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Abstract
While the dimensions of what it means to ‘witness’ are interrogated within recent scholarship on ‘media witnessing’, what it means to ‘bear witness’ is rarely explained. Bearing witness conceptually organizes what journalism does, and names a subject position for audiences other than voyeurism, but what it means requires clarification. I detail the plasticity of bearing witness within the discourses of media witnessing in order to demonstrate the resulting paucity of the explanatory labour the term is able to perform for studies of news media. Central to the lack of clarity within this literature is the conflation of eye-witnessing and bearing witness. I argue that a distinction must be made between these concepts in order to elucidate the ways practices of bearing witness exceed seeing. Following Zelizer, I argue that bearing witness refers to practices of assuming responsibility for contemporary events, and thus bearing witness extends beyond seeing through practices of enacting responsibility. I consider what practices of responsibility might mean for journalists and their audiences through an analysis of the structures of address and response within the columns Nicholas Kristof wrote about Darfur between 2004 and 2009.
... By studying media witnessing as a field in which different actors participate, this article also expands discussions on participatory journalism and highlights the challenges that the post-truth context poses for those inviting others to bear witness. This two-pronged analysis shows that empowering vulnerable parties to participate "in journalism" (co-creating journalistic content and inviting audiences to "bear witness") does not necessarily lead to their participation "through journalism" (audiences "bearing witness" and recognizing the suffering in response to these calls) (Ahva 2017, Tait 2011. ...
... While Tait (2011) writes in the context of centralised broadcast media (and with journalists being the first-hand witnesses), today's witnessing increasingly takes place "in and through" participatory journalism (Ahva 2017). This means that people in conflict zones can create witnessing material themselves and that audiences are more directly involved through online comment sections. ...
... To summarise, the tweeters used different narrative and visual strategies, such as speaking "directly" to the widest possible audience, they filmed their surroundings and clearly named their location to enhance their visibility and to gain trust (Ashuri, Pinchevski 2009), in the hopes of gaining influence "in" but also "through" journalism to evoke an active form of witnessing in which audiences would take notice of (and act on) their suffering (Ahva 2017;Tait 2011). ...
This article explores witnessing within and as participatory journalism (participatory witnessing) based on a case study of narratives of the Aleppo siege created by amateur content producers, professional journalists and commenting audiences. To analyse the nuances and challenges of participatory witnessing as a practice and a field, I examine the narratives of all parties (tweeters in Aleppo, news outlets and people commenting below the news articles) as well as their visual and textual strategies for gaining “trust” by claiming authenticity. While news outlets were largely sympathetic to tweeters and amplified their messages, the commenting audience distanced themselves from the suffering and refused to bear witness by responding with four narratives: “tweeters are fake,” “tweeters are terrorists,” “the media is lying” and “collateral damage.” Many elements from the “post-truth” narrative repertoire were utilised to create distance from the scene of suffering. Therefore, empowering vulnerable parties to participate “in journalism” (inviting the audiences to “bear witness”) does not necessarily lead to participation “through journalism” (audiences “bearing witness” in response to these calls).
... When personal stories were deployed, very often they were about the abortion of other people -a relative, partner, daughter, patient, lodger-, which separates this writing from the genre of the personal essay as described in the literature review. Rather than acts of sensational disclosure, these articles express the idea of "bearing witness", a practice that, as Tait (2011) has argued, is central to journalism's legitimation. "Here 'bearing witness' refers to media practices of producing testimony, however the qualifier of 'possibility' renders bearing witness provisional. ...
... This indicates that its meaning extends beyond the furnishing of reports", Tait writes (2011Tait writes ( , 1221. This is the key aspect of the notion of "bearing witness" in journalism: whereas reporting is associated with the detached and objective approach of an eyewitness, "bearing witness necessarily involves an attempt to change the witnessed reality by eliciting an affective experience that incites the audience's action" (Tait 2011(Tait , 1227. ...
... Given that this "bearing witness" is often discussed in relation to the role of journalism in the context of war, suffering, and conflict (the work of Lilie Chouliaraki 2009, for instance, or Luc Boltanski 1999, are examples of this), Tait (2011) argues that there is a "managed asymmetry" between the safe and rewarded journalist and the vulnerable victim. There are indeed examples of this within Irish journalism, such as Kevin Myers (2006Myers ( , 2020 two memoirs about his life as a reporter, first covering the Northern Ireland conflict post-1969 and later travelling to war zones such as Lebanon or Bosnia. ...
As part of a societal preoccupation with subjectivity and emotions, a discussion of authenticity has started to emerge in the professional practice of journalism. This is similar yet different to the more traditional notion of credibility: while credibility has connotations of truth-telling and unbiased reporting, authenticity points to other features, such as genuineness, intimacy, and, notoriously, trust, derived from what is regarded as an honest self. This article discusses the shift from a theoretical perspective and through an analysis of newspaper pieces written around the Irish Abortion Referendum of 2018. While some of these stories could be uncritically framed in the tradition of the so-called “personal essay” that is associated with “click-bait” journalism and cheap content, the article proposes that they present personal stories as a form of “witnessing” (Peters 2001) and “bearing witness” (Tait 2011), both of the journalists and writers’ own experiences and the experiences of others. The reflective tone becomes a dialogical form of correspondence between the author and the reader, where authenticity is derived in the relationship between the writer, the text, and the audience.
... In the case of the literature on media and witnessing, the case for the existence of a discourse of bearing witness and its role in justifying practices of journalism has been a valuable contribution to understanding how witnessing more broadly connects to the practice of journalism performed in proximity to suffering (Tait, 2011). This project develops this thinking further in conversation with journalists themselves, to outline more of the normative ethics that make up the role of one who 'bears witness' as journalists understand it, and the conflicts this role can occasionally create when doing work that may also involve being a direct spectator to others' suffering. ...
... Recent work on this issue includes Frosh and Pinchevski's (2008) work on media witnessing, as well as theorising the concept of 'witnessing' across various moments of media circulation (Ong, 2012). Audiences can witness through media (Chouliaraki, 2004;Rentschler, 2004;Kim and Kelly, 2013), media accounts can serve as witnessing texts (Chouliaraki, 2006;Givoni, 2011), and journalists, humanitarians and others can bear witness to atrocity directly (Tait, 2011;Cottle, 2013;Givoni, 2011) for the purpose of testifying to others about what they have seen. It is this latter conception -of the activity of 'bearing witness' to suffering -that I am interested in. ...
... For example, Tait (2011) has pointed to tensions between the principle of journalistic objectivity and the demand that one who bears witness communicate not simply the facts, but the (impossible) affective horror of what has been seen, in order to place a (moral) claim on audiences as spectators to suffering. Trying to communicate the affective horror of conflict so as to provoke action comports well with the discourse of witnessing as a kind of denunciatory spectatorship in Peters' sense (as in the archetypes of Holocaust testimony, or the witness speaking during a trial), but may be far less compatible with professional journalistic norms of objectivity. ...
