Responding: Passively and Actively
We do not simply view media: it has an effect on what we do next. This is not to resurrect early models of audience responses which claimed a simple, direct impact on behaviour, and which are now rightly out of fashion.[1060] As active moral agents, audiences can respond to and interact creatively with the news media and memories of what has been seen.
News about violence arguably influences viewers, shapes memories and in some circumstances even sets agendas. ‘Acknowledging that audiences are “active” does not mean that the media are ineffectual. Recognising the role of “interpretation” does not invalidate the concept of “influence”.'[1061] Violent news events in the media shape the symbolic environment in which we act, dream and believe. One response is to switch off or switch over. In States of Denial Stanley Cohen suggests there are many ways to block out what is seen.[1062] Susan Moeller shows how the viewer ‘resorts to compassion fatigue as defence mechanism against the knowledge of horror'.[1063] The never-ending repetition of images of suffering and violence can lead to a sense of powerlessness. On the other hand it may also provoke anger and even violent reactions, for example the attacks on Asians, assumed to be Muslims, in Britain and the USA following recent terrorist attacks. It is no surprise that photographs of Muslims being held in orange jump suits in Guantanamo Bay, being paraded naked or hooded in Abu Ghraib Prison or being massacred in Srebrenica, Bosnia (1995), are often cited negatively online and appear also to have contributed to the radicalisation of some young Muslims. Resentment can grow into the desire to meet violence with violence. And repeated viewing of these images feeds that resentment. In this way passive viewing can lead to active responses.The Norwegian scholar credited with laying many of the foundations for modern Peace Studies, Johann Galtung, argued that news can contribute to violent situations, with journalists tending too often to misframe or even misremember violence, and to focus on apparently irrational acts rather than structural causes. Elements ofJohn Birt and Peter Jay's well-known argument in the seventies, that news reports had a ‘bias against understanding', remain valid today.[1064] Galtung notes how many reports tend to reduce the number of parties in a conflict to two, and ignore the goals of outside interventionists, leading to what he describes as Manichaeism, with a good side and an ‘evil' side. He sees a related weakness in the failure to explore the causes of escalation, and indeed the impact of media coverage itself. Violence is presented as inevitable; alternatives are ignored. This viewpoint finds some support in Media and the Path to Peace in which Gadi Wolfsfeld concludes that ‘the news media generally play a negative role in attempts to bring peace’.[1065] Galtung goes further, claiming that ‘when news about attempts to resolve conflicts are absent, fatalism is reinforced. That can engender even more violence.’[1066] Images of peaceful outcomes are often left outside the news frame, and hence are easily forgotten. Robert Entman claimed that news frames offered prior to the Gulf War marginalised those proposing a negotiated settlement.[1067]
The result of ignoring structural elements in this episodic news process, according to Shanto Iyengar, ‘is the trivialization of public discourse’ and the lack of evidence to help audiences make informed moral choices in response to violence.[1068] Even in the supposedly more interactive internet, news providers work under constraints, including the necessity of framing stories to fit their site. So a popular blog such as Baghdad Burning interacted with television news.
Yesterday they were showing Sunni and Shia clerics praying together in a mosque and while it looked encouraging, I couldn’t help but feel angry. Why don’t they simply tell their militias to step down - to stop attacking mosques and... to stop terrorizing people? It’s so deceptive and empty on television - like a peaceful vision from another land.[1069]
This passage may be critical of television news, but it illustrates how news coverage, broadcast visual memories, provoke a strong response.
Such frustration with the limitations of the tools of their trade is shared by many journalists, as well as by their audiences. Fergal Keane writes of his work in Rwanda:
To this day I am at a loss to describe what it was really like. That smell. On your clothes, on your skin... This was not something I could convey with words or photographs or film... Our trade may be full of imperfections and ambiguities but if we ignore evil we become authors of a guilty silence.[1070]
As Jean Seaton says, ‘Journalists... are... travellers between moral worlds. They go from where you must not kill people, to where you have to.'[1071] The journalist in these situations acts as a witness of tragic suffering and tangible evil. They aim to ensure it is not forgotten.
Their efforts are not always wasted. Pablo Picasso famously created Guernica in response to news reports of aerial bombing, an artistic expression of grief, protest and rage,[1072] not only bearing witness to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (July 1936 to April 1939) but also anticipating the impact of conflict upon civilian populations in the World War soon to follow.