Who merits public sympathy is politically determined rather than natural

Evidence

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. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 813

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that even our spontaneous feelings of pity are politically engineered — that sympathy itself is a policed, manufactured response rather than an innate human reaction — resists easy summary and reframes how we should approach any humanitarian media.
• XREF: connects to: Framing a land dispute as elite privilege versus common masses can win public sympathy — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 843