Media and government jointly determine whose suffering merits public sympathy

Evidence

Both news reporting and TV dramas (and their perfect symbiosis, the Oprah Winfrey Show) operate as appendages of the War on Terror, by promoting acceptable emotional and intellectual responses to America’s engagement with Muslims around the world. These myriad forms of representation—some fictional and others “real,” some with clear ideological purpose and others unintentionally—shape the ways that we perceive our post-9/11 world. The government and commercial news media have defined a hierarchy of human lives in the War on Terror according to which certain people are deserving of spectators’ emotions—especially sympathy and outrage—and actions whereas others are not. Who is worthy or unworthy of sympathy is not arbitrary; the boundaries of feeling are policed differently in the case of Muslim women and men. Government and media producers construct “regimes of pity” that determine whose suffering is dramatized and presented as worthy of a response. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 813

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article’s theme of political signaling through representation, and to scholarship on Orientalism and the colonial ‘white man’s burden’ framing. — connects to: Sovereign influence over government hinges on mass-media enlightening quality. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 18; Pollution victims must narrate their lives in state-sanctioned suffering genres to get compensation — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 131
• DEFINE: Introduces Chouliaraki’s concept of ‘regimes of pity’ — a useful conceptual framework for analyzing how media assigns emotional worth.