1 The ethics of global disaster reporting: Journalistic witnessing and the challenge to objectivity Karin Wahl-Jorgensen & Mervi Pantti Introduction It is through the media that most of us encounter disasters and bear witness to suffering around the world. In recent years we have witnessed a series of large-scale disasters, including the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the cyclone in Burma and the Sichuan earthquake in China in 2008, followed by devastating earthquakes in Haiti in 2010 and Japan in 2011, and the tsunami and nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. All have caused unforeseen loss of human life, intense social disruption and economic damage. The total number of natural disasters over the last two decades has quadrupled and during the same period more people have become affected by them (Oxfam International 2007). When mediated, disasters have the capacity to mobilize solidarities both within and beyond national borders. Media reports play a crucial role because they can position us as a global moral community and signal normative emotional and ethical responses on the part of both journalists and audiences. In a globalized world, disasters and crises have also become more mobile, crossing geographical boundaries and reverberating around the world. The witnessing of journalists is centrally connected to media technology. The key characteristic of journalistic witnessing is “being there” to provide eyewitness testimony. Such witnessing has taken on new forms and channels as communication technologies such as mobile telephony, the Internet and social media have entered the daily communications mix and both interpenetrate with mainstream media and provide overlapping and alternative communication channels. 2 Relating to these developments, new questions have arisen about the role of social media and citizen participation in circulating and constructing meanings of disasters and defining public knowledge, emotion and action in global, national and local contexts. For example, the Asian Tsunami in 2004 showed how “ordinary people” may have an increasingly important role to play in disaster coverage by providing immediate information and dramatic eyewitness images and accounts. The exponential increase in mobile telephony around the world in recent years played a key part in the relief efforts following the Haiti earthquake in 2010, alerting rescuers to the location of buried victims and communicating disaster relief services and raising money for relief efforts from donors around the world. Crises, including natural disasters, war, political conflicts, provide useful lenses for investigating journalistic routines and practices (Allan and Zelizer 2004b). This chapter explores some of the complexities of the ethical implications of changing practices of disaster reporting in a world where disasters are not only becoming more frequent but also more prominent in signaling processes of globalization. As Beck (2000: 15) argues: The underlying basis here is an understanding that the central human worries are “world” problems, and not only because in their origins and consequences they have outgrown the national schema of politics. They are also “world” problems in their very concreteness, in their very location here and now in this town, or this political organization. Global problems require global solutions, and journalistic practices play a crucial role in both enabling and limiting particular outcomes. Here, questions of ethics are central: Ethics pertains to the “analysis, evaluation and promotion of what constitutes correct conduct and virtuous character in light of the best available principles” and in the context of a consideration of journalism’s public roles and responsibilities (Ward 2008: 139; Ward 2009: 295-296). The field of journalism ethics, which examines the obligations surrounding the 3 behavior and practices of journalists and journalism is a dynamic and ever-changing field that is particularly challenged by the advent of globalization. And this is illustrated strikingly in disaster reporting, where, as we will argue, despite the continued importance of the nation state as the interpretive framework, globalization and new technologies have opened up for new models and understandings of the role of journalists. With respect to disaster reporting, debates on journalism ethics have historically focused on issues such as how to avoid “bad” journalistic behavior, particularly in relation to the invasion of the privacy of victims (e.g. Ewart 2003), and the representation of graphic images of death and suffering (e.g. Sanders 2003: 104, Ward 2009: 297). It has tended to examine cases where individual journalists and news organizations have violated codes of ethics and set aside concern for victims and families in their pursuit of sensational stories (Sanders 2003: 96) or, on the other hand, to provide guidance for journalists setting out to report on disaster and trauma. For example, the Dart Center for Conflict and Trauma has issued guidelines for journalists covering tragedy, and instructs, among other things, as follows: Avoid unneeded gory details about the victims’ deaths. After the Oklahoma City bombing, certain reporters chose not to reveal that body parts were dangling from the trees near the federal building. Ask yourself whether the images are pertinent or will do unnecessary harm to certain members of your readership or broadcast audience. (Dart 2003: 3) Such debates highlight the very real and high-stakes situations that journalists face in covering disaster and tragedy, and dramatize the tension between the ethical principle of avoiding harm and the commercial imperative that drives news operation. 