When I was 14, I would spend a considerable time of my day religiously poring over the coverage of the 2014 Gaza war. In a month’s time, I had gone from ‘intensely aware about the situation with ingrained in memory statistics and events’ to ‘I will probably never read the news again’.

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On being asked why, the answer was simple: “That’s all the newspapers ever tell you: people died.”

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Stalin clearly knew what he was saying when he said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Singular deaths such as that of Alan Kurdi, Robin Williams and Jamal Khashoggi as opposed to those of Syrian and Rohingya refugees en masse seemed to have a farther reach and outcry in both: the press and the people’s minds (Fisher, 2018).

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Ethics besides being a moral philosophy is a principle that also involves recommending concepts of right and wrong (Fieser).  Now, studying to be a journalist, I realize why this ‘collapse in compassion’ is a major ethical issue (Small & Slovic). When the media reports on something that is clearly black and white such as terrorists and suicide bombings, it should be covered with moral judgments as it is a matter of how things really are (objectively); both being wrong (Almagor, 2005). This ethical issue then clearly has nothing against the concept of objectivity.

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Empathy serves as an important journalistic tool because it is necessary to understand and connect on a human level and not just be an instrument of stories (Plaisance, cited Harland 2008). The solution for this would be to practice compassion in unbiased journalism (Harland, 2008).

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This can be explained by a book review of Doerr’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel ‘All the Light We Cannot See’. May (2014) articulately stated, “The title of the book means that underneath the surface of history, there is light – and stories – that have not been seen; that have gone untold. Scientifically, we only see a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum; historically, we only see a small portion of the story.”

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An individual’s death and detailed story saddens and anguishes; imagine the collective sorrow and tragedy behind that large number with a lot of zeros. Now is not the time to switch off compassion; now is the time to switch off denial.

 

 

Bibliography:

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Almagor, R. C. (2005). Speech, Media and Ethics, Chippenham and Eastbourne: CPI Antony Rowe. Chapter 4, p 69-86.

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Doerr, A. (2014). All the Light We Cannot See, New York: Scribner.

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Fieser, J. (). Ethics, Internet Encyclopedia for Philosophy: A Peer-Reviewed Academic

Resource, Available: https://www.iep.utm.edu/ethics/ [Accessed: 28th April 2019]

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Fisher, M. (2018). How One Journalist’s Death Provoked a Backlash That Thousands Dead in Yemen Did Not, The New York Times, 17th October. 

Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/world/middleeast/jamal-khashoggi-saudi-arabia.html [Accessed: 28th April 2019]

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Harland, K. (2008). Practicing compassion in an unbiased journalism, University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics: School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Available: https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2008/06/16/practicing-compassion-in-an-unbiased-journalism/ [Accessed: 28th April 2019]

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May, E. (2014). Emily May’s Reviews > All the Light We Cannot See, Goodreads, Available: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1121106271?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1 [Accessed: 28th April 2019]

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