Compassion fatigue and sensationalism

The crux of my research paper was compassion fatigue – how certain media coverage can engender desensitization in the audience, which can curb reactions to tragic events. I also focus on how this points to the media’s responsibilities – to not only provide coverage, but responsible coverage, so as not to propagate compassion fatigue, and to recognize the influence over public opinion and use that in positive ways. Specifically in the case of the Indian media, these duties seemed to have been ignored, as the two rapes were covered using mostly the same strategies, without regard for compassion fatigue and the factors that cause it.

And while using the same coverage strategies might not, on first glance, seem like much of an issue, when we consider Susan Moeller’s argument that “much of journalism is repetitious, and repetition breeds indifference”, it starts to become clear that the Indian media was truly not cognizant of the effects its coverage of the two rapes was having on its audience. Moeller further states that “It takes more and more dramatic coverage to elicit the same level of sympathy as the last catastrophe.”, which points to how the media must anticipate and counteract compassion fatigue by engaging in a certain amount of sensationalism to ensure that coverage continues to produce desired responses in the audience despite desensitization to increasingly common disasters.

Sources: Moeller, S. D. (1999). Compassion fatigue: How the media sell disease, famine, war and death. Psychology Press.