4 Moving beyond these conventional areas of debates there is a relatively new and fertile area of research on disaster reporting which, although it only rarely explicitly discusses ethics (e.g. Chouliaraki & Orgad 2011, Tester 2001) is centrally concerned with the moral conduct of journalists and how it impinges on audience reactions. This research takes as its vantage point the context of globalization in examining the reporting of disasters around the world. It focuses on the role of compassion in disaster reporting which represents the suffering of distant others (e.g. Boltanski 1999, Chouliaraki 2006). The role of disaster reporting in engendering compassion and, relatedly, a cosmopolitan sensibility, turns on a particular understanding of journalistic practice. This is one which sees the journalist as actively involved in shaping and constructing the meaning of particular events in relation to understandings of the ethical responsibilities of the global community, nations, and individual citizens/audience members. Such an understanding is at odds with the conventional understanding of the detached and “objective” journalist, and signals a concurrent shift in the understanding of the role of emotion in journalistic practice. At the same time, it is strongly tied to and informed by emerging calls for a more cosmopolitan approach to journalism ethics: As Ward (e.g. 2005, 2008) has argued, the globalization of news media requires a radical rethinking of the principles and standards of journalism ethics which has traditionally been quite “parochial” in its approach. He and others have suggested that the adoption of a cosmopolitan attitude enables an enlargement of perspectives and an opening up to understanding the predicament of distant others through the cultivation of compassion. In this chapter, we wish to focus on emerging ethical questions around the journalistic cultivation of compassion and cosmopolitanism in the context of swift and profound changes wrought by globalization and new media technologies. We suggest that 5 disasters and their reporting have profound ethical implications not just in terms of understandings of the role of journalists in society and, relatedly, questions of journalistic conduct, but also in terms of how journalists and the texts they produce position audiences in ways that encourage particular modes of thinking and acting in relation to the suffering of distant others. We argue that while the negotiation of objectivity and detachment/engagement in covering stories is central to the everyday ethical labor of journalists, the concept of “bearing witness” to disaster calls these categories into question. We then consider how the forms of compassion that might be cultivated as a result of disaster coverage are not evenly distributed, but rather parceled out according to a geopolitically inflected “calculus of death,” where the nation state and its interests remain at the forefront despite the realities of globalization. Finally, we turn to the question of how new media technologies may be challenging orthodoxies of disaster reporting in opening up new forums for amateur contributions, broadening the global public sphere but also raising difficult ethical questions. Journalistic Witnessing as Emotional Labor The role of journalists in bearing witness to suffering is central to the ethical dilemmas of disaster reporting. Journalists’ witnessing creates the ethical and socio-political conditions under which we respond to distant suffering and global injustices (Kurasawa 2007, Peters 2001). Journalists are engaged in the labor of bearing witness by being present on the scene of suffering (see Allan and Zelizer 2004b, Peters 2001). The physical significance of “being there” is no less important in the present-day media landscape that permits technologically facilitated connectivity and proximity. Journalists on the ground in disasters - who experience the suffering and destruction on the behalf of audiences and victims – communicate their knowledge of the event, and at times also the emotional impact it has on 6 them as individuals. Through their personal testimonies, they turn audiences into witnesses as well (cf. Ashuri and Pinchevski 2009). Yet the issue of what it means to bear witness in an ethical manner is by no means straightforward because it invites questions pertaining to the epistemology of journalism: Does bearing witness mean that journalists tell stories of disastrous events in a detached, impartial and objective manner to convey the factual “truth”? Or does it entail a commitment to generating an understanding of the suffering which enables audiences to experience, and empathize with, the pain of others? Should journalists foster new moral and emotional bonds with distant others? Should they motivate the public to take action? Should journalists take on the role of a moral educator (e.g. Seib 2002, Chouliaraki 2008)? On the one hand, providing truthful accounts can be seen an end in itself in journalists’ witnessing (see Richards 2010). For instance, Leff (2010) argued that “[J]ournalists’ moral responsibility isn’t to elicit a particular reaction or outcome; their responsibility is to bring home the truth.” Truth, then, means raw “fact,” objectivity and neutrality. Indeed, such a perspective is compatible with conventional understandings of journalism ethics, underpinned by the ideal of objectivity as a cornerstone of the journalistic profession (e.g. Anderson and Schudson 2009). To observers such as Ward (e.g. 2005, 2008, 2010) questions of journalistic ethics have historically been intrinsically and foundationally tied to the ideal of objectivity, at least as conceived in Western, liberal democratic understandings of the role of the press (see also McNair 2011). Along those lines, journalism has been heavily invested in its claims to be a “facts-centered discursive practice” (Chalaby 1998). This conception places at center stage the conventional ideal of the journalist as an impartial and distanced observer whose main aim is to gather information for audiences/citizens, packaged in a garb of neutrality as “news from nowhere” (Epstein, 1973). Yet the grounding of journalism ethics in the ideal of objectivity has emerged from a 7 relatively parochial and narrow-minded understanding of the responsibilities of journalism (Ward 2008), and observers are now beginning to call for alternative understandings that take into consideration the consequences of globalization. Such understandings are often described with the label of “global journalism” (e.g. Berglez 2008, Ward 2008) and suggest that new realities – but also new intellectual resources – open up for a reconsideration of practices of objectivity and the cultivation of cosmopolitanism. Clearly, the established normative claims that journalists should provide the public with impartial testimony are called into question in the discussion of cosmopolitanism and global compassion. Journalists have an important role in the development of “cosmopolitan empathy” (Beck 2006: 7) in that that their testimonies can help to bring a global tragedy home, affect opinion and contribute to humanitarian action. The ability to imagine distant others’ suffering (and the possible moral action one can take) is seen as the basis of global compassion (e.g. Sznaider 1998: 123, Boltanski 2000, Seaton 2005: 265). The world’s neglected humanitarian emergencies have made it clear that the cultivation of cosmopolitan imagination and empathy is not a simple achievement. We have argued elsewhere that it requires the cultivation of