Domesticating distant suffering: How can news media discursively invite the audience to care?

Emotional domestication

The most common strategy of domesticating distant suffering was by establishing an emotional bond. For this purpose, the broadcasters focused on human-interest stories that appeal to the audience. Manifesting itself in diverse ways, the eyewitness account was the most prominent and visible technique applied. Accounts from Belgian tourists or expats who were affected by the disaster allow the spectator to get an inside look on the event by someone who is like them. Several items featured testimonies from Belgians abroad who – via Skype or telephone – gave a personal and often emotional account of what has happened and how they have personally lived through the experience (e.g., ‘it is terrifying’, ‘we fear the worst’, ‘panic and chaos everywhere’). Remarkably, many of these reports established the Belgians abroad as authoritative sources, qualified to make (often overtly harsh) statements about the foreign governments’ dealing with the crisis and the potential risks. In some events (e.g., an airplane crash in Congo, the tsunami and earthquake in Japan, floods in Australia, etc.), there were compatriots among the casualties, which is generally considered to be a determining factor for a high level of news value and attention (Joye, 2010). In these cases, the news reports were built around the fate of Belgian victims and/or their families, henceforth reducing the relevance of the non-Belgian victims – who generally went unmentioned or were only briefly referred to at the end of the report – despite the latter’s omnipresence. The Other and his/her life are in other words made inferior to the lives of compatriots. This specific kind of domestication is, however, a less deliberate attempt of news media to invite their audience to care (cf. infra). After all, the decision to domesticate the foreign event (i.e., the focus on the compatriots among the casualties) directly stems from the fact that Belgium is actually part of the story here, henceforth challenging the very nature of the event as one of distant suffering.

Belgian journalists further constructed a sense of emotional proximity by selecting emotional images (e.g., close-ups of starving children, images of pregnant and elderly women on the run and seeking shelter), using expressive adjectives in the voice-over comments or highlighting particular emotional details of a story (e.g., interviews with parents mourning their just deceased child). We hereby briefly refer to a dominant (visual and thematic) stress on so-called ‘ideal victims’ (Moeller, 2002), in particularly children and elderly. When Others were given a voice, they express their worries or mourn the deaths.

This emotion- and human-interest driven coverage can be interpreted as identifying with the western moral discourse of ‘civilized’ humanity and compassion towards the distant victims (Konstantinidou, 2007). The particular emotional approach opens up spaces not only for compassion and eventually relief response, but also for a cosmopolitan outlook as the audience is invited to relate with the cultural or ethnic Other. Our findings are therefore in line with those of Alasuutari et al. (2013: 699), who have found similar patterns in the domestication of the Egyptian revolt, although they subdivide this emotional strategy into two distinct modes: domestication through appealing to emotions, and domestication by linking the events with involved compatriots through eye-witness accounts.

‘What’s at stake for us?’

A second mode of domestication that we found relates to the attention being paid to the foreign event’s implications or repercussions for the audience’s home country. This strategy brings the distant event to the doorstep of the Belgian spectator, but simultaneously manages fears of the dangers it could represent to life in Belgium (e.g., ‘no reason to panic’ according to the news anchor). A standard pattern that was identified starts with an enumeration of all potential risks which establishes a sense of urgency, followed by an extensive list of domestic safety procedures and measures taken alongside a prominent stress on the skills and expertise of the Belgian authorities involved, hence articulating a dominant discourse of control and safety. Importantly, this journalistic formula draws on Belgian experts who were interviewed on location or invited to the studio to interpret a distant event and its (anticipated) consequences for Belgium. The main question was whether the distant event could negatively affect Belgium. News items for instance discussed a potential flow of immigrants following the famine in the Horn of Africa, the implications of a volcanic eruption in Iceland for Brussels airport, or the (theoretical) consequences of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima such as the nuclear fall-out affecting Belgium, global environmental damage and losses on the Brussels Stock Exchange. Some news items explicitly addressed the likelihood that a similar disaster could happen in Belgium. Particularly the tsunami and earthquake in Japan raised a lot of questions about the safety of Belgium’s rather old nuclear plants. Other practices include travel alerts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs following, for instance, volcano eruptions or hurricanes. In many cases, a telephone number or website was provided that spectators could call or consult in case they had questions and concerns.

Aid-driven domestication

Third, the invitation to care can also be made very explicit when the news anchor or journalist directly addresses the spectator with a call to donate money or organize an event to alleviate the suffering (e.g., ‘Stop the hunger in Africa’), commonly accompanied by a series of bank account numbers. In general, this third mode of domestication establishes a very material link between ‘us’ and the distant sufferers, alongside substantial references to the strategy of emotional domestication. Some items focused on (local) initiatives from individuals to raise money or act on the suffering, although the majority covered institutionalized forms of relief work by NGOs and the government. A recurrent narrative, for instance, was a news crew following compatriots who were involved in relief assistance in the affected area. Several items featured Belgian relief workers, from their departure at Brussels airport to the ground work in the disaster area, such as the famine-struck Horn of Africa in 2011. Belgian relief workers or NGOs generally deliver an interesting story to follow up which allows the news media to continue their daily reports on the disaster as they introduce a kind of ‘soap’ element or narrative. To a certain extent, some of these workers became familiar faces for the spectators and even celebrity figures. The victims in need were – again – portrayed as less relevant in comparison to these relief workers. In the long term, the relief work that is financed by public donations provides the journalist with a relevant angle to cover the aftermath of a disaster. The journalistic approach was driven by the leading question ‘what has been done with our money?’

