Sixty Cameras, Sixty Refugees: Syrians Document Their Exile

Syrian refugees document their exile in the latest installment of the Karam Foundation’s series at Syria Deeply.

IN APRIL 2015, the Karam Foundation, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization, launched its fifth Innovative Education mission for displaced Syrian children and youth. Karam’s team of more than 40 international mentors worked with upward of 400 Syrian students from four schools in grades 1–12, leading workshops that included entrepreneurship, arts, language arts, sports, yoga and full dental/vision clinics and screenings.

This series of posts about our mission, in the words of the mentors, offers a glimpse of what it is like to work on the Syrian border, shares personal stories of extraordinarily talented and resilient kids and reminds us that the Syrian children are more than the world knows, more than the world lets them be. They are #NotInvisible.

The Syrian conflict has created the worst humanitarian crisis of our lifetime. Yet in the midst of despair and destruction there is hope for a brighter future. This series is dedicated to our unwavering hope in the next generation of Syrian kids. We hope the stories will inspire you to action.

Zeitouna is a Karam Foundation program for displaced Syrian children. This creative therapy and physical wellness program runs twice a year on the Syrian-Turkish border with the participation of over 40 mentors and volunteers from all over the world. Zeitouna has served over 2,500 Syrian refugee children and youths since 2013.

This past April, I had the honor of volunteering with this program for the second time. I joined photographer Andrew Reed Weller to co-mentor the digital photography workshop for 60 fifth and sixth graders at al-Jeel School in Reyhanli, Turkey. The photography workshop invited the students to document their lives with point-and-shoot digital cameras, which they were given on the first day of the program. After going over some basic rules of photography, we gave the students their assignment for the week: create a photographic diary of your life through a series of shots. We asked the students to be creative, play with their cameras and have fun.

Every student was a Syrian refugee. Every student had lived through different, difficult experiences but they all shared a life in exile and a love of their homeland, Syria. The children captured powerful snapshots that allowed us to enter their beautiful worlds and to see their lives through their own eyes.

The above photograph was shot by Enayat, a 13-year-old from Idlib. Enayat described this scene, “I like it because there is so much going on, but overall there is nothing extraordinary about this picture, just a regular night by our house. You can see my brother serving tea to our neighbors, my siblings playing in the background. This is what we do after school. This is our life.”

This photograph was shot by Bayan from Aleppo. Bayan described the photo, “I tried to capture this flower from multiple angles. I moved around it, took a couple shots then I chose this one as my favorite. I like it because it captured a frame that we don’t always see.” Bayan professionally implemented many of the rules of photography that we covered in the workshop. We can’t wait to see her upcoming masterpieces.

This photograph was shot by Meryam from Latakia. Meryam requested an immediate family trip to the fields after getting her photography homework. She said, “We got there around sunset, just like you told us, it is the perfect time to take photographs. The sun was golden. I kept on clicking my camera for a long time. I think I captured more than a hundred shots!”

This photograph was shot by Nashwa after the Zeitouna mission had ended. The boy in the photo is practicing what he learned in the yoga workshop conducted by Carla Henson. He is also holding a feather from the dreamcatchers workshop that was led by Australian artist Karen Black and Madison Schutt. This image reflects the long-lasting impact of the Zeitouna program on the children we work with – they continue to practice the skills we taught, and share these skills with their families.

“Sunrise or Sunset?”

This photograph was shot by Mays. Mays woke up early in the morning to capture the sunrise and share this beautiful landscape with Syria’s hills in the background.

Every day, the students would ask, “When will you take the cameras back?” I would tell them that the cameras are for them – they get to keep them. But they couldn’t understand. I realized that so much has been taken away from them that they have forgotten how to receive something.

Karam Foundation created Zeitouna to give Syrian refugees some of what they have been missing. Our team of international mentors will continue to return to Reyhanli to tell the children that they are important, that they matter and that they are not invisible.

Humans of the Refuge

Goodbyes

April 29, 2016

"I hate the fact that we never really said goodbye. If I knew that we are going to be gone for more than just a summer, I would have packed some more. I would have taken a moment to say a little goodbye."
"How long has it been now?"
"Almost two years. I wish I have pictures of my house, I really want to show it to you."
"Why don't you just describe it?" 
"I will, but then I don't know if my home is still there. What if it was bombed? Do you think my toys and clothes are still there?"
Reyhanli, Turkey 

Close Your Eyes 

April 29, 2016

"Close your eyes, tell me where do you see yourself?" 
"I see myself in Aleppo." 
"Do you want to go back?"
"Oh, I wish I can go back, I wish I can go back right now." 
Reyhanili, Turkey

