Compassion fatigue

Exercise 39 - read the articles "Imagining War" by Jonathan Kaplan and "Walk the Line" by Max Houghton and write done your reactions to the authors arguments.

Both authors agree that a line needs to be drawn with regards to the level of 'gore' that should be published in/by the mass media. There is a general acceptance that the gorier the image, the more likely the audience are to focus on the gore and the less likely they are to focus on the story as a whole.

This then leads on to the inevitable question - where is the line? Simply put - how much gore is too much gore?

Examples of gore are provided: the death of Saddam's sons and the death of a mother in front of her baby son (Kenya). Both 'nasty' photographs, but nonetheless published in the broadsheets; the latter being published twice - first in B&W, then in colour.

I believe that the more exposure you have to any particular 'stimulant' the more resistant you become. That said, the vast majority of people do have their own moral compass that guides their actions and ensures as a society we don't return to barbarism. The issue being, as Houghton stated with respect to the photograph of Saddam's sons, "An invisible line had been crossed, but this line was evidently personal to me."

Kaplan also recognises this as an issue referring to this type of image being "used as medical pornography". Directly after he discusses reality surgery as 'huge entertainment'; with the trend to air American obesity programmes on UK television and the development of our own brand of reality show 'Embarrassing bodies', unfortunately, I have to agree with him.

Whilst it's easy enough for any individual to define their own boundaries of behaviour, it's much more difficult for them to live within them purely because of the media saturated environment in which we live. Watch the adverts on television; see a newspaper; click on a website - an image pops out, unfortunately, once that image is inside your head its very difficult to get out!

Taking the 'double-publishing' further... Ignore whether or not the photograph was appropriate to publish in the first place, a significant amount of effort went into the investigation behind the second publication. So, rather than leave a horror story, a tragedy, in limbo (because the journalist at the time could not find any further information), the follow-up becomes a real human-interest piece. No doubt, in part, driven by discussion and queries from the public. Either way, the approach of the second article 'humanises' the atrocities of war, by that I mean, brings the reality of the situation into the lives of everybody at a personal level that they can understand.

Susie Linfield discusses the use of war images in her book "The Cruel Radiance", accepting that we all have a line, once that line has been crossed (there is no going back) so the only way to make it count is to ensure that the horror is used for good (once the image is outside of the war zone - the propaganda zone).