Description
What impact do mass media portrayals of atrocities have on activism? Why do these news stories sometimes mobilize people, while at other times they are met with indifference? Do different forms of media have greater or lesser impacts on mobilization? These are just some of the questions addressed in Media, Mobilization, and Human Rights, which investigates the assumption that exposure to human rights violations in countries far away causes people to respond with activism.
Turning a critical eye on existing scholarship, which argues either that viewing and reading about violence can serve as a force for good (through increased activism) or as a source of evil (by objectifying and exploiting the victims of violence), the authors argue that reality is far more complex, and that there is nothing inherently positive or negative about exposure to the suffering of others. In exploring this, the book offers an array of case studies: from human rights reporting in Mexican newspapers to the impact of media imagery on humanitarian intervention in Somalia; from the influence of celebrity activism to the growing role of social media.
By examining a variety of media forms, from television and radio to social networking, the interdisciplinary set of authors present radical new ways of thinking about the intersection of media portrayals of human suffering and activist responses to them.
Chapter
States, the media, and humanitarian intervention
Ordinary people, the media, and distant suffering
News production – the first half of the equation
Audience reception – the other half of the equation
1 | Humanitarian intervention in the 1990s: cultural remembrance and the reading of Somalia as Vietnam
‘We were wrong, terribly wrong’: Vietnam in the 1990s
‘We saw it … in Vietnam. We saw it in Somalia’: debating humanitarian intervention in the 1990s
‘We should have said no’: Vietnam’s legacy and popular culture of the Somalia intervention
2 | Framing a rights ethos: artistic media and the dream of a culture without borders
2.1 Satrapi uses frame sequencing as a method of ironic juxtaposition
2.2 Delisle uses iconography toreduce an oil and gas company to its essence
2.3 Delisle uses the iconic representation of institutions to indicate a complex social program in a visual shorthand
2.4 Sacco uses iconographic reduction in an otherwise realist setting, distilling F.’s essence to his enraged mouth
2.5 Spiegelman uses visual metaphorto testify to his father’s experience of being trapped
2.6 Satrapi juxtaposes visual metaphors of modernity and the West with Persian culture
2.7 Satrapi recasts Edvard Munch’s iconic image of The Scream as an Iranian girl’s horror of the revolution
2.8 Stassen uses the dog metaphor to indicate Deogratias’ self-image
2.9 Satrapi makes use of the gaps between panels to slow down the pace of the action
2.10 Satrapi employs chiaroscuro to represent lament
2.11 Laughing at the curriculum on torture
2.12 Sacco’s reporter fails to understand that laughter is the story
2.13 Delisle presents the annual Water Festival as Burmese
Immediate action versus structures of feeling
3 | How editors choose which human rights news to cover: a case study of Mexican newspapers
A framework for understanding news selection
3.1 Model illustrating the process of news selection
Determining the newsworthiness of human rights information
Journalistic aims of human rights reporting: supporting democracy and stopping violations
Economic aims of human rights reporting: meeting reader demand and filling column inches
Political aims of human rights reporting: limited partisan and personal motives
4 | Framing strategies for economic and social rights in the United States
Framing strategies for economic and social rights
Table 4.1 Common framing strategies for economic and social rights
5 | ‘Fresh, wet tears’: shock media and human rights awareness campaigns
Shock public safety advertisements (PSAs)
Why use shock? Does it work?
6 | Celebrity diplomats as mobilizers? Celebrities and activism in a hypermediated time
Celebrities in the ‘network society’
Media and society: the role of the celebrity
The celebrity, citizens, and activism in a star-obsessed culture
Celebrity diplomats and the international arena
The successful celebrity diplomat: NGOs, civil society, and the public at large
Rocking the boat from within: sites of tension for celebrity mobilizers
Conclusion: celebrity mobilizers as a generative force
7 | Amplifying individual impact: social media’s emerging role in activism
Spreading the word: how boundary crossing and ‘strong weak’ ties make social media powerful cause-communication mechanisms
Online petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing campaigns: how social media organize collective action and recruit participants in a cause
Everybody can broadcast: how bypassing traditional media can facilitate change
How social media are decentralizing leadership
Conclusion: everyone is a potential activist organization
8 | The spectacle of suffering and humanitarian intervention in Somalia
What is the ‘spectacle of suffering’?
The iconography of famine: Biafra 1968
Emergence of the spectacle: Somalia 1991
Conclusion: bearing witness to distant suffering in an age of spectacle
Media, Mobilization, and Human Rights
：Mediating Suffering
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