Favorites

April 28, 2016

"So tell me about the best day that you have ever spent" 
"I really don't have a favorite day, every single day spent back home was special. I would call any day a favorite one. "
Reyhanili, Turkey

On the Move

April 28, 2016

"We were packing to head to our summer house. That day the shelling was very heavy and by the time we were ready to leave, it started pouring on our neighborhood continuously so we left and somehow survived by a miracle."
"Were you able to make it to your summer house?"
"We actually never made it to our summer house, we kept on moving from a city to another. We would stay a while in a place, but then they will start bombing it, so we leave. We have been to many places, until finally we made it all the way out of Syria and in here."

Reyhanili, Turkey

Missing It All 

April 27, 2016

"I remember my friends and neighbors. I remember my home. I didn't go a day without thinking about home. I even remember the soccer ball my neighbors and I used to play with. I also remember the days when the electricity used to cut off. We would tape the electronic bells of the houses in our neighborhood so that when the electricity is back on, the bells would sound and the sounds would fill the entire neighborhood. We used to laugh so hard on such nights, and I miss it all."

Reyhanili, Turkey 

Concerns Regarding the Coverage of Beirut’s Attacks

Letter To The Editor
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
The New York Times

Dear Mr. Serge Schmemann,

I am writing to express my concern regarding the coverage of Beirut’s terror attacks of November, 2015. I recognize the inconsistency between the coverage of the the similar terror attacks in Beirut and Paris and I see that the Beirut attacks were underestimated by The New York Times. The gap in the public’s empathy towards the attacks in Beirut and Paris can be strongly correlated to the unequivalent coverage that the two incidents have received. A more consistent coverage between similar events taking place in the West and the East is necessary to fill the empathy gaps and construct bridges between the two cultures.

The two terrible terror attacks in France and Paris line up so clearly, offering a comparison of how the New York Times chose to cover two events that are very similar in content, but different in location. In Paris, the coverage of the New York Times focused on the human nature of the attacks. In Beirut, the coverage of the paper focused on the ethno-religious divisions of the region. The stories on Paris were able to present a picture that the audience are able to relate to and empathize with, but the stories on Beirut weren’t able to do the same.

The Beirut attacks took place on November 12, 2015. That day, The New York Times covered the attacks on page 6, in one article, under the title “ISIS Claims Responsibility for Blasts That Killed Dozens in Beirut.” The article presents the attack as an event aimed on “Hezbollah stronghold” areas rather than “civilian’s area.” The use of the term “Hezbollah stronghold” presents the victims of the attacks, who are in fact nothing but civilians, as a different and complicated ethno-religious group whom readers can hardly relate to. The article then goes on into great detail to explain the relations between ISIS, Hezbollah and the United States. Thus, the article doesn’t focus on the human aspect of the story, but chooses to cover the attacks through telling a complicated political story that even experts on the Middle East can hardly understand. The usage of many terms in the article, such as “Hezbollah stronghold, “embraces the construction of the Lebanese society as an “Orientalist” one that Western audiences can hardly relate to. It also presents the victims affected as the “others,” who are much different than “us.”

On November 13, 2015, the Paris attacks took place. That day, The New York Times covered the tragic incident in six articles, three of which were front page stories. The first article, “Paris Terror Attacks Leave Awful Realization: Another Massacre,” began with a beautiful, romanticized description of the night of the attack. The introduction reads “The night was chilly but thick with excitement as…” The romanticized tone and word choice, such as “massacre, “strongly opposes the rhetoric of “the blasts that killed dozens in Beirut’s Hezbollah stronghold” used in the previous mentioned article on Beirut. Contrary to the article on Beirut, this article is beautifully written in a way that humanizes the victims of the attack and present them as people who are just like “us,” who we are able to relate to and empathize with.

In “Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks, Feels Forgotten,” published on November 15, The New York Times succeeds in presenting the victims in Beirut as innocent civilians who were going about their daily lives. The article used a very similar romanticized tone to the one on Paris, shedding a necessary light on the human aspect of the story. The publishing of this article was important and appreciated to many. However, the article was published two days after the attack, was hidden in the Middle East section online, and didn’t have the power revive the forgotten story. By November 15, the general public was already engaged with the news on Paris. Beirut was already left behind by then.