This thesis explores the practices and normative tensions of journalists reporting on conflict in South Sudan, based on a combination of semi-structured interviews with journalists based in Nairobi, Kampala and Juba, as well as ethnographic observation of an investigative reporting trip to the Malakal protection of civilians site in Upper Nile state. This thesis addresses two research questions, asking howjournalists’ practices are enabled and constrained in the context of South Sudan, and what normative tensions arise during their practices of journalism. To these questions, this thesis develops three arguments. In the first, I argue that risk functions as both a constraint to the practices of journalistsworking in South Sudan, as well as an element of the practice itself. It can afford journalists epistemic authority, material benefits and recognition as ‘professional’. I also provide an account of media intimidation in South Sudan as it appears to journalists, and some of the tactics adopted to cope with this. In the second, I argue for the importance of affect/emotion as an integral part of the practice of journalism in conflict. I make the case that emotion is not simply ‘picked up’ in the course of tiring and stressful work, but is an important part of how practices of journalism in South Sudan successfully proceed. I suggest that the case of journalists in South Sudan raises a number of important questions for research into affect/emotion in practices of news production more generally. Finally, I argue that normative tensions experienced by journalists as moral conflicts suggest that this journalism operates within a humanitarian imaginary of the type described by Lilie Chouliaraki. Perceived ‘obligations to report’ and discomfort over whether or not to help individuals in certain cases are, I argue, examples of journalists’ double-interpellation as both spectators and witnesses to the suffering of others.
... An event comes to mean something to the reader because their body has become implicated in it; the body's response is a form of participation. (Tait 2011(Tait , 1229 Journalists, in other words, are morally responsible for presenting events in affective ways that motivate their viewers to act (rather than becoming merely disinterested viewers watching a mere spectacle). ...
... Let us take stock. In the first section, we considered some of the literature in journalism about what it means for the news to bear witness, and its moral ramifications for how news is gathered and presented (Zelizer 2002;Kurasawa 2009;Tait 2011). I have argued that art in the streets sometimes bears witness in a very similar way to the news-just as photographs are used in the news to bear witness to harms and situations that call for a moral response, so too can witness-bearing art in the streets play the same role. ...
In this article, I explore the relationship between witness-bearing arts as a form of creative activism designed to respond to social injustices. In the first section, I present some common features of bearing witness, as conceptualized within media studies and journalism. Then I explain how artworks placed in the streets can bear witness in a similar way. I argue that witness-bearing art transmits knowledge about certain unjust and harmful events, which then places a moral burden or responsibility on the viewer. To defend this view, I offer some examples of activist art that bears witness to certain events. I suggest that witness-bearing art is placed in the streets in order to make certain truths publicly available, by offering evidence of them embedded in the artwork. The final section considers why the bearing witness is especially effective for activist art. Witness-bearing art plays a crucial knowledge-transmitting function, one which enables art to engage in creative activism. I conclude by considering how witness-bearing art offers a powerful and persuasive voice for the oppressed.
... The sense of responsibility that Rory mentions might be interpreted as a "moral imperative" (Tait 2011(Tait , 1221) that inspires him to publish a photobook in which he produces an aesthetic testimony to the plight of disappearing highrise housing. This form of public housing is often associated with deprivation due to poor construction and lack of maintenance. ...
... Much of this housing in the United Kingdom has been demolished and does not tend to be celebrated and memorialized given its connotations as a failed social project. In contrast to such forgetting, Rory becomes a memory keeper (Marcoux 2017) who aestheticizes the past though consumer staging and brings attention to this form of housing as a "visceral phenomenon" (Tait 2011(Tait , 1229. ...
Consumer research has focused on market-mediated efforts to memorialize the past, but this overshadows the issues that arise when consumers, as non-professionals, make the past consumable. Consumer-driven memorialization is defined as consumer engagement with traces of the past in memoryscapes of low market-mediation that creates a complex interplay of remembering and forgetting. Based on an ethnographic study of urban exploration, we theorize that consumer-driven memorialization comprises two practices of tracing and trace-making. Tracing involves consumer attempts to recover traces of the past, while trace-making involves consumer attempts to create traces for the future. Consumers enact multiple roles during consumer-driven memorialization: explorers experience the past, archaeologists materialize the past, artists aestheticize the past, and historians narrate the past. The theorization of consumer-driven memorialization offers three contributions. First, the dimensions of consumer-driven memorialization broaden understanding of what constitutes a consumable past in contexts of low market-mediation. Second, we explain how the ideological and material challenges that emerge in consumer-driven memorialization generate a complex interplay between remembering and forgetting. Third, we shed light on how consumer-driven memorialization is inscribed in space.
... In what ways do they conceive of deportation as slow violence? Following the idea of bearing witness, which refers to seeing something, actively taking responsibility and acting on that basis (Zelizer 1998(Zelizer , 2007Felman 2000;Durham Peters 2001;Tait 2011), we also discuss how those close to deportability have acted upon the experience of seeing slow violence done to others. ...
... Rather than remaining dispassionate to what they had observed, they acted upon what they saw and knew, they bore witness (see e.g . Felman 2000;Durham Peters 2001;Zelizer 2007;Tait 2011). The first step in taking action is to share experiences and emotions with other people who have witnessed similar issues and situations. ...
This book presents new conceptual and theoretical approaches to violence studies. As the first research anthology to examine violating interpersonal, institutional and ideological practices as both gendered and affective processes, it raises novel questions and offers insights for understanding and resolving social and cultural problems related to violence and its prevention. The book offers multidisciplinary perspectives on various forms and intersections of different types of violence. The research ranges from the early modern era to the present day in Europe, US, Africa and Australia, representing disciplines such as gender studies, history, literature, linguistics, media and cultural studies, psychology, social psychology, social work, social policy, sociology and environmental humanities. With its integrative approach, the book proposes new ideas and tools for academics and practitioners to improve their theoretical and practical understandings of these phenomena as a source of multidimensional inequality in a globalized world.
Marita Husso is Associate Professor of Social Policy at Tampere University, Finland.
Sanna Karkulehto is Professor of Literature at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Tuija Saresma is Senior Researcher at the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Jari Eilola is Senior Researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of the Jyväskylä, Finland.
Aarno Laitila is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Heli Siltala is University Teacher at the Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
... In what ways do they conceive of deportation as slow violence? Following the idea of bearing witness, which refers to seeing something, actively taking responsibility and acting on that basis (Zelizer 1998(Zelizer , 2007Felman 2000;Durham Peters 2001;Tait 2011), we also discuss how those close to deportability have acted upon the experience of seeing slow violence done to others. ...
... Rather than remaining dispassionate to what they had observed, they acted upon what they saw and knew, they bore witness (see e.g . Felman 2000;Durham Peters 2001;Zelizer 2007;Tait 2011). The first step in taking action is to share experiences and emotions with other people who have witnessed similar issues and situations. ...
In 2015, Finland, like other European countries, received an unprecedented number of asylum seekers. Later, in the aftermath of what we prefer to call the ‘refugee reception crisis’, the deportation of those who had received negative asylum decisions began. The Finnish Immigration Service significantly tightened its policies after 2015. Increasingly strict asylum criteria have resulted in deportations at a level never seen before. Furthermore, protests against deportations have increased and become publicly salient. In this chapter we theorize deportation as a form of slow violence that hurts not only its main target but also people nearby. While a forced removal can be seen as a single, potentially violent act, deportability is a slow process. The violence ‘happens’ rather than ‘is done’, and therefore deportability may not be understood as violence. By analyzing thematic interviews with people who have contested deportations, we analyze how citizens who are proximate to deportable migrants ‘withness’ deportability—how they begin to see and feel the invisible, slow violence done to others and decide to act. The chapter concludes that making visible violence that would otherwise remain unrecognized is crucial in current anti-deportation activism.