both emotional and rational capacities among audiences (Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle 2012). Hence, journalists’ testimonial labor is not only rational but also emotional: it is about knowing and caring (see Bell 1998). As such, drawing up a binary distinction between emotional expression and detached objectivity may be a spurious and unhelpful exercise. In recent ethical assessments of disaster coverage, journalists’ witnessing of crises have been connected to some degree of emotional engagement. As Howard Tumber and Marina Prentoulis (2003: 227) have observed, there is a general call today for a more “human” reporting that departs from an old style “founded on a “macho” attitude that prohibited any display of emotion,” For instance, Ward (2010), in commenting on the Haitian earthquake coverage, argued that in disaster reporting emotional 8 and the objective dimensions of journalism should converge into what he calls a “humanistic journalism”: A journalism of disasters is not a journalism of Olympian detachment. It is not a journalism fixated on stimulating the emotions of audiences. It is a humanistic journalism that combines reason and emotion. Humanistic journalists bring empathy to bear on the victims of tragedy – an empathy informed by facts and critical analysis. In this view journalists are motivated by their own emotions and do something by generating empathy for the victims through their empathetic and informed analysis. However, “stimulating the emotions of audiences” arises here as a problem for responsible journalism. Disaster reporting increasingly permits or even requires that stories of disasters move beyond the “bare facts,” give voice to the victims and deploy affective ways of humanizing the suffering to resonate with audiences. Among other things, the Dart Center for Conflict and Trauma guide to coverage of tragedies advises the following: Focus on the person’s life. Find out what made the person special: personality, beliefs, environment (surroundings, hobbies, family and friends), and likes and dislikes. Treat the person’s life as carefully as a photographer does in framing a portrait. […] Use pertinent details that help describe victims as they lived or provide images of their lives. Example: “Johnny loved to play the guitar in the evening to entertain his family, but it also helped him escape the stress of his job as a sheriff’s deputy.” […] Use quotes and anecdotes from the victim’s relatives and friends to describe the person’s life. Especially those that tell how the person had overcome obstacles. 9 Seek current photos of the victim (but always return them as soon as possible). This way, you know what the person looked like in life. (Dart 2003: 6) Despite the growing emphasis on telling stories of tragedy and disaster that humanize victims and generate compassion among audiences demonstrated in this statement, journalists frequently resist the idea that they should display their own emotions or act as “emotional educators” who instruct audiences on how they should feel (Pantti 2010, Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle 2012). Echoing journalism’s traditional normative claim of objectivity and neutrality, the primary role journalists ascribe to themselves is that of the uninvolved witness: the task of a journalist is to “register” emotions of those involved in disasters, not to actively incite or manage public emotions. There is a conundrum in these professional and academic statements: journalists want audiences to care, whilst at the same time rejecting the idea that they have set out intentionally and deliberately to do so, as that would imply they have crossed the line of journalistic professionalism and its demarcations of impartiality, detachment and objectivity. These tensions regarding the hopes to elicit compassionate responses from them on the one hand, and remaining faithful to industrybased and professional expectations of emotionally detached journalism on the other are exemplified in the following statement, by a senior journalist who has covered a range of global disasters: It’s a very fine line. It’s a very difficult one to walk, I think. Because on the one hand, you do want to be impartial and I don’t want to tell you to feel desperately sorry for those people in Christchurch or for those people that were on the beach in Thailand when the tsunami hit on their honeymoon, or whatever the story is for that family in Eritrea that has had everything decimated. But at the same time, you want people to really care, because, you know, life is not a rehearsal and you should care. While you’re complaining because your 10 McDonald’s is a bit too hot, there are people dying that could be saved by the £2 you spent on that coffee. (BBC editor/reporter cited in Pantti, WahlJorgensen and Cottle 2012) Moreover, while journalists and news organizations see emotion as a legitimate part of disaster narratives – expressed for example by the testimonies of victims and eyewitnesses or embedded in emotionally engaging images and sounds – they tend to share the view that journalists should not bring their own emotional responses into their reporting (Pantti 2010). This raises important ethical questions about what happens when journalists bear witness to their own experiences, rather than providing accounts of the suffering she or he has observed: Could such practices actually contribute to convicting ”the conscience of the observer” (Peters 2001: 713)? Do emotional expression and physical signs of emotions (such as the reporter’s voice trembling with anger) add to the authenticity and thereby to the moral force of witnessing? The normative distinction between giving a channel to the emotions of people affected by a tragedy on the one hand, and making journalists’ own feelings visible on the other is drawn up clearly in BBC correspondent David Loyn’s (2003) plea for objective journalism: “This [objective] approach is not dispassionate. It can be hugely passionate, requiring emotional engagement and human imagination. But it is not about my passion, how I feel. The viewer or listener does not want to know how I feel, but how people feel on the ground.” In recent years, the discussion about a shift towards a more emotional and engaged disaster reporting has intensified. For instance, CNN International's managing director Chris Cramer suggested that the Asian tsunami changed how journalists report the news: What has been different about much of the reporting, particularly on TV, has been that the emotional attachment between reporter and victim has been obvious. Gone is the professional, some might say artificial, detachment ... Now, for the first time, media 11 professionals are starting to tell us how they feel about some stories. And it will probably make them better journalists. (Cited in Lyall 2005) It seems that the emotional involvement of the journalist has become more acceptable, or even expected in certain situations. What has changed is that new media platforms and forms representing different expressive styles facilitate professional and nonprofessional journalists’ emotional involvement in their stories. Journalists, then, seem to find increased cultural license and media opportunity to reflect on their own emotional turmoil and the dilemmas of witnessing traumatic disasters. Carmit Wiesslitz and Tamar Ashuri (2011) argued that online journalism has fostered the emergence of a new journalistic model which they call “the moral journalist”; unlike the “objective” journalist who is supposed to remain outside of events, “the moral journalist” (who is, however, typically non-professional) presents their personal experiences as they witness the suffering and pain of others with the aim of changing the witnessed reality. Personal accounts and emotional confessions circulate in online and traditional media where journalists proclaim not only to care about the stories they are reporting on, especially when embedded in the disaster zone and confronting human tragedy, but also give vent to their own emotions in doing so. With the growing awareness that reporters are subjected to traumatization when witnessing the suffering of others, it has become easier to see journalists as vulnerable human beings who respond emotionally like the rest of us (Beam and Spratt 2009, Rentschler 2009). Along those lines, the Dart Center for Conflict and Trauma has reflected, in a variety of reports and statements, on the emerging recognition that journalists, caught up in traumatic events are themselves subject to the post-traumatic stress that is widely seen to affect victims, emergency workers and anyone else close to the disaster (Dart 2003). If anything, the demands of conventional practices of objectivity may make it more difficult for journalists to recover from their exposure to trauma: ”Journalists who cover any “blood-and-guts” beat 12 often build a needed and appropriate professional wall between themselves and the survivors and other witnesses they interview. But after reporters talk with people who have suffered great loss, the same wall may impede the need of journalists to react to their own exposure to tragedy” (Dart 2003: 3). In the emerging “human” culture of reporting, becoming emotionally involved in a story is not automatically deemed unprofessional, but is rather viewed as an inescapable reality of journalistic work. As journalism educators Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach (2005) noted in their comment on the surge of emotional expression among U.S. journalists who covered the Hurricane Katrina in 2005, journalists “are in essence our surrogate observers. It would have been odd, even distressing to most, if reporters had reacted like journalistic robots to the devastation in the Gulf Coast.” One much discussed example where a journalist “crossed the line” from the position of the distant observer was BBC reporter Ben Brown’s interview in Aceh in Indonesia with a woman who had lost her husband and four children in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. A neutral interview turned into an awkward act of comforting as Brown put his arm around the woman who was weeping and clinging to him. The appeal of this footage was described by a managing editor for CNN, Nick Wrenn: “The Ben Brown incident really brought it home to me—just the raw emotion of it. And it is an emotional experience, and I think sometimes you have to engage. To me that was one of the most powerful packages that I saw out of all the broadcasters.” (Dart 2005) Despite the increased cultural license to display and elicit emotions, most journalists continue to subscribe to ideals of objectivity as conventionally understood, in terms of impartiality and detachment. At the same time, they nonetheless concede that not only do they care but they want their news reports to help audiences to care as well, pointing to the need for an understanding of objectivity that allows for a journalism which has the capacity to articulate and enable affective engagements. The question of how such an 13 understanding may translate into practice remains open and contested: There is no normative consensus over what emotions journalists ought to display, and when and how, but the issues around journalists’ emotional expression that are typically discussed include the situational appropriateness and authenticity of emotional responses, the “right amount” of emotion for the situation (not too much, or too little of it), and the motivation behind the display of emotion (Pantti 2010). What can we say about the advantages of a more emotionally oriented approach to reporting? A more emotionally engaged approach has been seen to help generate a new moral imaginary when bearing witness to human suffering. It has been argued that journalists should learn to care more about their stories and “allow themselves to feel the anguish of what it’s like to be a victim” to be able to help people to see injustice and suffering as something that must be addressed instead of offering them comfort or excitement (Santos 2009: 39). As Willis (2003: 129) claimed, “readers and viewers become more engaged in a story if they feel the reporter cares about the story, the people in it, and cares enough about the reader or viewer to write a story evidencing that care.” There is, then, a recognition that a journalism ethics for a globalized world in which disasters are increasingly frequent and prominent should not be predicated on a strict view of the journalist as an impartial, detached and distant observer, but rather as someone who is able to put themselves in victim’s shoes – to empathize with their predicament – and might thereby build compassion and solidarity in audiences. Journalism, Disaster and Geopolitics: The Limits of Compassion At the same time, however, we would also suggest that the cosmopolitan imagination – and hence the possibilities for the cultivation of compassion -- is restricted by the nationally and geopolitically inflected narratives of disasters (Chouliaraki 2006). This 14 means that the opportunities for more compassionate ways of reporting and, hence, new understandings of journalistic ethics are not evenly distributed but are instead profoundly informed by global power relations, or by what we might call the “geopolitics of disaster coverage.” By this term we mean to emphasize that under conditions of globalization, where the media have become an arena for the ongoing reinforcement and contestation of global power relations, disaster coverage and the audience reactions it constructs are heavily influenced by geopolitics at the levels of ideology and journalistic practice. As such, this term enables us to understand the subtle ways in which disaster coverage is inherently informed by politics, rather than considering the journalists’ social obligations first and foremost, as it always “points to” the nation state (Billig 1995) and its role within dynamic global power relations. As Chouliaraki (2006: 22) argues, the relationship between spectators and the distant victims of disasters reflect the global distribution of power: “…it is always ‘audiences in North America or Western Europe [that] react to knowledge of atrocities in East Timor, Uganda, or Guatemala,’ rather than the other way round.” Geopolitics plays a role at the level of journalistic practice because it informs the allocation of resources and the prioritization of particular stories over others. When disasters make the news, it is often the result not merely of any objective measure of the “seriousness” of the disaster, as indicated by the loss of life, but of where the disaster happened and who it affects (see also Mody 2010). This, in turn, has profound consequences for how audiences understand the world and the people who inhabit it. Coverage of disasters is informed by concerns about “compassion fatigue” or the public’s limited attention to major global crises, including disease, famine, war and death, caused by what critics such as Susan Moeller (1999) have identified as irresponsibly event-oriented, sensationalist and short-termist media coverage which exhausts audiences in its relentless and unending parade of death and horror. 15 A 1995 large-scale content analysis by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press concluded that “the way the media covers international news may be doing little to change the American public's indifference to concerns about world events and foreign policy” (1995: 1). The study highlighted features of international coverage which have been consistently documented by scholars: News organizations tend to prioritize domestic news, or news that has a clear domestic “angle”, they cover different regions according to their perceived importance and focus on dramatic, violent and conflictual stories. They therefore fundamentally construct “The Foreign” as a place of violence, conflict, danger and spectacle, and disaster coverage is no exception. Although the report identified what its authors saw as distinctive features of American international coverage, such as an emphasis on unbiased and objective reporting, the nation-centered orientation of international news that it identified reflects a broader set of long-standing journalistic practices which cut across geographical boundaries and arise on the basis of a complex combination of ideological causes and professional routines that structure understandings of what counts as “newsworthy” These power relations also pervade the reporting of disaster, demonstrating “glaring differences that reflect global hierarchies of place and human life” (Joye 2009: 45). The global hierarchy of suffering invests more significance in the disasters and traumatic events that claim Euro-American victims, while suffering outside the West is routinely minimized or ignored. This practice, in turn, normalizes and perpetuates global inequalities. For example, Joye (2010) found that Flemish television news devoted about 50 percent of their coverage to European disasters, even though they only accounted for a total of 11.4 percent of all disasters that occurred over the period studied. On the basis of this geopolitical hierarchization, Joye argued that proximity, understood as a meta-concept covering over “cultural affinity, historical links, geographical distance, trade or economic relations as well as psychological or emotional distance” can be seen as a powerful predictor of disaster 16 coverage. Indeed, measures of proximity in this broader and more politicized sense matter because journalists, in selecting what stories to cover, make assessments about the affective response on the part of the audience and hence construct and delimit the cultivation of compassion and cosmopolitanism. In the case of the 2011 earthquake in Japan and the subsequent tsunami, much of the media’s attention quickly turned to the disaster’s consequences for the global economy, shaken by the long-standing financial crisis as well as by upheaval in the Middle East. This coverage highlighted the geopolitical significance of Japan. Media reports emphasized the interconnectedness of the global economy, as everything from the sale of smartphones to the production of cars was affected by the earthquake. The shocks of the earthquake, in other words, were felt as shocks to the global economy, as automotive factories around the world had to shut down and the stock markets reeled. For example, a commentary in the British quality newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, published on 14 March 2001, three days after the earthquake and tsunami struck, opened by suggesting that “amid the scale of the human catastrophe, any consideration of the economic consequences of the Japanese earthquake might seem faintly distasteful if not even perverse. Yet any disaster on this scale also has the capacity for extreme long-term economic damage and Japan is going to require careful management over the months ahead.” It then considered in detail the financial consequences of the disaster in a global context: The immediate impact will almost certainly be to push Japan back into technical recession. Fortunately, the area most directly affected is quite sparsely populated by Japanese standards and in economic terms not particularly important. The region hit by the Kobe earthquake in 1995 was in this regard of considerably more consequence. 