap operas, and prime time dramas, all striving to be more maudlin than the competition. So while television doubtless renders distant sufferings more vivid, it does not thereby necessarily render them more real.

The danger of blurring the line between real and fictive suffering is all the greater in the case of foreign affairs, our sense of the reality of which is none too solid to begin with. So remote are these affairs from our ordinary concerns as citizens of modern democracy, and so tenuous their relevance to these concerns, that, as Joseph Schumpeter long ago observed, "one feels oneself to be moving in a fictitious world."

What strikes me most of all and seems to me to be the core of the trouble is the fact that the sense of reality is so completely lost. Normally, the great political questions take their place in the psychic economy of the typical citizen with those leisure-hour interests that have not attained the rank of hobbies.... This reduced sense of reality accounts not only for a reduced sense of responsibility but also for the absence of effective volition. One has one's phrases, of course, and one's ... likes and dislikes. But ordinarily they do not amount to what we call a will -- the psychic counterpart of purposeful responsible action.(4)

Can television, itself a "leisure-hour interest that [has] attained the rank of [a hobby]", bring home to us the reality of such faraway happenings? Yes and no. Recent writers have underscored the paradox that television at the same time brings distant matters closer to us and serves to distance us from these very matters. The televiewer is not as such a teledoer (or even a doer of things close to home). As Curtis Gans puts it, "People say that television brings the international community into your living room, but what it really does is bring you into your living room" (and, he might have added, keep you there). Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam has suggested a negative correlation between television watching and participation in community activities of whatever sort (and, more interestingly, a...