... Witnessing is a concept of interest to both memory studies and journalism. However, the vibrant debate in literature around the role of journalists as witnesses is challenging to address given difficulties in defining 'witness', the range of 'moral, political, epistemological and aesthetic questions posed' (Tait, 2011(Tait, : 1220 and the subjectivity and fallibility of communicators and the communicative process (Peters, 2009: 26). Previous studies have approached the role of journalists on different levels of the witnessing spectrum, with Ignatieff's (2000) 'moral engagement' more involved than Tait's (2011) 'eye-witnessing' or merely seeing and reporting. ...
... However, the vibrant debate in literature around the role of journalists as witnesses is challenging to address given difficulties in defining 'witness', the range of 'moral, political, epistemological and aesthetic questions posed' (Tait, 2011(Tait, : 1220 and the subjectivity and fallibility of communicators and the communicative process (Peters, 2009: 26). Previous studies have approached the role of journalists on different levels of the witnessing spectrum, with Ignatieff's (2000) 'moral engagement' more involved than Tait's (2011) 'eye-witnessing' or merely seeing and reporting. Tait (2011) differentiates this disengaged form of witnessing from 'bearing witness' requiring taking responsibility for information gathered and reporting in an approach that 'conceptually organizes what journalism does, and names a subject position for audiences other than voyeurism' (p. ...
While the importance of journalism in memory studies has often been overlooked in academic scholarship, media discourses can be considered ‘memory’s precondition’ on both active and passive levels. First, journalists record events as they happen building on narratives and testimonies. Second, sometimes decades later, these can be invoked in legal and social post-dictatorship processes. Applying the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis to memory studies, this research explores the relationship between counter-journalism and counter-memories as a response to and rejection of the ‘echo chamber’ of authoritarian discourse which dominated the mainstream media and promoted official memory during Argentina’s last dictatorship. The methodological approach of the study is mixed, combining qualitative synchronic-diachronic text analysis with a corpus analysis of concordance lines to trace strategies of counter-discourse in two newspapers which opposed the dictatorship. The motivations of their editor-journalists for challenging official discourse and institutional memory in the climate of state terrorism are framed in the context of Margalit’s ‘moral witnessing’.
... Their testimony often does not have a predefined audience; rather, audiences come into being in, through, and around encounters with them, and the interpretive and politicizing work they do with them. This labor represents a "response-ability" to act in the online and inperson networked environments in which people encounter testimonial texts and recordings (Rentschler 2014;Tait 2011). So while "witness" involves acts of documenting, responding to, and publicizing sexual violence, it also constitutes a set of relationships that survivors and feminist cultural intermediaries create via the media of witnessing bodies-with some of the (sometimes purposeful) ambiguities and opaqueness that can accompany them (see Cohen, this issue)-and the recording techniques and practices of reporting that transform them into "felt" and more broadly distributable witness accounts. ...
This article examines the work survivors of sexual violence and abuse do to assert their credibility and the labor, in turn, that feminist journalists and activists do to help make victims and survivors believable. Drawing on a video clip made by the survivor that appears in Big Mouth and examples of survivor-based media witnessing in Canada, I analyze how survivors, anti-violence advocates, and feminist reporters build networks of media witnessing to address sexual abuse and assault, and provide the support and validation that survivors need. I approach their witnessing labor as affective and transmissible forms of movement work that carves out crucial spaces of informal justice for victims and survivors of gender violence and mobilizes forms of militant evidence that connect survivors to other survivors and social change intermediaries.
... With the emergence of digital networks and the use of camera-phones with highquality built-in cameras, non-professional photography is a significant form of everyday communication. Amateur photography has been studied since, at least, the 1970s (Sontag 1978;Chalfen 1987;Peters 2001;van Dijck 2008;Cobley and Haeffner 2009;Frosh and Pinchevski 2009;Lange 2011;Tait 2011;Sarvas and Frohlich 2011;Rose 2014;Gillies 2019;Zuromskis 2019;Näsi 2020). The preceding articles not only depict well the various functions of amateur photography, but also describe how it has evolved from analogue to digital. ...
Among an increasingly remote workforce due to COVID-19 pandemic, sharing photographs as part of internal communication has become something of a paradigm. In this article, exchanging primarily photographs and other quick visual artifacts, such as animated images and short videos, is considered a form of visual discussion among the work community. With a vast and diverse range of official and unofficial internal communication channels, this article focuses on three organizations, their internal communication channels and the visual discussions occurring therein. The semi-structured group interviews and qualitative thematic analysis we conducted shed light on the functions of photographs in different workplaces. The results demonstrate how visual discussions are heavily dependent on the context and nature of the work in question. In official channels, the most important functions of shared photographs are task-related and relevant to such issues as instructing, teaching, safety at work and emphasizing the message to be communicated. Photographs can also have a feeling-driven aspect that includes goals such as raising team spirit and employee commitment. Moreover, photographs are also shared in somewhat obscure unofficial channels with functions related to humour and concerning a common interest or hobby.
... This growth in immigration court research follows a long tradition of sociologists and legal geographers observing US courts (Atkinson and Drew 1979;Walenta 2020) and international human rights practices (Weissbrodt 1982;Jeffrey and Jakala 2014). Advocacy-centered initiatives such as these highlight perceived dilatory and unjust practices in court and detention, contributing to an action-based project rooted in human rights fact-finding (Orentlicher 1990) and moral responsibility (Tait 2011). As immigration court observers have documented and witnessed using human rights models, this article develops a theoretical and empirical understanding of their observations. ...
Examining what we call “crimmigrating narratives,” we show that US immigration court criminalizes non-citizens, cements forms of social control, and dispenses punishment in a non-punitive legal setting. Building on theories of crimmigration and a sociology of narrative, we code, categorize, and describe third-party observations of detained immigration court hearings conducted in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, from July 2018 to June 2019. We identify and investigate structural factors of three key crimmigrating narratives in the courtroom: one based on threats (stories of the non-citizen’s criminal history and perceived danger to society), a second involving deservingness (stories of the non-citizen’s social ties, hardship, and belonging in the United States), and a third pertaining to their status as “impossible subjects” (stories rendering non-citizens “illegal,” categorically excludable, and contradictory to the law). Findings demonstrate that the courts’ prioritization of these three narratives disconnects detainees from their own socially organized experience and prevents them from fully engaging in the immigration court process. In closing, we discuss the potential implications of crimmigrating narratives for the US immigration legal system and non-citizen status.
... This feeling arose out of being in the position of knowing more than others about (morally important) events and having a privileged position from which to tell others about what they knew. It is the moral dilemma of one who finds themselves in a position to bear witness (Tait, 2011). ...
This article examines the role of emotion in the practices of journalists reporting on conflict and its effects in South Sudan, based on a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations of the working routines of journalists from Nairobi, Kampala and Juba. Contrary to perceptions of emotion as an akratic failure to reason in a rational, detached manner, obligations felt to people and situations can be understood as rational, information-bearing guides to action, directing journalists to consider personal ethical norms that may sit in tension with the norms of their professional roles as they understand them. The presence of such feelings in the case of journalists committed to a norm of emotional detachment in their work points to the moral incoherence of norms of detachment in (at least) journalism of this type.
... Pratt (2008) discusses the importance of how witnessing is framed, noting the effectiveness of framing witnessing as people-topeople solidarity rather than 'care' or 'duty' (Pratt, 2008). Tait (2011) also draws a distinction between bearing witness and eye witnessing, emphasising that the former entails an active taking up of responsibility in reaction to what has been witnessed. ...