This April, Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the New York Times, followed up on the November attacks in Beirut through an opinion editorial titled “Are Some Terrorism Deaths More Equal Than Others?” The op-ed portrays the paper’s commitment to a fair and balanced coverage while addressing the fact that the Times does not tell the stories of terrorist victims with complete fairness. My question of concern is why is the Times still debating the quality of the event’s coverage five months later? The Times did not debate nor revisit the coverage of Paris. In fact, the Paris attacks are still receiving an in-depth coverage until today. Usually at The New York Times, events are covered thoroughly and fairly, so no op-eds or follow ups articles are necessarily to address what went wrong or was missing. Why didn’t the Times cover the attacks on Beirut and Paris using the same standards? The op-ed raises the question of “Do Western lives get a better coverage because they matter more?”

“Western” lives do matter more. More importantly, the geographic location of the victims in a certain story is what matters most. The attacks on Beirut killed three American citizens, but the fact that they were three American citizens in Beirut made them less newsworthy. Their geographic location prevailed over their nationalities. Only certain aspects of the audiences multi-layered identities are spatial or geographic. Thus, the role of the media, especially in global events like this, is to use the audiences multi-layered identities to move beyond geographic proximities and reach cultural ones.

The two attacks present two global events where the pain is similar, the victims are similar, and the enemies are identical. Thus, the two attacks provide a great opportunity for the media to draw on cultural proximities. However, cultural proximities were only drawn upon in Paris, but not in Beirut. Thus, the generated buzz in the media and the excellency in the coverage of Paris created a global audience that stood in solidarity with Paris. The media invited global audiences to relate to other people by developing a ‘mediated intimacy’ for those who are at distant. The global audience formed an imagined community that was able to perform more than 30 million interactions on social media during the first 24 hours after the Paris attack. Individuals from more than 200 countries joined this imagined community to stand in solidarity with France, but not with Beirut.

Margaret Sullivan, ended her op-ed with “..It’s part of The Times journalistic mission to help its readers not only know the importance of all human life lost to terrorism in an intellectual way, but feel it in their hearts.” I hope that the editors and authors of the New York Times work by this journalist statement during their next coverage on the Middle East, whether on a fortunate or unfortunate event.

Between The Devil and The Big Blue Sea

Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

This past summer, I spent a couple of weeks at the Al-Jarahyrie Syrian Refugee camp — one of the worst in its region. The camp is home to a tiny tent school, which is smaller than a two-bedroom apartment and hosts about 300 Syrian refugee students year round. I volunteered with Jusoor, a nongovernmental organization of Syrian expatriates, as an English teacher for elementary-level students, working with refugees who had fled the war zone about a year ago.

A week into the ESL program, I was still struggling with memorizing my students’ names, so I decided to distribute name tags. The minute I took the name tags out of my backpack, the class gasped in excitement.

“Are those IDs, Miss?”

“No, they are only name tags that we will use to memorize one another’s names.”

After class, Kousai, a 7-year-old, asked for another name tag for his sister. He pinned the tag on her sweater, telling her, “Don’t ever lose this, Mayassa — this is our only form of identification now. Remember what happened on the border when we told the guards we didn’t have IDs? You don’t want that to happen again, do you?”

Later in the week, I visited Kousai in his small tent by the school. His mom explained that they fled the country with nothing but their clothes on.

“We didn’t have time to pack anything — not even our ID cards,” she said.

While visiting other families in their tent homes, I learned that most of the refugees in the camphad lost their identification documents. When I asked if they were able to grab their passports before fleeing, a man shouted, “Passports? Why are you asking about that? We are not really worried about passports right now — we are worried about getting a rooftop to this tent before the winter.” His son later explained in detail how his sister died last December because her tiny body couldn’t stand the cold.

“She died before we were able to decide on a name for her, but I did decide on a name later. I chose Jasmine. I waited to see her for nine months, Miss, but didn’t really get the chance to watch her grow up. I know she is in a better place now, so don’t worry — I am fine.”

I then understood why his father shouted so loudly.

Three weeks later, I sat in Lebanon’s International Airport, staring at my messenger bag and flipping through my many identification documents, hearing that lady’s voice in my head. “Not even our ID cards.”

This past summer was a summer of loss. I heard stories about people who had lost everything: their children, families, loved ones, homes, stores, factories and jobs. I listened to people explain how they lost a body part during the bombing, how it felt and how they were coping with it. I watched as they acted out how they felt as barrel bombs exploded in their neighborhoods. I listened as my students imitated the sound of shells.

“No, it is much louder than that, Miss. Listen, it is more like this,” said one student.

“No, it is even worse. Actually, no one here can imitate the sound for you. Just imagine the loudest sound you have ever heard, and multiply it by 1,000,” shouted the second.

“A million times, Miss — a million times worse,” another corrected. Conversations like these were casual among my students.

