The Other School of Economics

What the media could learn from the Arts to stop ‘disaster porn’

ABC Drum Editor Jonathan Green obviously touched a nerve when he argued that “The media is not there to help. It does not feel your pain”

His views have been echoed by other bloggers such as @MrDenmore and Jonathan Powles or Tammi Jonas in Crickey. They are mainly denouncing the indecency of a form of ‘porn journalism’ appealing to the lowest common denominator: voyeurism, escalation in outpouring of raw emotions to hook the audience, and the fact that the media caravan moves on to the next story once they extracted their fix from victims who get left behind.

To the denunciation of the exploitation of human suffering to hook audiences, defenders of the current media practices oppose the utilitarian aspect of the media in times of disaster. This is the argument exposed by Lyndal Curtis on how the media can help victims who are cut off obtain timely and important information, as well as provide news for families and friends anxious to know what is going on. The media also plays a key role in raising awareness and disseminating knowledge on how to best respond to natural disasters. No one is seriously criticising this role and this was certainly not the angle that Jonathan Green was taking. We all know the “public service” in the true sense of the word fulfilled by ABC in times of bush fires or cyclones. Nobody is arguing with about that.

The argument is on a totally different level, which was actually picked-up by David Penberthy in his response to Green in the Punch. “The coverage”, he replied, would be “the most powerful possible driver for collective displays of humanity”. The media would be there to “help tie people together as a community, and at every level, and gives them a chance to empathise.”

Empathy and catharsis

Precisely, ‘empathy’ is the real point of contention here.

The word empathy sends us back to the ancient philosophical notion of ‘pathos’ defined as the appeal to the audience’s emotions, sympathies and imagination. It specifically relates to the process of catharsis articulated by Aristotle as the way tragedy should succeed “in arousing pity and fear” to accomplish a purgation or “cleansing” of such emotions.

Greek tragedians were pursuing the same goals a modern media producers: they were trying to hook the audience to their narrative. In a dramatic story the characters engage the attention of an audience because they promise to take them on a journey to experience a fulfillment. Regular people can project their own emotions and experiences on what is happening to the heroes of the drama.

Thousands of years apart, the dynamics are the same. This is why going back to the classics can enlighten this debate about modern media.

Since the antique Greek theatre, the idea of catharsis has even been extended to the wider Arts. The cleansing of emotions and building of empathy happens thought various forms of artistic expressions, not just drama plays anymore. In fact because modern journalism as we know it is only a very recent practice on the historical scale, the role of telling narratives, reporting epic events but also verbalizing human emotions has been traditionally done through a wide range of artistic expressions.

Let’s try an ‘empathy’ experiment with a few examples from the Arts

Take a few minutes to read the following poems, or reflect on those photographies.

The immense grief following the death of a child has been captured by Victor Hugo in ‘Tomorrow at Daybreak’ after his daughter Leopoldine passed away. It is a penetrating piece that no platitudes improvised by modern day pop-psychologists will ever beat.

“Tomorrow at daybreak, when the fields are pale
I will leave. You see, I know that you wait for me.
I will cross the forest, I will cross the hills
I cannot live far from you any longer.

I will walk, my eyes seeing only mind’s visions
Seeing nothing else, hearing not a sound
Alone, unknown, back bowed, hands crossed
Sad, and the day for me will be like the night

Looking not at the golden night that falls
Nor the sails from far descending on Honfleur
And when I arrive, I will place upon your grave
A wreath of green holly and heather in bloom.”

The same goes for W. H. Auden’s ‘Funeral blues’ regarding the death of a friend. So much so that it found its way into popular culture via an enormously successful movie in the 1990s.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

In the graphic Arts, ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ (Le Radeau de la Méduse) from French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault depicts the wreck of the French naval ship la Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today’s Mauritania in 1816. Around 150 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue. The event was an international scandal at the time and the painting depicts the horror that carried the survivors “to the frontiers of human experience”. They endured starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness.

The canvas is of such monumental scale that most of the figures are life-sized drawn, pulling the viewer into the physical action as a participant. The painting made such a lasting impression that its influence can be found in the works of Eugène Delacroix, Turner, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet.

As a final example closer to us, Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado worked between 1984 and 86 on a project on the African Famine with the humanitarian organization, Doctors without Borders. In this picture from him, the understatement of the subjects magnifies the intensity and despair of the situation.

My point is that all those examples may not have the gruesome intensity of what sensationalist media like to display, but they have the power to draw us into the narrative with even more impact and longer lasting effects.

Surely this is not to suggest that relatively static forms of art can replace on-going fluid journalism revolving around the 24-hour news cycle.  I’m not expecting CNN’s Anderson Cooper or Australian Channel 7’s breakfast tv host David Koch to start reciting allegoric poetry to report on disasters. However there is a forgotten lesson to be re-learnt from the way subtle and mature artistic forms of expression draw their audience into narratives. More importantly as @MrDenmore pointed out “what the best art preserves in depiction of tragedy is a sense of human dignity“.

In short, the Arts can teach the media dignity, sensitivity, subtlety and the confirmation that ’suggestion’ is in the long run more power full that tacky raw ‘exhibitionism’. One can have an impact without being crass.

It is up to the profession to show how this can be done in practice. The purpose of this piece is not to articulate a new detailed  media charter. However this would clearly mean abandoning the systematic over-dramatisation and sensationalisation of stories with all the special effects and tricks found in the book. Whether it is the dramatic music to create the atmosphere, the anchors trying to run a broadcast-marathon rehashing the same platitudes for hours on end when there is nothing new to report, or chasing raw testimonies and tears of victims that will be showcased over and over. Jonathan Powles (@JonPowles) captured the point perfectly when he commented that “media stories need depth, as much a depth of values as of facts”

The majority of the responses to Jonathan Green have been unequivocal pledges that the profession “do care about the victims”. We could then safely assume that putting pressure on editors to run quality pieces opting for reflection and introspection would not be such a big stretch?

Commentators call the voyeuristic fascination with gruesome details and outpour of raw emotions “disaster porn”. This bizarre metaphor might ironically contain a key to a first practical step towards resolving the issue: if anything, media organisations could contain the damage to “disaster eroticism” by which the information is valued and subtly revealed, as opposed to being bastardised and obscenely regurgitated at us.

{ leLaissezFaire }

References:

Some participants to the debate on twitter:
- Jonathan Green, ABC The Drum: @GreenJ
- Jonathan Powles : @JonPowles
- MrDenmore: @MrDenmore
- Tammi Jonas: @Tammois
- David Penberthy, The Punch: @PENBO
- Lyndal Curtis, ABC: @lyndalcurtis

Video: W. H. Auden’s ‘Funeral blues’ in ‘Four Weddings and Funeral‘