Courtwatching involves grassroots efforts to observe the day to day work of decision making in justice systems, usually undertaken by activists as a way to scrutinise and challenge the power of legal professionals such as judges. This paper argues for closer attention to courtwatching in legal geographical research. Numerous courtwatching programmes exist around the world, and the first part of the paper surveys some of these, giving a sense of their diversity, the challenges they can face, and the influence that they have. The second part of the paper uses courtwatching to explore questions of visibility, publicness, witnessing and embodiment in legal research into courts, trials and hearings. It argues that courtwatching highlights the complexity of legal publicness, problematising the binary notion of ‘closed’ or ‘open’ hearings and also raises important questions about the ethical differences between watching and witnessing. Finally, in the context of proliferating ways in which courts are becoming public via digital means of watching, such as TV and podcasts, the paper asks what difference it makes to actually be there, in the flesh, to watch legal processes.
... Knowing that such visual accounts come from an eyewitness enhances viewers' perceptions of authenticity and affective engagement with the content (Ahva and Hellman, 2015). By pairing engaging material with commentary that communicates the organizational reality of crisis, leadership can bear witness both of what has happened and how it can be overcome collectively (Tait, 2011). ...
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to describe organization members' attributions for managerial responses to obviously externally caused crises. The authors draw from attribution theory research and the actor-observer bias to argue that organization members' proximity to managerial crisis response is a key determinant of organization members' affective and behavioral outcomes following a crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors develop a conceptual dual-process model of attributions that explains why organization members' judgments of managerial responsibility and associated outcomes differ depending on organization members' proximity to crisis response action.
Findings
The authors focus on organization members' attributions for the failure of managerial crisis responses to obviously externally caused crisis events. The authors present propositions regarding the impact of organization members' potential biases on their attributions for managerial crisis response. Then, the authors delineate how action proximity can assuage negative outcomes of managerial crisis response failure by encouraging an attitude of understanding and awareness of situational challenges.
Originality/value
The authors diverge from prior applications of attribution theory to crisis management by focusing on organization members' attributions of managerial crisis response failure, rather than attributions for the initial cause of the crisis itself. The authors also extend prior work that primarily focuses on crisis response strategies by instead elaborating on how organization members' attributions operate in the wake of their management's failure to effectively respond to an obviously externally caused crisis.
... This makes it difficult to conceive of a journalism that is at once objective, and able to 'nourish moral response'. Thus, while 'bearing witness' is a concept used to moralize the inability of journalists to act on suffering, the imperative within the normative construction of objectivity is not actually bearing witness at all," (Tait, 2011). We, as Christians, cannot separate our moral code in the name of objectivity. ...
Christian apologetics has an essential place in the delivery of news. No matter what field of journalism, for either print or broadcast platforms, it is critically important that journalists maintain throughout their professional journey strong ethical and moral principles from the receipt of every assignment to their completed delivery, and after. Engraining Biblical teachings to the mission of each story ensures truthful reporting while demonstrating respect for the community and its values and mores, and ultimately creating a trusting and useful relationship between the journalist and their public.
... Journalistic eyewitnessing in disasters is more than seeing and critical storytelling. Journalists also adopt a public stance to bear witness to human suffering (Anden-Papadopoulos & Pantti, 2013;Tait, 2011;Zelizer, 1998). The emotional toll of covering disasters often puts journalists in a tenuous situation needing to negotiate between the professional norms of detachment and the moral responsibility to produce engaged narratives that bear witness. ...
Natural disasters not only create physical damage but also disrupt social norms. Studying disasters and their media representations thus reveals how a society establishes and maintains its political structure and cultural values. Focusing on Typhoon Morakot, Taiwan’s deadliest typhoon on record, this study employs a ritual view of communication to examine its first week of television coverage. The study found that a variety of televisual practices, such as the interruption of commercials, live reporting, visualization of emotions, and cinematic vignettes, have been used to symbolically repair a shaken society. This case study adds to the literature of disaster journalism as it improves our understanding of mediated crises as visual texts constituted by facts and feelings and addresses the gap in the traditional epistemological assumption that journalism is a product of rationality and objectivity.
... (My hope was to avoid this by conveying the multiplicity and complexity of Indonesian views and responses to West Papua, as well as useful Indonesian and Papuan exchanges and identifying proposed legal avenues for justice). Despite Tait (2011) arguing that it is 'difficult to conceive of a journalism that is at once objective, and able to "nourish moral response"' (p. 1232), other journalist-researchers have articulated the consistency of these two positions. ...
Journalism about West Papua is in many ways an act of translation. It involves not only translating between languages, but also disciplines, audiences and knowledges. This article examines how interdisciplinary research—such as anthropology and history— might intersect with journalism as a means to understand and challenge existing gaps in translation, or ‘silences’ about West Papua in the past and present. It also reflects on how audio documentaries carry out such translation work on misunderstood and underreported issues. To illustrate this, the author reflects on the process of making the audio documentary #Illridewithyou, West Papua for ABC Radio National’s Earshot documentary programme as well as a companion long-form article for the ABC’s website.
... Part of this blurring of lines is a related to the witnessing of dramatic events. Journalists bear witnesses to the issues they cover, which Tait (2011Tait ( , 1233 defines as follows: ...
This study examines local news reporting about the Flint water crisis. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with local reporters to explore journalistic practices and perceptions of the crisis. The study utilised a framework grounded in concepts from community journalism and crisis reporting, as well as environmental justice and racism scholarship. The qualitative thematic analysis centres around four themes: coverage practices and professionalism, resources and challenges, connections to place, and environmental justice and racism. The results reveal that the crisis served as a catalyst for some news organisations to make substantial investments in their newsrooms; but this was not the case for small organisations that depend mostly on grant-funding. Local reporters generally claimed that despite their attachment to the Flint community, they maintained their normal journalistic standards. However, some reporters struggled to separate their personal experiences from their professional practices, evidence consistent with prior studies on crisis reporting. Reporters demonstrated empathy towards victims impacted by the water crisis, and this heightened their distrust towards official sources and motivated their outreach efforts. Finally, for those reporters, their ideologies were largely consistent with both historical and emerging claims on environmental justice and environmental racism, that persons of colour, minority populations, and poor neighbourhoods in cities are more likely to suffer from environmental hazards compared to white and more affluent communities. Suggestions for crisis reporting in environmental justice contexts are discussed.
... The importance of images was also examined by Tait when he suggested that affectivity of conflict news from the media arises from such news being able to move the audiences, facilitate sense of attachment and trigger bodily sensations (Tait, 2011). Corroborating Tait's suggestion, William et al., (2011) argue that 'emotional impact of citizen imagery is created from the experience of being able to view news events from the perspective of those affected or those directly witnessing the events (2011, pp. ...
With the availability of the media, no one will deny both proximal and distance happenings across the globe especially when it is about suffering of others. The visibilities of these sufferings of others are much triggered with the emergence of new media. People of different socio-cultural and demographic background have adopted social media as means of letting the world know the happenings around them. In Nigeria through the medium, people have become witnesses to the suffering of victims of jungle justice as their images are constantly displayed on daily basis. Existing studies on audience reaction to suffering of others through mediated images shows that audience response to such images are dependent on their gender, socioeconomic, political and religious background, and some arguing that they have become numb and no longer care about suffering of others. Though these may be true, it cannot be generated to Nigeria audiences as a lot of factors determine how audience responded to mediated images. Little or no study of Nigeria background verified how Nigerians respond to suffering of others especially on the victims of disaster and attacks such as jungle justice. It is against these backdrops that this study through survey (focus group interview) determines Nigerian respond to images of victims of jungle justices in Nigeria. The finding reveals that Nigerians are not numbs when faced with such images and reaction is that of pity and ‘it could have been me’ with the sense of responsibility as to help avert the suffering.
