Domesticating distant suffering: How can news media discursively invite the audience to care?

Abstract

Several scholars have identified an important emotional role in news media's covering of international disasters; inviting the audience to care for people in need who are not like us. This article addresses the question of how news media can attribute a local sense of relevance to global suffering by focusing on the journalistic practice of domestication. Following a case-based methodology, we investigate how two Belgian television stations have domesticated international disasters in 2011. As the study shows, rendering distant suffering more relevant to local audiences can be realized in several ways. A Critical Discourse Analysis identified four key discursive modes of domestication. By drawing on these modes, news journalists try to incite involvement in their representations of distant suffering, hence inviting the local audience to relate with the distant Other. Domestication can lead to possible feelings of cosmopolitanism and identification, although dominant power relations of global inequality remain largely unchallenged.

Close, but not close enough? Audience’s reactions to domesticated distant suffering in international news coverage

“…These discursive modes of domesticating international news were first explicitly linked to mediated distant suffering when we uncovered four dominant strategies of domestication employed by news producers to invite the audience to care (Joye, 2015). First, we found that journalists domesticate distant suffering by selecting emotionally narrated stories or eyewitness accounts of compatriots who were affected by the foreign event (emotional domestication).…”

“…Although domestication is also defined as 'the discursive adaptation of news from 'outside' the nation-state so as to make it resonate with a national audience as it is perceived' (Olausson, 2014: 711, emphasis added), we can easily understand why most research has chosen to focus on the production side and on the journalists whose discursive practices are investigated through textual analysis (Alasuutari et al, 2013;Olausson, 2014;Joye, 2015).…”

“…Proximity, membership in one's in-group, and a sense of perceived similarity are significant in facilitating empathy towards mediated suffering (Loewenstein and Small, 2007). Domestication of distant suffering, by for instance creating a sense of emotional proximity (for example by including someone from the home country into the narrative, see Joye, 2015), is thus an appropriate strategy to incite an affective state of empathy. We expect that viewers are more likely to identify and consequently empathize with suffering if a news item features someone who is more recognizable to the home audience who explains the kind of suffering foreigners experience.…”

“…The potential of domestication in the context of suffering has previously been investigated, although predominantly from the production side. For instance, based on a critical discourse analysis, previous work has demonstrated several strategies of domestication that can bring distant suffering closer to the spectator, which can potentially lead to an increased sense of care and compassion (Joye, 2015). Although most research on domestication thus looks at the producers'/journalists' side of the story and/or relies on a textual analysis, this article urges to include the audience into the equation.…”

“…Central to this study is understanding how an audience makes use of domestication strategies in viewing and reacting to mediated distant suffering. Earlier text-based research has found several ways of domesticating distant suffering that can invite an audience to care (Joye, 2015). Building further on this media-centered study, ten focus groups reveal a two-flow model of domestication, consisting of first-level domestication on the production side by journalists and second-level domestication, in which audience members themselves use strategies of domestication to make sense of distant suffering.…”