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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