17 Nonetheless, the effect of the quake has been to bring economic activity to a grinding halt, rather in the way September 11, a comparatively localised event, managed to create a temporary hiatus across the entire US economy. […] All the same, the history of such disasters is that after a brief lull, economic activity tends to bounce back, boosted by heavy spending on renewal. After this assessment, which, among other things, reassuringly stated the relative unimportance of the affected region and could be viewed, by the admission of its author, as both distasteful and perverse, the article concluded as follows: “What can be said with certainty is that the world economy needed another disaster like a hole in the head. The best that can be said for this one is that unlike most economic disasters, at least it wasn't manmade.” This piece was not unique in its callousness, but instead was symptomatic of a larger trend of focusing attention away from the scale of human suffering and hence the cultivation of compassion, and towards questions of the impact of the disaster on global and national economies. The scale of this coverage was unprecedented: A Nexis UK search showed that in the two weeks following the earthquake and tsunami, there were a total of 1454 articles on the global economic consequences of the disaster in major world newspapers. Though the case of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was unusual precisely because of Japan’s central importance to the global economy, it also forcefully demonstrated the geopolitical logic of disaster reporting which means that the extent to which disaster reporting might cultivate an ethics of compassion depends largely on where the disaster happens and who suffers its consequences. In other words, if there is no such thing as “news from nowhere” (Epstein 1973) discourses ostensibly generating a cosmopolitan sensibility are rarely politically innocent. If respect for the “rights of others” (Benhabib 2004) is central to cosmopolitanism, the 18 geopoliticized nature of discourses on disaster means that some victims have more rights than others, insofar as their representation is more likely to give rise to audience compassion and hence action and intervention. This demonstrates that questions of ethics in disaster reporting need to be linked to an analysis of power relations– not just between individuals, but also between nation states – and the ways in which they determine the extent to which journalists foster an ethics of compassion (cf. also Moeller 1999). Thinkers have long recognized that compassion and solidarity are created through individualized storytelling which enables audiences to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Hannah Arendt (1968: 104) thus suggested that story-telling about individual lives are able to connect up to larger issues of the common good by penetrating “the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.” As the narrator in Graham Greene’s classic novel, The Quiet American, observed, “suffering is not increased by numbers, one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel” (cited in Benthall, 1993: 196). Nevertheless, the politics of pity (Boltanski, 1999: 3-19) generated out of stories about distant sufferers tends to be crafted out of a stock of geopoliticized discourses, often with a postcolonial tint. Rather than challenging global power relations, it might reinforce notions of the superiority of Western nations. Such a narrative does not invite compassion in the sense of a genuine recognition of the fundamental rights of distant others (cf. Benhabib 2004). Indeed, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has been critical of claims around cosmopolitan regimes, under which he fears that human rights become the rights of victims (cf. Fine 2007: 80) or “of those unable to enact any rights or even any claim in their name, so that eventually their rights had to be upheld by others” ((Rancière, 2004, p. 298). To Rancière, such representations work to justify humanitarian military intervention, in itself a project predicated on the naturalization of particularly Western normative regimes, 19 and seen by critics as underwriting neo-colonial projects. However, Chouliaraki (2006) has suggested that rather than assuming the best we can achieve is a politics of pity, we need to carefully distinguish between different types of disaster coverage and the forms of emotional response that they elicit to better understand the ethical implications of the spectatorial positions constructed. To this end, she has proposed a typology of three different forms of news of suffering, what she calls “adventure,” “emergency” and “ecstatic” news. Adventure news is “news of suffering without pity,” characterized by brief, factual reports represented by a “void of agency” because of the absence of any human actors from the story. As a result, “there is no possibility of human contact between the other and the spectator.” By contrast, emergency news is “news of suffering with pity,” which represents victims as individuals who can be helped by the action of distant others. Finally, ecstatic news, exemplified by coverage after the September 11 attacks, brings the sufferers as close to the spectators as possible, opening up a space for identification (Chouliaraki, 2006: 10-11). On the basis of her analysis of these three types of news, Chouliaraki concludes that news of suffering “reserves the spectators’ capacity to connect for those who are like ‘us’ while blocking this same capacity for the largest majority of world sufferings – those experienced by distant ‘others’” (2006: 181). The suffering of those who are proximate and similar in a geopolitical sense, in other words, is far more likely to attract ecstatic news coverage. It seems, then, that there is a scope for disaster reporting to open up for a cosmopolitan imagination – one which is premised on a form of journalistic witnessing which allows audiences to empathize with the suffering of distant others. Nonetheless, the possibilities for the cultivation of cosmopolitanism are inhibited by structural features of disaster reporting – as, indeed, of journalism more broadly – namely those of the apparently inevitable grounding in the nation state, and the structuring role of geopolitical power relations. This form of parochialism may, however, be under challenge by 20 the emergence of new media technologies which generate new modes of witnessing and broadens the range of witnesses from professional journalists to a larger global public sphere which draws on both amateur and professional voices. Non-Professional Eye-Witnesses Indeed, one of the most significant changes in disaster reporting – and in media witnessing in general - in recent years is the proliferation of “citizen journalism.” With new visual-driven communication technologies enabling new opportunities for documenting and distributing information across the globe, ordinary people are playing an increasingly active role in the labor of bearing witness to distant suffering and in disaster response in general. As Frosh and Pinchevski (2009a) argue, crises or disasters today are not only something that audiences “see” in the