Another day, while we were coloring, a student said, “You know what, Miss? I don’t care how I’ll die anymore. Death has become so casual among us that I actually feel comfortable dying anyway.

Another student continued, “Death is death. It doesn’t really matter whether you die because of a shell or a barrel bomb — what is the difference? … If it was up to me, I’d choose drowning in the sea after fleeing on a boat. I think it is different and adventurous!”

During my lunch break, I sat in the principal’s room and heard teachers debate about where they should seek refuge.

“How is your husband, Manal?” asked one teacher.

“He is stuck on the border of Athens. Those who promised his group a boat took their money and escaped, so he is not sure what to do next. But it’s OK — they are a group of about 100 men. They’ll manage. Sooner or later, they’ll reach Germany.”

I learned just this week that Manal has joined her husband in Athens. She traveled to him on a “death boat” earlier last week. They haven’t reached Germany yet.

When the school’s teachers asked me how I would travel back to the United States, I felt ashamed. What could I say? “Oh, I’m boarding a two-story plane, where I’ll sit on a comfortable seat with a screen of more than 100 movies, food and snacks, and in less than 24 hours, I’ll get to the States. Why don’t you go ahead and continue telling me the story of how it took your husband three months to get to Norway by foot?”

The two-story plane did get me back here to the States, and now I’m here in Berkeley, trying and failing to put aside all that I have heard, seen and experienced this past summer. I wonder while flipping through the pictures of my students whether they have fled the camp or are still there, and whether they are still attending school or were forced to stop. I hope their parents didn’t pull them out of school to have them work double shifts in the fields. I know that not much has changed in the camp ever since I left, and I’m sure that their situations are only getting worse.

Day and night, I have been following the news coverage of the refugees. While watching the news, I debate whether I would be happier knowing that my students are still safe in that refugee camp or if they’d be better off fleeing on one of those floating boats in the Mediterranean. There’s a huge probability that they wouldn’t make it to Europe on such boats, but they probably won’t last long in a refugee camp in Lebanon, either. What a situation they are left in — between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a refugee camp and the Mediterranean.

This article was published in The Daily Cal on September 11, 2015. 

Exploring the Future of Immersive Journalism & Storytelling at ORAMA

During my second semester while studying abroad in London, I was offered the ACE scholarship to attend a conference on Immersive Journalism and Storytelling through Virtual Reality. As a Media Studies and Journalism student, I studied the medium of Virtual Reality in many of my classes at UC Berkeley, approaching the topic rather theoretically. Attending the two days conference where I got to hear from filmmakers who have put together VR pieces that were previously mentioned in class, have complemented my theoretical knowledge on the subject with some hands on experience.

At the conference, I got to engage with some immersive VR content, connect with journalists and filmmakers who are the pioneers in the current emerging and niche VR community, and hear about their practices and experiences while producing VR content.

Immersive Journalism Content for Social Impact: 
I was mainly interested in hearing from and getting to connect with filmmakers and journalists who use Virtual Reality as an effective medium to tell human stories in order to raise awareness and promote activism. For example, I got to hear from NYTimes correspondent and United Nations filmmakers who have put together pieces to shed a light on individual, humane, and personal human stories from Syrian refugee camps. Some of the content they produced was shown to policy makers, politicians, as well as at fundraising events where thousands of dollars were raised in aid of the refugees featured.

Seeing how the world of media and human rights can work together to tell humane stories in such innovative ways have exposed me to a whole new world of possibilities. I learned how I can merge the two medium s to start a career.

ORAMA, like many of the academic and non academic experiences I had while studying abroad, provided me with a practical approach and a hands on experience to what I studied in “theory” at Berkeley. By no doubt, the theory I studied at Cal provides me with a very strong foundation which now helps me approach media pieces critically, but as we are often stuck in studying theory and research at Berkeley, I believe that it is important to explore with what is really happening in our fields on the ground and away from theory.

This year, I have learned that studying abroad isn’t about attending classes in another country. Studying abroad is about exploring, connecting, getting the furthest away from your usual comfort zone as possible. Studying abroad is less about “studying”and more about “being” in a new environment academically, culturally, and socially. Thus, I would recommend the scholarship for any student who is interested in participating in any activity that can add to their experiences while abroad in any possible way.

I am not sure if I will start a career in Virtual Reality after graduating, however, I am sure that exploring all my options, what is going on in the media field, will only get me closer to what I want to do. Thankfully, London has been offering countless opportunities to explore, learn and grow.

