Media manufactured moral outrage primes audiences to endorse intervention

Evidence

By “moral outrage,” I mean the feeling of disgust that is often provoked by stories about the violent oppression of Muslim women. Readers and viewers are encouraged to feel outrage at the injustice and compassion for the women and to advocate correcting the injustice by saving these women and punishing the Muslim men who are presumably responsible. The Oprah Winfrey Show and media coverage on the oppressed Muslim woman both help to create an emotive public, that is, a segment of the public sharing in an emotion—outrage, pity, and so on—and the normalization of this sentiment in relation to Muslim women. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 816

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘moral outrage’ and ‘emotive public’ as analytical terms specific to this media analysis.
• SEED: Angle for an essay on the Oprah-Winfrey-Show-era framing of Muslim women as passive victims, and how ‘emotive publics’ get manufactured around geopolitical crises.
• XREF: connects to: Global media lets distant moral outrage fuse with personal frustration into martyrdom — Scott Atran, The Devoted Actor: Unconditional…, 64; Moral outrage over sacred-value violations depends heavily on rhetorical framing. — Philip E. Tetlock, Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values…, 1