... During a disaster, routine practicesand therefore gatekeeping processesare disrupted as the lack of communication limits on-air access to sources and reporters covering recovery efforts (Littlefield and Quenette 2007). Local journalists, as members of the affected community (Weidmann, Fehm, and Fydrich 2008), bear witness of the unfolding events (Tait 2011) and have to negotiate and balance their position as professional reporters and affected individuals, which can significantly affect journalistic routines (Himmelstein and Faithorn 2002). This spontaneous communication dynamic may fill in details of evolving emergency situations or raise important questions about response management. ...
Hurricane Maria (2017) was the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico in the last 90 years. The entire communication system collapsed, including cellular. Media organizations in Puerto Rico, with the exception of one radio station, were unable to transmit much-needed information during and immediately after Maria made landfall. This study examines changes in journalistic practices, organizational readiness and disaster coverage plans, and infrastructure preparedness almost 18 months after the event. This study extends the limited research examining long-term changes to news media preparedness plans in the context of disasters and expands theoretical understandings of media practices in the context of the hierarchy of influences model. The results suggest that infrastructure damage severely hampered the ability of news organizations to perform their work, but solidarity among media was useful in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Each media played a differentiated and important role after the disaster based on their resources and organizational structure. The study shows that preparedness plans were inadequate and that changes are slowly been implemented to deal with challenges related to infrastructure, electricity, and technology, but with limited focus on the long-term well-being of media workers. Recommendations to improve responses to future natural disasters are presented.
Reporting on cases of genocide presents distinct complexities and challenges for journalists, who must negotiate practical, professional, and emotional experiences that challenge traditional expectations of their role. Previous research has provided strident critiques of this reporting, arguing Western reporting of genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica was reductionist and biased and contributed to the lack of Western intervention. Drawing on 22 interviews with print journalists who reported on genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica, this article challenges this dominant critique by foregrounding the voices of journalists and their experience of reporting. Themes of inaccessibility, the moral imperative to report on these events, and the intersection with emotional labour on emotional effects of this reporting crucially demonstrates and acknowledges the challenges of conflict reporting. This adds to contemporary debates around how emotion, attachment and morality intertwine in journalism practice and the importance of this consideration when assessing the impact of reporting.
At a time when local journalism is under threat, regional newsrooms can play a crucial role in working with communities to confront shameful truths and profound failures. The regional city of Ballarat emerged as an “epicentre” of clergy sexual abuse through Australia’s landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017). This article examines how the regional city’s newspaper, The Courier, bore witness to these crimes and their impacts within its local community. A content and thematic analysis of coverage of child sexual abuse from 2010 to 2019 documents how The Courier’s locally produced journalism revealed to its audience the extent of abuse, helping to acknowledge and face crimes that had occurred in Ballarat’s local institutions. The interlinked themes of revelation, reckoning and recovery demonstrate how local journalism can work with its community to address traumatic events that occur within its geosocial space. Local media bore witness on multiple levels, as both the amplifier of stories told by survivors and the facilitator of community processes of reckoning and recovery. We refer to this special form of local journalism as “proximal” media witnessing.
New modes of journalism, such as testimony journalism, use the first-person to let members of marginalized communities tell their stories in their own words and increase the audience’s affinity with them. However, the assumption that this strategy fosters audience affinity has not been empirically investigated. We build on findings from media psychology, demonstrating that the point of view (POV) from which a narrative is told affects engagement with the narrative and persuasion, and apply these insights to journalism studies and news reports. Using a factorial design in an online experiment (n = 924), we examined the effect of POV in a newspaper article on the experience of social presence of the article’s protagonist, identification with him and attitude changes. As hypothesized, social presence was significantly stronger when reading a first-person article than a third-person article. Moreover, social presence mediated the effect of POV on identification. POV also indirectly affected support for policy and behavioral intentions through the mediation of social presence and identification. The findings suggest that the first-person POV heightens the experience of a real interaction with the protagonist. This effect occurs even when the first-person POV testimonial is part of a newspaper article written by a journalist.
Violence against women is prevalent both in and outside the sports world, and dozens of professional athletes have been accused, although the reactions and consequences to such accusations are not always the same. This study examines three instances of athletes committing misogynistic violence and the effect that video evidence has on sports media discourse. We look at a wide range of online media sources and print newspaper articles (n = 153) to see how the discourse changes after video evidence has been released publicly. We rely on feminist theory, hegemonic masculinity, and mediated witnessing as theoretical frameworks to conduct a critical discourse analysis. Video evidence of violence against women by athletes alters the way sports journalists cover them by countering hegemonic narratives about responsibility, player value, rehabilitation, and procedure. This study builds on previous scholarship about how evidentiary video can alter the way sports media subjugate women and perpetuate hegemonic masculinity.
This contribution focuses on 'new narratives' dealing with the global issue of migration which however stands only as a paradigm of other forms of systemic injustice and discrimination. Taking paradigmatic projects-Clouds over Sidra (2015) and This Room (2017)-I will set off to look behind the promise of interactive, immersive narratives to let users 'walk in someone else's shoes'. This article explores in how far the specific affordances of VR affect the engagement with content and the potentially transformative impact the producers are aiming at. Are we dealing with an exploitive gaze, are we drawn into a 'human rights spectacle', or do new forms of narrative enable response-able witnessing? The theoretical framework brings together recent theories of VR non-fiction, drawing on the tradition of documentary theory and approaches to interactive storytelling, as well as findings in social psychology, especially conceptualizations of immersion, empathy, and presence in VR environments. Addressing problematic socio-cultural, socio-political and media-ethical constellations (the risk of 'improper distance', of dehistoricizing and depoliticizing complex issues, of reinscribing hegemonic points-of-view and of imposing one's own truth over the actual experiences of 'others', colonizing their feelings) I suggest a form of critical dis-immersion, arguing that the potential of new narratives does not consist in its amplification of visual illusion and immediate affective response but rather in its ability to model a different concept of subjectivity, questioning established regimes of gaze and perspective of the 'self' in relation to others.
The two-decade-long US occupation of Afghanistan, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, finally ending with the withdrawal of the US forces on August 31, 2021. The ensuing political, social and economic chaos for Afghanistan continues to reverberate throughout Pakistan as well. Several journalists have lost their lives while covering ‘combating operations’ against terrorist organizations. The missions of secret agencies, target killings, insurgencies created by Taliban militants in the north, Baloch separatists’ movements in the south, and ‘disrupted law and order’ are some of the great threats faced by the media professionals while rending their professional assignments. By and large, Pakistan’s mainstream print and electronic media have covered the government’s National Action Plan to mount an ongoing anti-terrorist offensive with a positive tone. Extensive research has been carried out with regards to the image of Pakistan in the realm of terrorism in its national media.
This article analyses the architecture of affective witnessing in the biographical film, A Private War (Michael Heineman 2018), representing the life and work of famous war correspondent, Marie Colvin. Focusing on the self-reflexive representation of affective witnessing in the film, the article discusses the ethical aspects of compassion in war reporting and the politics of trauma and moral injury with their dangerous impact on the life of the protagonist. Affective witnessing implies an ethical position of compassion and responsibility for the victims of war, but it also implies various levels of trauma, with maladaptive effects on the psyche of war correspondents. The analysis of the film is the basis for a theoretical exploration of the affective practice of witnessing and the dangers of trauma and moral injury that accompany the work of war journalists.