Interested in Immersive Storytelling too?
Follow: @immersivly, @visualise360, @Empatheticmedia

On Bridging the Empathy Gaps through International Media:

A Look at the Attacks in Beirut and Paris in November 2015
 

On November 12, 2015, the Beirut attacks took place killing at least 43 people and wounding more than 200. Hours later, on November 13, 2015, the Paris attacks took place killing 130 people and wounding hundreds. On that day, the two terrible terror attacks in France and Paris lined up so clearly, offering a comparison of how the media covered two events that are very similar in content, but different in location. One would think that the almost identical events would be covered similarly and would at least receive a closer share of the media’s attention. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The unequal coverage of the two attacks created an empathy gap towards the two events.

Rhetorics

The stories on Beirut weren’t able to present a picture that the audiences were able to relate to or empathize with. Beirut is known for being the “Paris of the Middle East.” However, while reporting on the attacks, the “Paris of the Middle East” was no Paris at all. The romanticized tones of describing the European-like city were replaced by ethno-religious terms such as “Hezbollah stronghold” and some other political terms that experts on the Middle East can barely understand. The use of such rhetorics embraced the construction of the Lebanese society as an “Orientalist” one that Western audiences can hardly relate to.The generalized view of the Middle East which emphasizes differences over similarities and encourage negative stereotypes is clearly seen in the coverage of the Beirut attack. Thus, the coverage presented the public with a story that is hard to follow, of people they knew little of, and of a region that is extremely troubled. The stories on Beirut focused on the “differences” rather than the “similarities,” raised many questions and offered little, if any, space for empathy.

News Coverage on Paris

Major newspapers like The New York Times covered the Paris attacks in six articles, three of which were front page stories. The first article, “Paris Terror Attacks Leave Awful Realization: Another Massacre,” began with a beautiful, romanticized description of the night of the attack. The introduction reads “The night was chilly but thick with excitement as…” The romanticized tone and word choice, such as “massacre, “strongly opposes the rhetoric of “the blasts that killed dozens in Beirut’s Hezbollah stronghold” used in an article covering the Beirut attacks.

In Paris, the media used a romanticized tone which humanized the victims. Articles described the victims as those who were enjoying a night out at the concert, a cafe or a soccer game. Those in Paris were people who were just like “us.” On the other hand, the victims of the Beirut attacks were presented as the “other.’ How can we empathize with the “other? Especially if their story isn’t even reported on enough.

News Coverage on Lebanon

The same paper, The New York Times covered the Beirut attacks on page 6, in one article under the title “ISIS Claims Responsibility for Blasts That Killed Dozens in Beirut” focusing on the fact that the neighborhood is affiliated with Hezbollah. The Atlantic reported under the title, “Twin Explosions in Beirut.. They struck a Shiite suburb in the south of the Lebanese capital.” The article, similar to the New York Times’, focuses on the fact that the neighborhood is a “stronghold of Hezbollah,” and mentions that “Lebanon is no stranger to conflict.” Thus, the early reports on the event focused on the political and ethno-religious affiliations of some Lebanese groups distracting the audience from the human aspect of the story. People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims, and the stories on Beirut presented the victims as people who could never be “us.”

In an interview with BBC, a young Lebanese explained how he felt as he scrolled down a Facebook newsfeed mourning Paris, but not his hometown, Beirut. He stated “…it tells me that I’m irrelevant. Living in the Middle East, you are always a third class citizens,” “….It tells that the people in Beirut are not worthy of your attention.”

The Lebanese people felt abandoned, neglected and totally irrelevant for many reasons. The world shed a spot on Paris and turned a blind eye on Beirut. Facebook activated two innovative tools to show solidarity with Paris, but not Beirut. Global monuments lit up around the world with France’s flag colors, but not with Beirut’s. Facebook activated the Safety Check tool on the day of the Paris attack, but not for Beirut’s. Over four million people used the tool leading to about 360 million people getting notifications. Following up, Facebook activated a France filter where people can applied masks on their Facebook photos with an overlay of blue, white, and red, the colors of the French flag. Acts of solidarity were easily tracked through hashtags. Every minute, 99 posts with the #PrayforParis were shared on social media compared to only 2 with a hashtag on Bierut. Global leaders mourned Paris, but not Beirut. Obama described the attack as a “massacres against ‘all of humanity’ The same common humanity Obama referenced was not very common but selective. Selective by western standards, catering Western audiences and reporting on the West. But why is it that Western lives get a better coverage, is it because they matter more?