Familiarizing the unfamiliar

Finally, an often overlooked mode of domestication is related to the format of the news broadcast and to a series of subtle stylistic, narrative and technical practices that appear unremarkable by virtue of their ubiquity. These routine practices are less concerned with establishing involvement as they mainly act to create a sense of familiarity and recognition. For instance, footage from foreign broadcasters was expounded by well-known voices of local expert journalists or followed by additional comments by a popular Belgian weatherman, relief worker or celebrity who often did not contribute any new information but merely rephrased what has been shown or said. Other examples include the use of metaphors or short illustrations that directly relate the disaster to the spectators’ daily life. For instance, in order to make the radiation risks in Fukushima tangible, the journalist briefly referred to the radiation rate of ‘a X-ray taken in the hospital’. Similarly, ‘the French beans that can be found in our supermarkets’ introduced a topic on the practices of the food industry that impacted the famine in Africa while the Belgian national football team was the narrative peg to present an item on an airplane crash. The use of such (self-) reflexive narrative devices stems from the assumption that in terms of the experience of suffering, Belgian audiences encounter difficulties to empathically relate with people who are for instance starving as that particular experience is generally unknown to them. Journalists are thus looking for a kind of common ground to make that suffering somehow accessible and comprehensible. Furthermore, many news items started with an animation of the globe that starts in Belgium and then spins to the country affected by the disaster. Such items implicitly establish Belgium as the news item’s absolute though latent point of reference. Finally, the most common way to make the unknown more familiar was by ways of journalistic narrative and foreign correspondents. Live interventions of (well-known) Belgian correspondents or explicit voiceover references to Belgium are textbook examples of linking the area of danger (the Others) with the home country. These local interventions also contribute to a ‘perceived sense of reality of the event’ (Clausen, 2004: 32).

To conclude this section, there is an important distinction to be made with regard to the causes of domestication. In some of the discussed cases, the element that makes domestication possible was inherent to the news event itself and has henceforth determined the news value of the event (e.g., compatriots killed – which also raises important moral questions about the ‘universal’ value of human life). In most other cases, it was the journalist who decided to domesticate a pure foreign event by introducing local perspectives and actors in his/her narration such as eyewitness accounts or interviews with a Belgian expert. It is clear that the societal role and responsibility of news media are mainly manifested in the latter instance of an external element of domestication that is introduced by the journalist. Here, journalists deliberately opt to make a foreign event more relevant, appealing and less distant. Although the sufferer remains an ethnic or cultural Other, his or her suffering is no longer represented as morally irrelevant. However, discourses of inequality and hierarchy remain largely unchallenged. Moreover, a discursive side-effect of the overtly domesticated representation is the articulation of a sharp disparity between us and them in a sense that, for instance, relief aid was portrayed as ‘premised on an unequal world order, whereby the poor depend on the rich’ (Chouliaraki, 2006: 136).

Taken one step further, we might also problematize the implied objective of the identified domestication practices. Audiences, as individuals and as a collective, are indeed invited to care, but for whom? As hinted at above, the distant Other in need is – due to the applied strategies of domestication – attributed far less screen time and relevance in comparison to so-called proxies, i.e., Belgian expats, tourists and relief workers. Therefore, most news items are not so much about the distant sufferers as they are about us, the westerners. We are portrayed as a true caring nation, as Good Samaritans and the beneficiary of our pity or compassion is thus arguably rendered inferior and interchangeable. This mediated disposition of the Self as caring and benevolent persons is not only linked to the particular articulation of the domesticated other but also supports the idea of international relief aid as a project of self-construction (cf. Driessens et al., 2012). Nevertheless, even a national discourse and identity of caring westerners can play a positive role as they ‘provide a cultural lens to legitimise concern for ‘others’ and encourage fundraising that provided much needed humanitarian assistance’ (West and O’Reilly, 2014: 11).

Another problematic aspect of the practice of domestication is that excessive domestication can eventually produce ‘a rather Eurocentric if not ethnocentric picture of global affairs’ (Manning, 2001: 62). If proximity becomes the overall and dominant principle of international news reporting, this can result in a declining interest in events that would be pure foreign news. Acknowledging that audiences do not easily relate to foreign events, domestication can help to overcome that threshold but it simultaneously holds the risk of establishing a new threshold as distant events are increasingly assessed on their potential to be domesticated.