During the global pandemic and online teaching, we co-taught the keystone course for the new environmental humanities minor at the University of Pennsylvania. Beyond introducing students to transdisciplinary modes of communication and environmental humanities analytical frameworks, we focused the course around building a public engaged collaboration with community organizations and civil society initiatives in Colombia. The final project for the class resulted in a bilingual Digital Environmental Justice Storytelling platform that invites people to learn how different communities in Colombia engage with the arts and sciences in their activism and daily life to navigate environmental health uncertainties, defend territories, and transform urban and rural life conditions. In this article, we share our experience facilitating transdisciplinary international collaboration, bilingual translation, and multimodal methods in the building of the platform. We explain the pedagogical and methodological design of the project, placing emphasis on the flows of learning established between students and their Colombian community partners. The article includes the perspectives of different participants regarding their collaborative process, reflections about the importance of multilingual and hemispheric perspectives for the environmental humanities, and the impact of digital mediums as tools for environmental justice struggles and solidarity building.
Joan Baxter’s story-model approach to The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest focuses on the historical and contemporary events surrounding Northern Pulp, the controversial Pictou County pulp mill in Canada’s Nova Scotia province. Tracing a fifty-year arc, the journalist bears witness to the epistemic injustice that prevails within the context of the antagonisms that inhere in the debate about the pulp mill. Baxter does more than recognize and expose wrongs—a critical task of the mainstream journalism project. Instead, the journalist reveals the testimonial injustice perpetrated against communities who oppose the mill and whose relevant knowledge is invalidated and discounted in favor of the highly selective and partial discourse of progress bereft of any notion of social justice.KeywordsEpistemic injusticeBearing witnessEnvironmental journalismJoan BaxterNarrative journalismLiterary journalism
This contribution focuses on 'new narratives' dealing with the global issue of migration which however stands only as a paradigm of other forms of systemic injustice and discrimination. Taking paradigmatic projects -- Clouds over Sidra (2015) and This Room (2017) -- I will set off to look behind the promise of interactive, immersive narratives to let users 'walk in someone else's shoes'. This article explores in how far the specific affordances of VR affect the engagement with content and the potentially transformative impact the producers are aiming at. Are we dealing with an exploitive gaze, are we drawn into a 'human rights spectacle', or do new forms of narrative enable response-able witnessing? The theoretical framework brings together recent theories of VR non-fiction, drawing on the tradition of documentary theory and approaches to interactive storytelling, as well as findings in social psychology, especially conceptualizations of immersion, empathy, and presence in VR environments. Addressing problematic socio-cultural, socio-political and media-ethical constellations (the risk of 'improper distance', of dehistoricizing and depoliticizing complex issues, of reinscribing hegemonic points-of-view and of imposing one's own truth over the actual experiences of 'others', colonizing their feelings) I suggest a form of critical dis-immersion, arguing that the potential of new narratives does not consist in its amplification of visual illusion and immediate affective response but rather in its ability to model a different concept of subjectivity, questioning established regimes of gaze and perspective of the 'self' in relation to others.
A moving YouTube video depicts the rescue of Lily, a delightful piglet, from a factory farm (Direct Action Everywhere, 2017). A man wearing a flashlight on his forehead is seen entering a dark, cramped, filthy facility, taking Lily in his arms and gently removing her from the premises. He is later depicted caring for her, offering her medication as he hugs her in a pink blanket, and escorting her into the sunshine.
Holocaust memory institutions are looking to new media technologies to preserve survivor testimony and bridge the ever-growing spatio-temporal divide between survivors and the post-Holocaust generation. To contribute to the growing body of literature on this topic, this chapter explores The Last Goodbye (Dir. Arora and Palitz, [VR Film], 2017), a virtual reality experience produced by the USC Shoah Foundation as a case study. Thinking critically about the possibilities of digital witnessing, this research considers the framing and positionality of the user inside the digital simulation of the Majdanek concentration camp memorial site and their virtual proximity to survivor Pinchas Gutter. Drawing on notions of the ‘witnessing text’ (Frosh, Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(4), 265–284, 2007) and ‘memoirs of return’ (Jilovsky, Remembering the Holocaust. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), this chapter argues that the user is encouraged to imaginatively embody the familial gaze and perform the role of the secondary witness. In turn, this experience can encourage future generations to acknowledge their ‘response-ability’ (Tait, Bearing Witness: Journalism and Moral Responsibility. Media Culture and Society, 33(8), 1220–1235, 2011) for Holocaust memory in a post-survivor age.
This essay introduces the special issue entitled Journalism and Emotional Work. It argues the need for a context-sensitive understanding of emotional work in journalism profession. Contributions to the issue elucidate the social context for and the social consequences of emotional work. It demonstrates that journalists' emotional work is shaped by the changes in the industry and specific contexts in which they carry out their work.
In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found that Canada’s management of child welfare discriminates against First Nations children. The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, one of the complainants, maintains a web-based campaign called “I Am A Witness,” providing details on the hearings and legal materials and asking visitors to act towards ending discrimination against First Nations children. What does it mean to bear witness to such discrimination? The concept of “witnessing” circulates through Indigenous oral traditions, communication and media theories, and the common law. This article explores the I Am A Witness campaign, arguing that as it evokes various theories of witnessing and builds public awareness of legal processes, it shifts spaces of and perspectives on legality beyond Western categories, creating a public that is enabled to bear witness to, and respond to, ongoing injustices against Indigenous peoples.
This chapter maps the ways in which the mediated first-person testimonies and personal trauma narratives of bereaved family members of the deceased, as primary definers of the news agenda, have increasingly been embraced as positive developments in mainstream media’s engagement with traumatised subjects and coverage of fatal mental health crisis interventions. This has often been with little critique of the potentially harmful effects that the publication or broadcast of this lived experience can have on these same individuals (as a consequence of the ‘second wounds’ it can produce), the legal and coronial process, and for other individuals involved in these critical incidents, whose voices are, by comparison, marginalised in public debates about the police use of lethal force. The chapter highlights the vulnerabilities of these individuals and questions the limits of ethical responsibility in the reporting of fatal mental health crisis interventions.
Media representations of violence against transgender individuals have implications for public opinion, awareness and policy. A sample (N = 212) of U.S. mainstream news articles about 53 transgender 2018–2019 victims of homicide were studied by content analysis and qualitative methods. About 13% of articles referred to victims by their deadnames (no longer used birthnames), but about 18% of articles drew attention to the harms of misidentification. Deadnaming declined significantly from 2018 to 2019. About 30% of the full sample discussed violence against transgender individuals in social context. Police and transgender community advocates were sources in 80% and 50% of articles, respectively.
Reporting War and Conflict brings together history, theory and practice to explore the issues and obstacles involved in the reporting of contemporary war and conflict. The book examines the radical changes taking place in the working practices and day-to-day routines of war journalists, arguing that managing risk has become central to modern war correspondence. How individual reporters and news organisations organise their coverage of war and conflict is increasingly shaped by a variety of personal, professional and institutional risks.
The book provides an historical and theoretical context to risk culture and the work of war correspondents, paying particular attention to the changing nature of technology, organisational structures and the role of witnessing. The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are examined to highlight how risk and the calculations of risk vary according to the type of conflict. The focus is on the relationship between propaganda, censorship, the sourcing of information and the challenges of reporting war in the digital world. The authors then move on to discuss the arguments around risk in relation to gender and war reporting and the coverage of death on the battlefield.