“Western” lives do matter more. More importantly, the geographic location of the victims in a certain story is what matters most. The attacks on Beirut killed three American citizens, but the fact that they were three American citizens in Beirut made them less newsworthy. Their geographic location prevailed over their nationalities. Only certain aspects of the audiences multi-layered identities are spatial or geographic. The role of the media, especially in global events like these, is to use the audiences multi-layered identities to move beyond geographic proximities and reach cultural ones. The two attacks present two global events where the pain was similar, the victims are similar, and the enemies are identical. Thus, the two attacks provide a great opportunity for the media to draw on cultural proximities. However, cultural proximities were only drawn upon in Paris, but not in Beirut.

Imagined Communities to Include or Exclude?

The generated buzz in the media and the excellency in the coverage of Paris created a global audience that stood in solidarity with Paris. The media invited global audiences to relate to other people by developing a ‘mediated intimacy’ for those who are at distant. Thus, global audiences formed imagined community for Paris, and Paris only. An imagined community was created as the audiences imagined to be connected with others they didn’t know immediately, or speak their. Idealy, imagined communities result in inclusions and connections. That was the case for Paris. However, Beirut suffered the exclusion of that imagined community. France’s imagined community was able to perform more than 30 million interactions on social media during the first 24 hours after the Paris attack. Individuals from more than 200 countries joined this imagined community to stand in solidarity with France, but where was Beirut in all that?

A Better Global Imagination

Media representations shape how we come to see, think of and feel about the world. International media, especially in tragic events like terrorist attacks, help the audiences situate themselves in relations with others in this world . Thus, in the collective way of seeing, understanding and feeling at a global level in such international events, the audiences are presented with large amount of information, leading to more and more engagement in the topic. In our modern world of a “new media visibility,” it is up to the media to determine how this global imagination is created through its coverage.

So What If?
How can the public create an interest for a story that has been rarely covered? Isn't it hard to truly mourn a stranger unless you can hear their story? What if the Beirut attack got the attention the Paris attacks did? Would the general’s public reaction be the same? What if the article focused on humanizing the incident? Would Facebook then see the need to activate the same features of safety checks to Beirut? Would the public stand in solidarity with Beirut? Would the world reach a common humanity or at least a better one?

The Spectatorship of Suffering

The term ‘analytics of power’ describes the complexities of discourse which place human beings in certain hierarchies of power to one another  (Foucault, 1998). Those hierarchies of power can be seen clearly in the reporting of the Western media on the East, specifically, on misfortunate events taking place in the Middle East and Africa. In her book ‘The spectatorship of suffering,’  Lilie Chouliaraki discusses how the media can effectively create empathy gaps and construct bridges between the two different worlds. The notion, as coined by the author discusses the paradox between the comfort of the spectators in their cozy living rooms and the vulnerability of the sufferer that is being aired on the spectators’ screens (Chouliaraki, 2006.) Thus, it looks at the relationship between the sufferer and the spectator seeing how media can effectively have the capability to create a global morality.

The term global village, coined by Marshall McLuhan, first appeared in the author’s book The Gutenberg Galaxy, predicting the rise of the internet and new media how the emerge of such mediums will contract the world into a small village. Many decades ago McLuhan anticipated that the instantaneous movement of information across space and time will result in an "extension of consciousness” (McLuhan, 1962). Decades later today, we are more connected to the ‘distant sufferer’ than ever before. This “extension of consciousness” raises questions on whether the media through mediating news stories can create a new sense of responsibility towards the ‘distant sufferer.’

Stuart Hall’s model of communication looks at news stories as they get coded in newsrooms to soon get decoded by audiences to be interpreted, reflected on and possibly reacted to. Mediation happens through a complicated process of narrating, representing a discourse that is either powerful enough to deliver a promise of a reflexive audience, an active audience or a disempowered audience that disconnects from the news by a click of a button or a scroll of a finger (Hall, 1980).

Similar to Hall’s encoding/decoding method, Lilie Chouliaraki’s book pushes such questions further to discuss whether the media can cultivate a disposition of care for and engagement with the distant sufferer and whether the television can create a global public with a sense of social responsibility towards ‘the distant sufferer’ (Chouliaraki, 2006). Mediation is the capacity of the media to involve us emotionally and culturally with the distant other and the process of mediation raises ethical questions about the role of media to raise a public with a social responsibility towards the ‘distant sufferer.’

