"Compassion fatigue is the unacknowledged cause of much of the failure of international reporting today. It is at the base of many of the complaints about the public's short attention span, the media's peripatetic journalism, the public's boredom with international news, the media's preoccupation with crisis journalism. What does compassion fatigue do? It acts as a prior restraint on the media. Editors and producers don't assign stories and correspondents don't cover events that they believe will not appeal to their readers and viewers. Compassion fatigue abets Americans' self-interest. If conventional wisdom says that Americans are only interested in their own backyard, the media will prioritize stories where American political, cultural, or commercial connections are evident. Compassion fatigue reinforces simplistic, formulaic coverage. If images of starving abies worked in the past to capture attention for a complex crisis of war, refgugees and famine, then starving babies will headline the next difficult crisis. Compassion fatigue ratchets up the criteria for stories that get coverage...Journalists reject events that aren't more dramatic or more lethal than their predecessors. Or through a choice of language and images, the newest event is represented as being more extreme or deadly or risky than a similar past situation. Compassion fatigue tempts journalists to find ever more sensational tidbits in stories to retain the attention of their audience. Compassion fatigue encourages the media to move on to other stories once the range of possibilities of coverage have been exhausted so that boredom doesn't set in. Events have a certain amount of time in the limelight, then, even if the situation has not been resolved, the media marches on. Further news is pre-empted. No new news is bad news."

- Susan D. Mieller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sells Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999)

Questions to Consider

• Imagine for a moment that the terrorist attacks had occured in a country other than the United States. How much attention do you think they would have received on the news? What factors would have gone into the news media's decisions about how much coverage they would have received? To what degree would "compassion fatigue" have impacted the way that you and other viewers responded to that coverage?
• How might "compassion fatigue" explain the rather fragmentary coverage given to the events leading up to this incident? For example, how much did you know about Bin Laden or about Afghanistan and Pakistan prior to these events? How might this fragmentary coverage make it difficult for us to place these events into a meaningful context or to make an assessment of what steps should be taken next?
• How will the news media decide when to stop covering these events and move onto other stories? At what point do you think people will stop watching their television sets with such rapt attention and begin to grumble about the disruption of their normal routines?
• How might the phenomenon of "compassion fatigue" alter the ways these events get represented over time? Does the news media need to keep developing new stories or images to convey the tragic nature of these events? We might consider this question in terms of the death toll. News reports initially inflated the likely death toll, so that the final numbers are likely to be significantly lower than some initial estimations. Is there a risk that we will respond to these lower numbers anticlimactically where-as if we had seen them initially we would have been shocked at such a high death toll?
• How might the reporting of individual, personal stories of the people who have died help to combat the compassion fatigue which could emerge if we simply to represent the mass number of people who have died in this incident?

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