Media-produced pity for distant suffering often backfires by triggering viewer contestation.

Evidence

Other segments of the public, however, refuse to participate in the emotive publics shaped by the media and the government. These people create an oppositional emotive public that expresses alternative emotional responses; these men and women are often “outraged at your outrage.” These viewers of distant suffering question and criticize how the suffering is made meaningful to viewers. Reflecting an oppositional interpellation, these viewers express outrage at the assumptions embedded in this narrative—in the case of the Oprah episode, that Islam is barbaric, that Lawal is the ultimate victim, and that the United States as a compassionate and civilized nation must save her. … Some posters challenge the dominant framing of the oppressed Muslim woman through competing moral frameworks that challenge the notion that the United States is postfeminist by highlighting hypocrisy and through alternative testimonies by native informants. The politics of pity, therefore, has the unintentional side effect of inspiring viewer contestation and an insistence on alternative moral frameworks. These fractured responses demonstrate a challenge to the ways in which government and media discourses determine appropriate and inappropriate feelings in the War on Terror. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 818

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the politics of pity literature (Boltanski) and audience-reception studies of humanitarian media; also parallels the moral panic chapter dynamics in the same book.