aiming to mobilise humanitarian action and overcome indifference to suffering,
above and beyond the problems discussed in the previous section. Furthermore, it
raises questions about how to spread humanitarian identity without sacrificing its
integrity. These arise both in terms of how humanitarians formulate and
promulgate their message, and the media environment in which it is transmitted.
Though deterministic readings of technology, like the “CNN effect” or
“compassion fatigue” theses, are no doubt rather overblown, there is little doubt
that the characteristics of the media play an important part here. Clearly,
contemporary media is often seduced by sensationalist readings of events, and
events need to be sensational to make the news. Kevin Rozario cautions us not to
create a dichotomy between a good humanitarianism and a bad media, arguing that
the identity of modern humanitarianism is in many ways itself the product of a
sensationalistic mass culture.^74 Michael Ignatieff considers that the lure of a good
clear story line, with a clear demarcation between good and evil, innocence and
guilt, is hard to resist, as are the distortions of over-sentimentalisation.^75 This
creates a dangerous terrain for professional humanitarians to navigate, especially if
they are attempting to present their own “sentimental education”.
For Ignatieff, who focuses on the role of television in particular, another
distortion is to reproduce the problem of the technical understanding of
humanitarian crises, examined in the previous chapter, in which the humanitarian
consequences are presented with great pathos, at the expense of political
understanding, such as happened during the Ethiopian famine in 1984, with Michael
Buerk’s famous “biblical” report, in which the famine victims seemed to be prey to a
timeless tragedy.^76 In an examination of visual culture more generally, David
Campbell argues that the visual representation of key sites like Darfur do not simply
mirror what is going on, but rather “both manifests and enables power relations
74
Kevin Rozario, ""Delicious Horrors": Mass Culture, the Red Cross, and the Appeal of
Modern American Humanitarianism", 75 American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003).
76 Ignatieff, "The Stories We Tell", 292-293.
Ibid., 293-294. For a detailed critique, see Edkins, Whose Hunger? , 2-9. See also David
Campbell, "Ethiopia and the Recurring Famine: Same Story, Same Pictures?" Imaging
Famine blog (23 May 2010). Available at http://www.imaging-
famine.org/blog/index.php/2010/05/ethiopia-1984-2008/; accessed on 11 June 2010.