Suffering, Compassion and the Telethon: from producers to the Audience

An explorative study is conducted on La Marató de TV3, as it is the most popular telethon in Catalonia and is responsible for the most fundraising in all of Spain. The most recent edition, in December 2010, raised € 8,735,103, the highest amount raised in the telethon’s history. This study focuses on the two aspects that are key in explaining the success of this Catalan telethon: the production and the audience. The production of the telethon with references to the content and the audience reactions and involvement (participation and donation) are studied to find out what specific elements enable the telethon’s success. La Marató de TV3 is not yet analyzed in this way by other researchers. Two datasets have been collected. The first dataset comprises of opinions expressed by three experts of La Marató de TV3 and one philosopher specialized in compassion. Compassion is one of the main emotions that audiences can feel while watching a telethon or images of suffering. The data obtained from these four experts were collected through face-to-face in-depth interviews. The second dataset comprises of an online survey distributed to a sample of the audience of the Catalan telethon (N=500). This questionnaire was conducted to study (1) the different motivations to participate or donate in that telethon, (2) the feelings that the audience has while watching images of suffering on the telethon, and (3) the main reasons why La Marató de TV3 achieves such a success every year. In my review of the literature, I defined a variety of aspects related to suffering media content, audiences, compassion, and telethons. The results of this research suggest that La Marató de TV3 achieves a great popularity, participation, and donations mostly from the Catalan audience not due to the harsh images of suffering but due to different reasons such as the transparency of the project, the consolidated television program, the audience’s confidence and belief in the project, the proximity from the channel TV3 and from the testimonials, the diverse representation of cases, and an overall Catalan community feeling.