Compassion fatigue is a condition signaled by a way of gradual losing of compassion over time, which leads to much of the news reporting failure nowadays. It has been caused widespreadly in the society by journalists based on many arguments about the media’s roving journalism, the audiences’ short attention span, the media’s precoverage with happening crises, the audiences’ apathy with global news (Moeller, 2016, p. 2). The compassion fatigue now is becoming a paramount restraint which keeps news producers away from covering the events unattractive for audience. Amid the lost empathy about tragedy news stories of audiences, according to Hiltermann (1994, p. 68), reporters will be trying to find more sensational tidbits to edit orchestrated information so as to sustain readership, which may be against the “objectivity” principle of news writing, while other scholars argue that the faded passion has a weak effect on the principle. This study demonstrates that compassion fatigue affects objective reporting considering that editors take sensationalism, formulaic coverage and localized reporting as solutions to avoid the fatigue, rather than writing thought-provoking stories.
Sensationalism
Sensationalism is regarded as an editorial tactic reacting to compassion fatigue by which journalists select the particular events and word them to enthuse the audiences as well as creating colored impressions of these stories instead of neutrality (Gunter, 1997, p. 3).
The quality of news coverage does not necessarily get improved as its increased sensational concept, although the best slot is always prepared for the extravagant stories which is considered to merit people’s attention. Based on Moeller’s (2016) research, “the Ebola/Rwanda/Somalia Standard” is the minimum level of acceptable tragedy news story recognised by journalists, which virtually raises up the criteria of further similar coverage (p. 317). During the period of genocide in Rwanda, the newspapers occupied the event through rare violent and bloody pictures, which was similar with the measure used by media that referred the Ebola outbreak in Zar with special terms such as “apocalypse bug” or “the ultimate horror”. It is therefore a clear rule that a single death, a flooding or an usual epidemic, even some deadly crises that do kill many people but are not inherently horrendous, are not eligible to be made for quality news, only if journalists sensationalize them to horrific stories through relentless pictures and emotional language. More and more dramatic coverage is thus emerging in the purpose of eliciting the level of compassion same as the last extremely abhorrent disaster. Some words and phrases, such as “the unprecedented crisis in the world” or “a tragedy of the century”, become the indications of gold standard news coverage.
The same tread can also be found on TV reporting. From the perspective of John Donvan, a reporter of one TV’s program “Nightline”, audiences were unconsciously trapped between fiction and fact given that one of episodes of “Nightline” describing Ebola was opened with several clips of a movie named “Outbreak”. As the way media covered crises before, Ebola was finally presented as a death-dealing risk due to related coverage processed by sensationalism so that other banal events were weak in comparison and were underreported, which illustrated that the yardstick of news values has changed. It is thus worth noticing that thanks to the sensationalism, the compassion fatigue does not guide readers to follow a series of stories which can keep them out of the indifference and boredom, but makes no other coverage to follow in the first place because of media’s ignorance and disappreciation to it.
It is also stated by many academic research that the media is used to building particular image deliberately for some areas which make audiences interested in, whilst hiding a part of truth of it. News reports of southern events, especially in the developing world, are generally found more sensational than that of the west or north. Africa has been covered heavily for many years either as a place bombarded with war, starvation and horrible epidemic or a scientific-research base focused on various animals (Kohut & Toth, 1996, p. 8). As a result, the stereotype of Africa - a disaster-swept continent - has been constructed due to the persistence of negative words and images used by journalists, despite its stone town and Kilimanjaro of Zanzibar or the Namib Desert of Namibia known worldwide.
Formulaic coverage
Formulaic news coverage is the consequence of keeping using the same criteria to judge news value and the same method to cover a fixed type of news mechanically. It is a series of uniformed news which is essentially caused by the panic of journalists led by the compassion fatigue. Faced by the rapidly diminishing interests of readers to news for sympathy, the most effective competing measure discovered in media business is to follow other companies to select and edit news information while aiming to court the audiences - focusing on the similar topic, using the similar image and description language, writing in the similar structure - to avoid any unpredictable risk led by completing the work on reporting a news event independently (Moeller, 2016, p. 13). The reporting in the news market becomes less various than before, alongside with the decreased richness of every single news’ content, amid that news is gradually packaged as products to audiences.
People worldwide are allegedly more likely to pigeonhole all events into a dichotomy of good guys and bad guys. For example, for Americans, identifying white people they support and encouraging their victory is the ultimate purpose of reading news. Almost every news is consequently based on strong contrast of characters as readers expected, which contributes to deepening stereotypes of particular groups in people’s mind so that audiences are not able to distinguish these impregnable biased beliefs with the facts (Höijer, 2003, p.21). The disaster stories are especially written as scripts with morality play language in which “angels” and “demons” fight for the advantage. The characters - victim, devil and rescuer - are three indispensable essentials for all news coverage, while the victims must be vulnerable groups worthy of sympathy. Arranging extreme pictures, such as setting a photo of pitiful refugees with an image of dictators throwing missiles together, to explain who is bad and who is good is the habit of media. Therefore, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are undoubtedly invidious culprits, the hundreds and thousands of refugees all become innocent victims.
Secondly, even the content of coverage with similar theme can be formulaic. News with the same nature can always be streamlined into exactly the same news, under a rule that the shape of reporting is dictated by the past several comparable news stories, not the news itself. The cruel news, such as flooding, famine, hurricanes and earthquakes, looks same for many years thanks to a designed template for this type of coverage. The only difference among them is the place and name. Many stories all develop in the same chronological order. For the case of assassination, only three scenarios - death, mourning and funeral - are used by news editors to tidy up the whole complicated crisis. The assassination of president John Kennedy is almost the same with the Ur assassination in the aspect of news reporting; it is difficult now to cover such a case differently. Vergobbi (1992) explained that the speeding car, the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson and the funeral process were all the assassination-related pictures imprinted in the minds of people who have lived through this for a long time (p. 236).
