Taking Back the News

Abstract

Today the methodologies and approaches of the contemporary ethnographer, the journalist and the documentist run parallel. None seek only to explain or describe the phenomenon under investigation, rather each seeks to understand that phenomenon through experiencing. In turn they seek to convey this lived experience to their audiences. However, mainstream media continues with a structuralist approach to the gathering of news stories. Celebration or tragedy is conveyed to a broad audience through stereotypes. As an example it is worth noting the famine image of Don McCullin taken in Biafra in 1968. This image is of a malnourish woman with an emaciated child suckling at her dried up breasts. While this is an accurate portrayal of one aspects of famine, it has come to be the iconic image that is repeated by media journalists in every crisis since. Effectively the media of the minority world portrays each crisis in the majority world as if it were the same, thus reducing the majority world to a set of iconic stereotypes. This effectively renders their collective plight and each individual's plight as being that of the exotic other. The use of stereotypes and iconic representations limited the read to expression of pity rather than compassion. In Social Suffering Tom Regan observes that the politic dimension of suffering is that it bestows social status on a person depending on their membership of a community, nation or state. What defines such a community and who has membership of that community is largely determined through different modes of storytelling - popular culture, religion and the mass media. This publication builds on the previous editions and asks who owns stories and what are the costs of stories about crises being constructed to a formulae predicated on exclusion. Further, to what extent does mainstream media strengthen the boundaries surrounding communities, nations and states and promote stories that seek to exclude, rather than include, members. Importantly, this edition interrogates styles of journalism and documentary practice and how they can render the subject, and the situation in which the subject exists, invisible to a readership that exists outside their moral community.