In current contemporary news stories, one of the most common distant sufferer is ‘the refugee.’ Years into the beginning of the refugee crisis, the story of Alan Al-Kurdi came to define the refugee crisis. The tragic incident took place on September 02, 2015 when the three-year-old Syrian/Kurdish boy drowned in the Aegean Sea after the boat he was on with his family capsized. He and his family were trying to reach Europe amid the European refugee crisis. In death, Alan became a symbol of all the children who lost their lives trying to reach safety in the Western world. Soon, his viral image came to be one of the most iconic of the year. Two main photographs on his story were widely spread. The first, was of the lifeless child in a red shirt and navy shorts lying with his face down to the Turkish beach. The second, was of the Turkish police officer gently carrying the body of the three-year-old after he was washed ashore. In the United Kingdom, the photographs ran on the front covers of The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Mail, and The Sun. Anne Bernard of the New York Times noted that the image is not the sheer size of the catastrophe — millions upon millions forced by war and desperation to leave their homes — but a single tragedy that has clarified the moment (Bernard, 2015). If Alan’s story isn’t a single story, then what is it in his story, or moreover, in the coverage of it that clarified the moment and ignited a sympathetic reaction?

The analytics of mediation looks at the semiotics of the news stories. The semiotics include the  words and all other multimedia elements that work together to convey certain messages and guide the spectator  into specific ways of viewing . In Alan’s news story, the main element is the photograph itself. A photograph or an image doesn’t offer as many semiotic elements to be analyzed, if compared to other multimedia pieces. However, the photograph itself is a representation of the wider refugee crisis as it reduces the wider crisis into a single story and a single body. The moral response tends to be more coherent when news stories show real people. Thus, the photograph humanizes the refugee crisis and offers the spectator the chance to reconstruct a new and alternative narrative on  the topic. It also offers the spectator a space to make sense of the event, reflect on it by building new meanings and discourse (Echeverry & Herrera, 2005: 141).

BBC’s News video coverage on Alan focuses on the humanitarian aspect of the story. In one of their videos, the reporter gives a platform for the surviving parent, the father, to tell his story on his own and in his own language. Abdullah Kurdi shares his story far from politics saying “my children were the most beautiful in this world, is there anybody for whom their child is not the most precious thing?” (BBC, 2015). Similarly, in the reporting of the story, CNN chooses to share the same quote of the father, in a similar attempt to focus on the ‘human’ aspect of the story (CNN, 2015). However, the three minute BBC video segment soon shifts the conversation as the news anchor asks a personnel of the Turkish authorities “why can’t Turkey stop the smugglers who are creating those death?” The personnel gets into numbers and statistics saying “the case of trafficking has gone up by 150% in the last year, especially of Syrians…” The segment ends with the anchor saying “this is the story of one family’s stragedy but it will happen again and again as more people continue fleeing Syria.”

Chouliaraki quotes the philosopher Jacques Derrida who sees that orality and visuality as two different but equally complicated semiotic codes. The relationship between orality and visuality is fundamental for the process of meaning making. In the BBC video segment mentioned above, the video’s semiotic codes are split between a focus on the humanitarian aspect of the story and the complicated politics behind smuggling; the orality of the father telling his story in Arabic and the visuality of the Turkish personnel with some B-roll of the Turkish government building playing in the background. The result, the meaning making progress, can also be split between the two, shifting the focus from the humanitarian tragedy and leaving the spectator with the later complicated question posed to the Turkish personnel.

Normally, mainstream television's coverage of the refugee crisis presents the issue to be one ‘at a distance’ from the spectator, an issue that the ‘other,’ not ‘us’ has to deal with. For example, “Who Should Take in Refugees?” was aired on BBC News on September 19, 2016. Almost a year after the viral spread of Alan’s story. The video segment opens with maps, graphs, wide shots, and statistics with no context. Such coverage dehumanizes the refugees, present them as numbers, and distances the spectator from what they are watching. According to Chouliaraki, this type of news coverage restricts both the emotional and ethical appeal of suffering, leading to a representation of suffering with pity, emergency news, but failing to produce a ‘cosmopolitan’ spectator (Chouliaraki, 2006: 23). In such reporting, the significance of Alan’s story is recalled as a story that was able to humanize a much wider issue that is often dehumanized on public and mainstream media (Chouliaraki, 2006:97).

The American news channel draws misleading parallels between Syrian refugees and terrorist groups to promote a culture of fear. On September 9, 2015, a few days after Alan’s news story took place, Fox News aired a live video under the title “Terrorist Inbound? Taking Refugees Could Open Doors to Jihadists (Arrowood, 2015).The video shows a group of men riding a bus and chanting “Allahu Akbar,” which translates to “God is the greatest.” The news anchor reporting claimed that the video is of Syrian refugees in Europe. She states “..at the same time that the White House is considering what to do about this refugee crisis, a new video surfaces online showing why some are worried Europe is opening its doors to potential terrorists.” The video refers to the refugee crisis as a “national security issue,” “an invasion.”

