Abstract
Scholarly work on suffering and poverty and on its representation in the media often focuses on how media producers portray suffering and media audiences’ reception of this portrayal. In The Poverty of Television, Jonathan Corpus Ong, inspired by the ‘anthropology of moralities’, addresses gaps in these current works. According to the author, debates usually revolve around concerns such as ‘the media’s responsibility to “the other” […] and reflections on the best narrative techniques in media production to move spectators to “do something” about faraway tragedies’ (p. 1). This is often done from a privileged Western perspective and fails to capture audience responses in their natural occurrence.
The main aim of Corpus Ong’s book is to show how differential response to televised suffering is the result of dissimilarity in moralities about suffering and media of people from different socio-historical contexts. In building this argument, he makes use of the highly classified society of the Philippines, where televised suffering not only takes the form of ‘distant suffering’ but also of everyday and more proximal suffering. Corpus Ong uses an anthropological approach to distinguish different classed (lay) moralities toward suffering and its representation. Well embedded in debates on media ethics and suffering, it connects many of the different trends within these debates.
In the first two chapters, Corpus Ong provides an elaborate review of a broad range of existing literature on media ethics and suffering. Chapter 1 mostly provides the reader with an introduction to these topics. Here, the anthropology of moralities is presented as a useful perspective, being concerned with lay moralities arising from different socio-historical contexts, rather than ‘uniformly prescribe[ing] a moral framework for all media or all audiences’ (p. 21). In the second chapter, three different strands of the media ethics debate are distinguished – textual ethics, audience ethics, and ecological ethics – and subsequently, the holism of these different strands is criticized by emphasizing the significance of ‘mediation theory in accounting for distinct ethical questions that arise from specific moments’ (p. 11) within these three different strands.
The third chapter proffers a Bourdieusian perspective, presenting the process of distinction in a very classified and overly low-class populated Filipino society. The higher classes actively distance themselves from local television by labeling it as a lower class (Jologs) medium and emphasize their own superior taste for international television. The lower classes in their turn are not able to escape their identity as Jologs but can only embrace it and thereby actively enjoy and engage with the Filipino television. In the subsequent chapters, Corpus Ong continues to show that these acts of ‘switching off’ and engaging with local television are not just a matter of taste.
In Chapter 4, Corpus Ong uses a case study of the factual entertainment television show Wowowee in order to present classed audience responses to suffering on television. Finally, Chapter 5 sketches a similar situation in the classed evaluation of the Filipino television news. These chapters present the upper class as evaluating the televised poor as victims with no agency at all. The facet that the poor willingly participate in what is in their eyes ‘degrading television’ ‘taints their evaluation of the moral value of [poor] contestants themselves’ (p. 99). These negative feelings toward both the poor and local television prevent the upper class from articulating any discourse of compassion. The strategies applied by the Filipino upper class to distance themselves from the televised sufferers highly correspond with the turning away from images of suffering of the Western audiences in prior studies. The higher Filipino classes seem to use similar discourses to the ones that scholars have previously ascribed to Western audiences in order to avoid feelings of guilt or compassion toward the poor (Boltanski, 1999[1993]; Kyriakidou, 2008; Seu, 2003).
This restraint from compassion is in stark contrast with the articulation of discourses of ‘tender-hearted compassion’ by the lower classes and their strong emotional engagement with television. They experience the constant representation of the poor on television as helpful for their own coping strategies with suffering and evaluate the televised sufferers as using their agency (e.g. in their media pilgrimage) to better their situations. At this point, the analysis ascribes agency to both the poor audiences and the televised poor in the context of televised suffering. When compared to previous studies on the topic, we find that these findings are challenging in two interesting ways. First, Corpus Ong’s findings show that the televised poor have a certain agency which they employ strategically to better their situation. On one hand, this corresponds to a number of recent studies showing that the poor have the possibility to actively manage their own image in the media (see Awad, 2014). However, Corpus Ong’s argument opposes the portrayal of the poor as passive victims, who do not have a voice in media production as employed in the majority of previous research. These prior studies often treat the poor as passively accepting their situation, while the media is critiqued for advancing discourses of ‘blaming the victim’ (Gilens, 1999; Golding and Middleton, 1982; Lugo-Ocando, 2015). Instead, Corpus Ong presents a poor population actively coping with their situation and using the recourses available to them. The second way in which Corpus Ong’s work challenges existing literature is by discovering no signs of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Cohen, 2001) toward the overrepresentation of the poor on television. While this fatigue is applicable to the Filipino upper class, the lower classes see the constant flow of images of the poor as part of their own reality, which complicates the notion of ‘compassion fatigue’. Without the author explicitly stating it, the analysis shows how the poor use television to create what Anderson (1991[1983]) has called an ‘imagined community’, in which the Filipino poor sympathize and support each other without ever meeting.
Overall, Corpus Ong’s analysis of the Filipino society provides a well-structured image of the classed (lay) moralities toward suffering and the media. By doing this, Corpus Ong seems to challenge the ‘Othering’ of the poor, as pleaded by Krumer-Nevo and Benjamin (2010). By situating the actions and discourses of the Filipino poor within the specific context and structures of the Filipino society, the author provides an image of the poor as active agents strategically resisting poverty within the structured possibilities available to them. At the same time, it shows how the Filipino higher classes make use of this ‘Othering’ of the poor in order to avoid feelings of guilt or compassion and to preserve social inequality. Even though the specific context of this book might be hard to translate to other cultures, this book certainly adds to our understanding of the complexity of prevailing concepts in this particular strand of research (e.g. compassion fatigue, distant suffering, and othering). This book might be especially interesting in comparison with other contexts, in particular poverty within the West (an interesting contrast is found in the sense of agency of the poor in the West, see Chase and Walker, 2013). Overall, the work aims to raise scholarly awareness of the, possibly overlooked, influence of socio-historical contexts in the study of mediated suffering and media ethics.