1st Edition
Compassion Fatigue How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death
By Susan D. Moeller
Copyright 1999
400 Pages
by
Routledge
400 Pages
by
Routledge
From outbreaks of the flesh eating viruses Ebola and Strep A, to death camps in Bosnia and massacres in Rwanda, the media seem to careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death. First we're horrified, but each time they turn up the pitch, show us one image more hideous than the next, it gets harder and harder to feel. Meet compassion fatigue--a modern... Read more
Introduction: Riding with the Four Horsemen, ONE Compassion Fatigue, TWO Covering Pestilence: Sensationalizing Epidemic Disease, THREE Covering Famine: The Famine Formula, FOUR Covering Death: The Americanization of Assassinations, FIVE Covering War: Getting Graphic About Genocide, Conclusion, Notes, Acknowledgments, Index
Biography
Susan D. Moeller is Director of the Journalism Program and Associate Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University. She has worked as a journalist for national magazines and newspapers and is the author of Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (1989).
"Moeller takes a morally complex and tightly interwoven theme--how the media sells disease, famine, war and death--and melds it into a coherent and powerful indictment of exactly how the right photo and words can shape public opinion with often devastating effects on the future... A book that, despite its scope and density, should be read by the public and media." -- The Press Christchurch, New Zealand