media as the ultimate witnesses of tragic events but something “they are increasingly socialized to create” as the most important producers of mediated testimonies. Images, in particular, have become a vital part of non-journalists’ witnessing, and a powerful – but problematic – source for professional journalism (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2011). It can be argued that the camera phone has become an essential tool in the current destabilization of the border between professional journalism and “citizen journalists”. The “citizen camera witnessing” is intrinsically a transnational phenomenon as eyewitness accounts are increasingly being addressed to a global public via social networking sites or transnational media channels. In addition, citizen photographs are particularly effective in appealing to viewers’ emotions, and can become propelled by the international news media into global media events. At this juncture, the eyewitness’ ability to have an influence on public discussion and upset authorities seems be greater than ever before. Today’s eyewitnesses are themselves capable of creating and distributing media content 21 without mediators functioning as gatekeepers determining who qualifies as a witness and counterbalancing the eyewitness’ subjective position by its truth-telling rituals and ethical rules (Ashuri & Pinchevski 2009: 139, Thomas 2009: 101, Zelizer 2007: 421). Amateur photographs and video typically enter mainstream news in situations when the news event is unexpected or sudden (as was the case with the 2004 tsunami), or when journalists’ access to the scene has been inhibited (as happened for example with the post-election protests in Iran in 2009 and also during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011). Thus, the importance of citizen images of breaking news events arises from the fact that they provide instant and “raw” eye-witness accounts of unfolding events. By doing so they help to establish journalism’s own claims to authority that allows news organizations and journalists to present their accounts of reality as truthful and relevant (Zelizer 2007). The 2004 Tsunami coverage has often been identified as the decisive moment not only in adopting a more emotionally engaged reporting style but also in the use of citizens’ eyewitness imagery in professional news coverage (Riegert et al. 2010; Zelizer 2010: 244-266). The video footage and photos of the tsunami we witnessed in the mainstream media was, in Barbie Zelizer’s words, “close-up, grounded in real time, personal, genuine, explicit, and terrifying” (2010: 249). Citizen imagery is often credited with providing crisis reporting with a new kind of closeness, that is, a heightened sense of emotional identification through the “raw”, immediate and subjective testimonials of ordinary people struggling to bear witness to the scene around them. Images taken by involved citizens promise to eradicate barriers of physical and social distance between spectators and sufferers seen in the media (see e.g. Chouliaraki 2008). At the same time, they raise several ethical questions for professional journalism. To start with, the physical presence of “being there” does not guarantee 22 responsible reporting (see Silverstone 2006) and some observers have asked whether new visual technologies might in fact contribute to the creation of “citizen paparazzi” rather than “citizen journalists” (Glaser 2005). Citizen images’ much appreciated “aura of authenticity” arises from the fact that the pictures are generated by individuals involved in the events rather than journalists as “detached observers” (Pantti and Bakker 2009; Williams, Wahl-Jorgensen and Wardle 2011). However, as Ashuri and Pinchevski (2009:140) write, involvement may come with the annihilation of perspective. The moral foundation of witnessing that includes recording significant events, revealing conditions of injustice and creating empathy towards sufferers does not necessarily hold in a situation where every participant can become an eyewitness. As Mette Mortensen writes, sometimes “being there” and being able to snap pictures seems to be a sufficient motive for an eyewitness: “Much contemporary eyewitnessing appears to be an extension of the mundane habit of visually documenting our lives, that is, when passers-by photograph a fire or a traffic accident with their mobile phones” (2011: 72). While the work of bearing witness is greatly enhanced by the existence of global public spaces where eyewitnesses’ accounts of distant suffering can be widely disseminated and responded to, the challenges of structural inequality remain largely the same. There is no guarantee that citizen witnessing will narrow the distance between the interests of “people like us” and the suffering of distant others. It appears that the citizen witnessing is no less connected to geopolitical power relations and to the cultural attribution of meaning and significance to disasters than mainstream media representations. That some disasters remain forgotten and some voices are silenced is seen in some recent studies. In her study on BBC convergent news of the Haiti earthquake, Chouliaraki (2010) asserted that the boundary between the “silent sufferer” and the “speaking Westerner” is not necessarily disappearing with the new media technologies and online platforms that have allowed for the 23 proliferation of ordinary voices, as the vast majority of non-journalist testimonial messages come from NGOs and other Westerners indirectly affected by the disasters. The “who” and “why” questions of citizen testimonials are central when we think about responsible journalism. The problem of establishing who produced a particular photograph or video clip (and why, when and where) as well as their typically graphic nature renders the journalistic value of non-journalists’ images complex, and it is clear that they raise specific ethical issues that the mainstream media must deal with before it can publish or broadcast them to avoid jeopardizing the core journalistic value of truth-telling. Professional journalists in different European countries distinguish themselves from the citizen journalists or amateurs by referring to their editorial judgment (what is relevant, accurate and “good”) and commitment to ethical codes and practices such as verification (Pantti and Bakker 2009). In today’s networked media environment, however, acts of publishing are not simply about truth-telling and revealing new information, but also about making ethical statements. For example, by publishing (or deciding not to publish) images from non-professional photographers which are already available in the public domain, news organizations make a claim about their ethics. Interviews with Finnish Broadcast and print journalist point to the fact that most of the amateur imagery they receive through international news organizations is too graphic to show to a general public, or it can be shown only by using various ‘distanciation’ techniques (such as using black and white images) or identifying it as disturbing content (cf. Becker 2011). As Karin Becker writes, journalists have long developed strategies to incorporate pictures produced outside journalism’s editorial control into the professional discourse: “In order to include the aura of “truth” embedded in the private picture’s apparent closeness and lack of control, journalism must frame the picture within its own agenda of news, including the ethical considerations that entail” (Becker 2011). 