What does it mean to witness in an age saturated with media technology? This paper argues the need to rescue witnessing as a concept from its conflation with the watching and passive consumption of events. As an inherently political practice, the mediatization of witnessing is bound within questions of ethics and morality and has the potential to realign power and control in society. This article explores these issues through the witnessing of public death events: those shocking, exceptional and morally significant deaths that become ‘public' through their mediation, observing that the continuous and contiguous production and consumption of media content has given rise to new performative rituals of local witnessing for (potentially) global audiences. I argue that the mediatization of witnessing serves to increase our moral awareness of seeing, rendering an ethical imperative of capture on those that witness, and thereby closing the veracity gap between events and their meaning.
The presentation and representation of death is a political matter, and it was always a means to establish and confirm power relations. This chapter reflects on the use of gruesome images for establishing hierarchies of belonging and utilising the visibility of death as a symbolic political weapon to give offence. The chapter explores the ambiguity of the offensiveness of gory images in Israeli mediated public sphere, and shows that the approach of news organisations to protect those who are dear to ‘us’ from the offensiveness of gruesome death images was gradually replaced by a non-journalistic approach that utilises such images in order to offend ‘the Other’. This contemporary practice challenges common perceptions about the offensiveness of death imagery and the ethics of its circulation.
O sofrimento tem despertado crescente interesse em pesquisas sobre narrativas jornalísticas. Tais estudos dão um enfoque privilegiado ao telejornalismo e ao fotojornalismo e discutem, sobretudo, o sofrimento ocasionado por catástrofes ou conflitos armados. Neste artigo, busca-se compreender as estratégias narrativas mobilizadas pelo jornalismo impresso para constituir e retratar cenas de sofrimento ligadas ao trabalho infantil doméstico, considerado por organizações sociais uma das atividades nas quais crianças e adolescentes são mais oprimidas. Parte-se da discussão da “política da piedade” (Arendt) e da “narratividade jornalística” (Motta; Casadei) como fundamento teórico para a análise de exemplos de apropriações jornalísticas do sofrimento, considerando dois aspectos: a configuração narrativa de cenas de sofrimento e o posicionamento dos sujeitos sofredores nos relatos dessas experiências. Importa-nos, no que pode remanescer da política da piedade, a persistência das narrativas jornalísticas de sofrimento e a constituição de cenas em que figuram sujeitos sofredores.
The shifting constitution of journalists as humanitarian actors has profound implications for changing forms of journalism practice, as well as for the normative models through which journalists understand and reflect on that practice. In an effort to develop a more empirically-grounded engagement with change, this article explores the interview testimonies of Australian journalists who cover international and humanitarian issues. It argues that frameworks reliant on stark oppositions (between past and present, optimism and pessimism, or moral agency and material structure) are both empirically and practically problematic, and seeks to move beyond these. Engagement with data from semi-structured interviews offers insight into how journalists’ perceptions of and responses to change are shaped by the historical and shifting institutional relations in which they are implicated.
This article develops and extends the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity to temporality through a case study of archival activism and participatory film-making. It examines mediated witnessing within the Italian online audiovisual archive Archivio delle memorie migranti, which documents and archives the experiences of contemporary migrants in Italy. The moral basis of Archivio delle memorie migranti is cosmopolitan solidarity, which is usually understood as a practice that crosses spatial and communal boundaries. However, the ethics of solidarity also bridges past, present and future generations. Through the case of Archivio delle memorie migranti, this article demonstrates the significance of temporality in the theorization of cosmopolitan solidarity.
Distant Suffering, first published in 1999, examines the moral and political implications for a spectator of the distant suffering of others as presented through the media. What are the morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering on television, for example, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place? Luc Boltanski argues that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it. Developing ideas in Adam Smith's moral theory, he examines three rhetorical 'topics' available for the expression of the spectator's response to suffering: the topics of denunciation and of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. The book concludes with a discussion of a 'crisis of pity' in relation to modern forms of humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves an emphasis and focus on present suffering.
Television, the author argues, responds to two powerful desires of our age: it makes us witnesses of often traumatic events and it tries - and fails - to provide us with narratives that make sense of the world. The author makes sense of modern television, both by exploring its processes and in terms of its dynamic relationships with the cultures that provide it with raw material. Television, he proposes, offers us multiple ways of understanding the world, yet does not arbitrate between them. He explores this process as one of "working through", whereby television news takes in the chaos and conflict of the world and subsequent programmes of all kinds offer diverse ways of unravelling its confusions, from the psychobabble of talk shows to the open narratives of soaps, documentaries and dramas. By means of this working through, problems are exhausted rather than resolved. The author demonstrates how television's function in its new era is no longer that of building consensus; rather it uses all the means at its disposal, including sophisticated computer graphics, to mediate etween conflicting approaches to our age of uncertainty.
The author argues that we have obligations to our fellow citizens as well as to those outside our community. Since these obligations can conflict and since neither automatically trumps the other, the author provides the general principles needed to resolve the conflict. While rejecting the notion of global citizenship, he argues for a globally oriented national citizenship and spells out its political and institutional implications.
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.1 (2003) 88-124 In an editorial on photos of lynching recently exhibited at the New York Historical Society, reporter Brent Staples claims that “[t]he modern era takes it on faith that images of suffering stimulate sensitivity to that suffering.” Yet, he continues, the effect of these images is more often to brutalize spectators and “normalize” atrocity, turning the “likenesses of these events [into] a form of brutality in themselves.” Staples’s challenge to the modern era’s putative faith in the power of empathy—or what was called “sympathy” when it became an important quality of the feeling individual in the early nineteenth century—is a familiar one. The notion that images as well as narratives of suffering produce indifference, numbing, or emotional “death” is by now unremarkable. “The mind sickens and grows numb,” wrote George Steiner to describe the effects of so much brutality in the twentieth century (173–74). Political scientist Clifford Orwin notes: “The final pitfall of the new abundance of televised suffering is also the most ironic. It is the danger that constant exposure to such suffering will not sensitize but inure us to it” (49). Some scholars have defined a new problem in trauma studies they term “empathy fatigue” or “compassion fatigue,” in which numbness is explicitly conceived as a form of self-protective disassociation. And even those responsible for fund-raising in international humanitarian organizations, including Amnesty International and the French Doctors without Borders, have claimed that they face a “numb” public.
Certainly such pessimistic commentary is now commonplace. Yet its very repetition, pervasiveness, forcefulness, and tendency to hearken wistfully back to the very humane ideals it insists we can no longer live up to bears investigation, for this pessimism takes specific forms and expresses new historical restraints on imagination and feeling. Discourses about various impediments to empathic feeling have of course existed since the eighteenth century, when sympathy was first deemed a crucial component of the enlightened self, the feeling individual, and the new social order. In his “Letter on the Blind,” for example, Denis Diderot noted that distance inured us to the suffering of others, and satirists from Mandeville to Richardson sought to expose the exploitation and manipulation of sympathetic emotion by do-gooders (Ginzburg 62; Smith 9). In 1769, when sentimentalism was the height of fashion, the witty correspondent Madame Riccoboni wrote from Paris, “One would readily create unfortunates in order to taste the sweetness of feeling sorry for them” (qtd. in Boltanski 101). In this vein, significant denunciations of bourgeois moral hypocrisy from Balzac to Marx sought to reveal how the pity that moved the prosperous classes consolidated the very social hierarchies they bemoaned. Marx depicted a more consciously vicious bourgeoisie who profess pity but secretly revels in spectacles of pain, so that, for example, prominent wives of bourgeois politicians enthusiastically applauded the “revolting atrocities” to which Parisian Communards were subjected (52). In response to the images of violated and abused slaves that American abolitionists circulated in the early nineteenth century, several commentators noted that while they were meant to inspire moral action, the drawings often owed their impact to other more dubious pleasures (Haltunnen).
