Humanitarianism Contested: Where Angels Fear to Tread by Michael Barnett & Thomas G. Weiss

Author:Michael Barnett & Thomas G. Weiss [Barnett, Michael & Weiss, Thomas G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781136814389
Google: pPGrAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17551564
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

One picture …

Many observers believe that growing public awareness of humanitarian calamities, made possible and plausible through real-time media coverage, helped feed the desire to do something. To be sure, there were important precursors to what eventually became dubbed the “CNN effect” or the “BBC effect.” For the most part during the era of interstate warfare, the media mainly served state interests in gathering and maintaining the public’s backing for war.

Media moguls of the nineteenth century found ready-made occasions to boost sales of newspapers by celebrating the joys of jingoism. For example, in 1897 as the Cuban population protested Spanish rule, US imperial ambitions manifested themselves through the likes of William Randolph Hearst’s promise to “furnish the war.”1 While there is some doubt about whether he actually said that when a reporter suggested there was no war, mainstream US media certainly stoked frenzy for the 1898 Spanish–American War with slogans such as “Remember the Maine.” Inexpensive and widely available media fomented war then, just as the spread of radio captivated an even wider range of populations hungry for news of wars in the first part of the twentieth century.

The use of images can motivate or deter the political will required to enable military action; and with the development of real-time reporting, humanitarian suffering gave a new meaning to the old reporter’s adage, “if it bleeds, it leads.” Most famously, the haunting pictures with Biblical proportions of mass flight during the Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s helped to stir not only public concern but also launch Band Aid/Live Aid.2

Since then, and especially in this third historical period, media coverage has been an important aspect of capturing the public’s attention and fomenting international action. Without the media, at a minimum, appeals from humanitarians fall on deaf ears. In relationship to one of our main analytical prisms, salvation, John Hammock and Joel Charny described the media’s treatment as “a scripted morality play” whose simplified images contribute to compassion fatigue and a failure to educate the public and politicians about root causes.3 Milan Kundera’s words in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are poignant:

the bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia; the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh; the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende; the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai; and so on and so forth, until ultimately everyone lets everyone be forgotten.4

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.