Thirdly, the news stories are generally simplified once they have been reported. These coverage in the market is arduous to understand as reading events they occupied is like reading chapter 1 repeatedly or opening a book in chapter 20 suddenly. Readers are not allowed to learn what happened before or what will come next. Only “where, what, who, when” are provided in the reports, rather than “why” and “how”.
The simplification can especially be seen in the disaster coverage. For instance, editors tend to ignore the causes and solutions of famine so as to misguide readers that the famine is a natural disaster out of human’s control. Therefore, a careful assessment of the factors for famine can be avoided and causes of that will be blamed to a simple problem, such as the drought which is purported leading to the famine in Ethiopia from 1984 to 1985. Finally, oversimplified solutions will be suggested amid the simplistic causes-providing more money - to emphasize the power of assisting agencies and to weaken the influences of indigenous efforts. These formulaic reports barely dig deeper into the calamity to indicate the key factors of the famine are region’s money and technology, instead they divert audiences’ attention to foreign aid.
Meanwhile, journalists rarely revisit the coverage published several months or years ago, however, it is found that the incomplete or fake news can always be improved or pointed out in the follow-up.
In addition, monotonous news theme as one of the feature of formulaic coverage limits people’s sights to the reports of wider dimensions. Most readers are presented only with civil war, diseases and famine, with the same pictures used over and over again (Soloski,1989). The particularities these stories level are consistent. For the case of famine, it would not be reported unless there are thousands of starving orphans literally dead everywhere.
Localized reporting
Localizing stories to renew people’s passion of news is media’s stock-in-trade. Taking America for an example, Americans are the type of person who fully focus on themselves, so ensuring the American filter in international news coverage is becoming extremely crucial for America media. According to Smith (2007), in the case that journalists are not able to afford covering all disaster news stories faced by the decreased news budget, they tend to write those with American direct participation, rather than selectively reporting the tragedy on the base of the number of people hurt or dead (p. 322). However, the international news without the involvement of American become less attractive than before for readers while Americanizing events to relieve the fatigue - only the global coverage with pictures sanguinary or brutal can increase audiences’ interests.
Discussion
The study by Clark (2014, p. 23) illustrates that the objectivity of journalism is to provide comprehensive and quality news information as much as possible under the principle of serving audiences loyally so that readers can make up their own minds for each story they have been told, instead of passively accepting editors’ news reporting criteria. Sensationalism as a result of compassion fatigue shows that the value system of media guides readers and decides what event deserves to being reported. The manner in which editors cover the news stories effects audiences’ concern about other details as well as their judgement to them; formulaic coverage suppresses the diversification of news in the situation that journalists regard news stories as products in favor of profit motive, so the demands of audiences for news reporting can not be fulfilled; localized coverage shows that editors do not assess the news value based on facts, but to select and edit news information by overemphasizing the needs of specific groups of people. It can thus be concluded that people’s losing interests to the coverage for sympathy do have detrimental effects on objective reporting, given the explanations above of three solutions to compassion fatigue.
On the other side, Merrill (1985) stated that compassion fatigue does not pose a threat to objective reporting (p. 392). Every journalist has a unique definition of news itself and a particular understanding of how to occupy an event to achieve the fundamental purpose of news, that is to entertain, educate and inform people. Therefore, it is reasonable for journalists to make a balance between interest-driven news market and news value as well as trying the best to retain the readership by reporting news stories in their own way when the coverage for sympathy can not have a positive influence it deserves on the audiences. Considering that objective reporting is always an idealized model in news media because editors are being manipulated by their sources, the objectivity is hence difficult to be affected through the reactions of media to the fatigue.
However, it could be argued that the three solutions taken by journalists amid the faded passion breach the inviolable principles of objective reporting.
Firstly, the sensationalism reporting reveals that mass media only reports the news information which can make “good story” at the expense of ignoring the factual accuracy and social relevance (Hight, 2001, p. 171). In a coverage of The New York Times on medical care in various countries, editors focus on the extremely expensive medical expenses in China and tedious steps of people seeing the doctor by mistranslating or adding patients’ words to win readers’ mercy, such as adding “here” which means “hospital” in the sentence “I spent more than $43,000 to see doctors”. Secondly, objective reporting complements authority of media each other, but it can be seen from the formulaic coverage that instead of covering the reports truthfully, journalists give up editorial independence for a market-driven approach to news, which sells the authority as a public asset. Thirdly, the presumed goals of the three solutions are all to increase the profits, which is not allowed in the objective reporting. There is no way that media can cover the world or follow an event all the time, but it is journalists’ responsibility to know when to remind audiences to raise the concern. They should give readers more perspectives to view the world as well as backgrounding them on the history of particular stories or updating the coverage when it is necessary. Explaining to audiences why they ought to know these is the duty of journalists, despite it is more difficult, more expensive and more time-consuming in the aspect of energy and money.
The study finally proves that less objective coverage is caused due to the compassion fatigue, and suggests the needs for the media business to get back to the business of reporting all the news, all the time as well as the demands for more coverage of international affairs and more freedom given to talented reporters to define their own stories. An intense interaction between journalists and audiences, has been revealed, in an age filled by orchestrated news information.
Bibliography
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