Thus efforts to inspire moral action on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised presumed that arousing human compassion required some symbolic proximity to the sufferer. One had to be inspired by the powers of imagination to feel the likeness to the sufferer that images or narratives of violation were meant to generate. These images, however, could also arouse the “wrong” sort of compassion, or insincere forms of sympathy. Diderot, Rousseau, and Balzac, among others, each presumed that all natural human compassion has socio-historical limits determined by the extent of our real likeness to others. Thus geographical, ethnic, and social distance may preclude or distort compassion: either distance extends across space and culture, so that when there are calamities in Japan, says Rousseau, I can’t get very worked up about them, or it is so deeply embedded in social difference that the poor become but...
Objectivity and dialogue are competing ideals in the practice of American journalism and in the way the press is analyzed and ethically evaluated. This article examines the relationship of these two ideals using tools from the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber and Michael Bakhtin. I argue that 'objective' journalism is part of an atmosphere that observes, maps, gathers information, and objectifies social phenomenon while keeping an outsider position and avoiding entrance into dialogical relationships. Such a position demonstrates a monologue that speaks in the ostensibly factual voice of the real world. But as the belief in objectivity waned through the postmodern crisis, the dialogical perception — as a general theoretical and methodological array of thought — started to flourish in communication studies and journalistic practices. The undermining process of the modernist objective, message-driven model of communication encouraged the rise of scholarly perceptions and journalistic practices that 'privatized' the communication process into various dialogical sites. Online journalism, with its interactive technological potential, marks another peak in the dialogic potential.
In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescrip- tion. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational mode of ethico-political labour, an arduous working-through produced out of the struggles of groups and persons who engage in testimonial tasks in order to confront corresponding perils produced by instances of situational or structural violence; it is the work of witnessing, the normative and politi- cal substance generated through the performance of patterns of social action, which matters. Using Celan's allegory of the poem as a message in a bottle, I consider bearing witness as a web of cosmopolitan testimonial practices structured around five dialectically related tasks and perils: giving voice to mass suffering against silence (what if the message is never sent or does not reach land?); interpretation against incomprehension (what if it is written in a language that is undecipherable?); the cultivation of empathy against indifference (what if, after being read, it is discarded?); remem- brance against forgetting (what if it is distorted or erased over time?); and prevention against repetition (what if it does not help to avert other forms of suffering?).
In most traditional accounts, to be a witness is to be physically present at an event and report it to those who are absent. The ontological principle that authorizes testimony is the individual's corporeal presence at the event, a presence often vouchsafed by the suffering of the witnessing body. The logical extension of this is that media audiences are not the witnesses of the events they see, but the recipients of someone else's testimony. I take issue with such an account, claiming that contemporary witnessing has become a general mode of receptivity to electronic media reports about distant others. Replacing the ontological primacy of the witness with the interpretive encounter with “witnessing texts,” I focus on these texts’ world-making properties and the imaginative demands they make of their addressees. Mass media witnessing situates this imaginative engagement with others within an impersonal framework of “indifferent” social relations, creating a ground of civil equivalence between strangers that is morally enabling.
Technological innovations in the generation and circulation of images have altered both the way death looks to contemporary audiences and the access publics have to representations of death and dying. While Western mainstream news providers conceal the corpse from public view, entertainment media renders death and the dead body in increasingly spectacular fashion, and documentary imagery of death proliferates online. I interrogate the historical relationship between imagery of death within newsmaking and the emergence of Hollywood's ultraviolent aesthetic, and explore the recent technological advances which enable novel regimes of post-mortem representation and their dissemination. Contemplating the traffic between fictional and documentary images, I develop my analysis around imagery of the dead produced during the current conflict in Iraq. I frame this analysis around footage of fatalities within recent documentary films and digital images posted online by coalition soldiers. These regimes of representation present unique issues regarding the ethics of representing the dead, the way in which ‘the real’ is signified, and the proximity of viewing publics to horrific imagery.
Technological innovations have meant that the way images of the victims of war and other categories of body horror are procured and disseminated has changed. Soldiers in theatre may record what they witness, and upload this material online. Terrorist groups have staged the executions of hostages for the camera and distributed this imagery via the internet. Thus, the circulation of body horror is enabled in ways that evade the prerogatives of the mainstream press to produce news which accords with notions of “taste and decency”, using practices which protect publics from imagery which may cause harm yet also often map with a propagandist function to conceal the carnage of war from public view. The essay explores online spectatorship which takes place outside that which is deemed appropriate for the publics of news, arguing that we must move beyond the reductive ways in which looking at body horror has been conceptualized. Neither witnessing, as the posited correct form of spectatorship, nor the pervasive pornographic analogy used to render moral judgment on such looking account for the diversity of spectatorial positions taken up by those who choose to look at online imagery of the dead and suffering.
This article is concerned with war reporting from Bosnia. It begins by examining the key issues involved in BBC reporter Martin Bell's controversial demand for a ‘journalism of attachment’. Bell clearly intended his intervention as a wake-up call for reporters, implied in accusations of misreporting during the Gulf War of 1991, and he insisted that reporters must be reflexive about their role in the conflict. It is argued here that Bell's attempt at defining the reporter as moral witness overlooks the specific responsibility of the reporter as secondary witness to the conflict. Taking the example of the German reporter Marina Achenbach, this article examines her reporting from Bosnia as an example of how journalists can be reflexive in their writing without abandoning the attempt to represent another culture. Influenced by post-colonial writing, it shows how Achenbach successfully forced her readers to reflect not only on their own role in the conflict but also on the ways in which this war changed them.
Abstract In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas explores the meaning of affect and its importance to educational efforts to create the classroom conditions necessary for students and teachers to become critical witnesses to trauma and oppression. Zembylas draws out some of the ethical and political possibilities that emerge through such efforts, and extends our thinking about the affective possibilities of witnessing. His aims are threefold: (1) to discuss the nature of affect and the affective economies of witnessing; (2) to show some of the ways in which classrooms and affect interact to produce a particular politics and ethics, especially in contexts of historical trauma; and (3) to provide a sketch of how progressive pedagogies based on witnessing can educate toward an understanding of affect that may encourage a transformative political response.
The past compels us for what it tells us about the present. It is no wonder, then, that nearly everyone with a voice claims territoriality for it - wide-ranging collectives like nation-states; large-scale interested groups bonded by ethnicity, class and race; professional communities driven by expertise, like historians, filmmakers or journalists. Each strives to colonize connections to the past as a way of lending credence, cohesion or even a simple perspective to life in the present.
Witnessing is a common but rarely examined term in both the professional performance and academic analysis of media events. This article explores the practice of witnessing in general to clarify such problems in media studies as veracity, reliability, liveness, responsibility and historicity. The long history of puzzlement and prescription about proper witnessing that developed in oral and print cultures is a rich resource for reflection about some of the ambiguities of audiovisual media.
The Gaza war controversy over positions of showing ('hill of shame' vs. 'Gaza street' views) throws into relief the moralizing power of a particular way of seeing, witnessing, that organizes Western war and conflict reporting around demands for pity about human suffering rather than demands for justice over the causes of war. Insofar as witnessing functions as the key mode of seeing in Western media, this article argues, it becomes responsible for reproducing hierarchies of place and human life that prioritise Western over non-Western suffering as a cause of emotion and action for media publics.