24 In a new situation where professional newsmakers are competing with nonprofessional photographers, it is increasingly difficult to assert any collective ethical standard in producing and publishing images. However, establishing general principles for the use of non-journalist imagery of disasters is a crucial task for global journalism ethics taken the increasing power of amateur visuals to define global publics, frame significant events, and shape the news production (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2011). Codes of ethics, which have traditionally neglected visual reporting, were largely written before the explosion of digital photography and especially camera phones, and as a study of U.S. journalism ethics codes shows, they do not provide a sufficient framework for dealing with issues of authenticity or how to handle graphic images across media platforms (Keith, Schwalbe and Silcock 2006). News organizations face a constant need to make decisions about whether or not to show violent images, which ones to use and why, where to show them (on broadcast news bulletin or online news) and how to present them (e.g. should they be digitally edited to reduce their horror factor; how should they be captioned and contextualized) (see Perlmutter and Hatley 2004). While these decision-making dilemmas prompted by images of death and violence are far from new, the fact that graphic, newsworthy images are today “everywhere” makes established media organizations' decisions more important – and difficult. It has been suggested that for news organizations wishing to appear respectable, the figure of the amateur provides “an ethical bumper” for presenting graphic images: “The amateur, willing to point his or her camera at anything, shoulders the ethical responsibility of producing such footage. Meanwhile, the network can frame such footage with multiple declaimers about its ‘disturbing content,’ while simultaneously reaping the benefits of presenting a more graphic picture of a given event” (Bridge and Sjøvaag 2010). John Taylor (1998) writes that journalists’ codes of ethics have traditionally restricted them from displaying dead bodies, dying people and bloody details of a violent 25 event. In practice, as we have discussed above, there is a well-documented hierarchization of death and violence which means that graphic imagery is usually reserved to those deaths that are not perceived to be literally or culturally close in geopolitical terms. The proliferation of amateur imagery that does not adhere to the standards of “good taste and decency” governing mainstream news media, together with a global reach of today’s journalism, makes this is a question global media ethics needs to address. Conclusions: Cosmopolitanism and Crisis Reporting In this chapter, we have explored key ethical issues surrounding the coverage of disasters in a globalized environment characterized by swift technological change. We have suggested that one key development wrought in part by globalization is the emergence of a new lens through which to view the ethics of disaster reporting; one through which journalists are not necessarily viewed as distanced, impartial and detached observers first and foremost, but rather as witnesses to the suffering of distant others who are able to paint vivid and compelling pictures of the experience on the ground so as to cultivate compassion in audiences. This conception challenges conventional understandings of journalism ethics as tied to a conventional understanding of objectivity, but also opens up for broader conceptions of the roles and responsibilities of journalists. To be more specific, our consideration of disaster reporting suggests that a more normatively desirable and practicable model of objectivity incorporates an understanding of journalism as a discourse which often has affective registers and consequences and may open up for the cultivation of compassion. Nonetheless, we have also argued that openings for compassion and cosmopolitanism are not evenly distributed, but profoundly determined by what we have referred to as the geopolitics of disaster reporting. It means that victims in geopolitically proximate countries and regions are more likely to be represented in compassionate ways, and also that the construction of 26 suffering is informed by concerns about the health of a globalized economy, as in the case of the 2011 Japanese earthquake. This suggests that any consideration of how to articulate and realize a journalistic ethics of compassion cannot be ignorant of global power relations. However, we have also argued that even if the “home nation” remains at the forefront, a space remains for the cultivation of cosmopolitan sensibilities based on the forging of emotional connection. Along those lines, a just ethical approach would be one which takes for granted the moral duty of considering all human experiences of loss, suffering, and death equally worthy of compassion, and makes this explicit in the training of journalists, the writing of codes of ethics, as well as in newsroom practices and procedures. Finally, we suggested that the increasing use of amateur imagery in disasters creates new ways of sharing information about disaster which might heighten emotional involvement, this development also raises new ethical questions around the responsibility of non-professional journalists which need to be addressed urgently. It seems, then, that globalization and new media technologies have destabilized categories long taken for granted in discussions of journalism ethics – particularly those of objectivity and professionalism. If anything, recent developments remind us that the truth claims on which journalism and its ethics rest are always fraught, contingent and open to contestation.