Fox’s representation of  Syrian refugees as potential terrorists raising potential threat conveys a feeling of horror and fear putting the news story closest to Chouliaraki’s category of representing suffering without pity, adventure news, a segment put together to redivide the world into hierarchies (Chouliaraki, 2006: 101). Furthermore, such an approach to the coverage of the refugee story focuses on what Cohen would call a ‘moral panic.’ In his book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Cohen states that a moral panic happens when “condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values interests.” As shown in the Fox News video segment, media can play a massive role in enforcing moral panic through reporting the news.

On the other hand, media can play a massive role in humanizing the story being told while reporting the facts and putting everything in context. Such as the later moves the discussion from ‘moral panic’ to better understanding and possibly engaging (Cohen, 1972: 1). On September 03, 2015, The Guardian published an article covering the story under the title: “Alan Kurdi: friends and family fill in gaps behind harrowing images.” The article includes three video segments, none of which, were edited or even curated by a news anchor. Instead, the video segments were all of Alan’s family members telling the story themselves. The article unfolds the story in a rather romanticized tone, focusing on what the family members dreams and how they turned out. The article does not get into any of the politics behind the story but rather focuses on the humanitarian scope solely, leaving the reader with the heavy impact of the small details (The Guardian, 2015).

The photograph of Alan breaks the stereotype of the usual refugee story which shows packed boats or huge groups of people running into the fields trying to cross borders. In such stories, the mass of the population obliterates over the individual stories and the human beings behind every number and figure. Stories like Alan’s gives back such groups their names and stolen identities. Chouliaraki would see such a news story as one of ‘suffering with identification,’ ecstatic news (Chouliaraki, 2006:97).

The hurt of the sufferer — in this case, Alan’s or any other refugee,  is unrelated to the life or condition or the state of the spectator and does not really affect their life. Moreover, the misfortune which affect the suffering person has no effect on the spectator’s condition. Thus, the person on the other side of the screen or paper, the spectator, could safely ignore the sufferer (Boltanski, 1999). The two outcomes Chouliaraki proposes are either to “switch off, shed a tear or get angry and protest.” The spectator either chooses to forget about the sufferer or seek to do something about their suffering (Chouliaraki, 2006: 1). In this news story’s case, the spectator chose to suffer with the sufferer, feeling a motion of sympathy towards them. Both the mediation of the story and  the story itself were successful in starting a public discourse and an urge to a humanitarian reaction towards the refugee crisis. Alan’s news story brought forth not only emotions but actions for engagement with the suffering (Chouliaraki, 2006: 39). It was able to travel widely in many forms, from retweets, long-form reads, to reimagined illustrations.

Google Trends published the results in numbers of the shift in the rhetorics used around the refugee crisis after Alan’s story went viral. The graph portrays how tweets went from using the word “migrant” to the word “refugee” (Vis, 2015). The public started questioning the difference between the two terms and the conversation started shifting. Google Trends tracked the search inquiries after the break of the story. The results show how people not only read, but started asking questions about the bigger picture around the refugee crisis indicating that the questions varied from what happened to Alan, to why do Syrians leave Turkey, to questions about policies and suggestions to how they can help. One of the main 5 questions Googled was “how to adopt a Syrian child?” (Vis, 2015). The question indicates a result of  a shift from a stage of “sympathy” to a stage of “empathy” toward the refugees. While sympathy acknowledges how hard a situation might be for someone, empathy makes one questions what they can do to make the situation better for the other.  The question of “how to adopt a Syrian child?” indicates the presence of what Chouliaraki would call an ‘involved’ spectator calling for action  (Chouliaraki, 2006: 187).

One can’t analyze the news story of Alan Kurdy without looking into to how the story played on social media. The unfolding of Alan’s story on Twitter provides an example where a participatory culture was put into action. Hours after the first tweet was published, the public started pushing the narrative of the story forward as the retweets of the photograph expanded to include content of adapted images, reimagined and reproduced. The visual narrative was pushed and was at the same time made less brutal, and even more relevant for some Western audiences. Thus, through new media, the photograph was able to travel widely bringing up the question of the power for social change achieved by citizen dialogue while tying in citizen participation that generates opinion flows which could extend to calls of solidarity and political pressures.

In many of the examples above, Alan news story showcases how media can give the spectator the tools needed to promote a sense of empathy. However, the ethical debate on whether the mediation of media can really be a catalyst of change creating a global morality and a social responsibility from the spectator towards the distant suffer remains ongoing.

Works Cited

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