Audience, distant suffering and moral responsibility in a globalizing society

It has been argued that different societies are drawn together in a globalizing environment. This increased proximity and interconnectedness could broaden the scope of solidarity and care of people towards formerly distant peoples and places. Media play an important role in raising awareness of such globalizing processes. Especially a cosmopolitan discourse could make the audience aware of living as a global citizen in a global society. It is this line of argumentation that is further explored in this thesis. Earlier research has often focused more on emotional reactions of people in the audience such as compassion or care. Other research focussed more on the ways that media (should) present distant suffering without empirically substantiated evidence. This study has aimed to broaden the discussion about audience responses by doing empirical research of audience responses paying special attention to more rational responses of the audience by studying how a cosmopolitan discourse can appeal to the spectator’s sense of moral responsibility. One of the main arguments in this thesis is that people may be able to still be concerned and feel involved, despite (a lack of) emotional responses such as compassion or care. The study has been carried out by doing focus group session, where participants were asked to discuss the images of the drought and famine in the Horn of Africa in 2011 shown by a Dutch national news broadcaster. It was found that most participants attached great importance to the different actions that could or should be carried out to alleviate the distant suffering. Most participants thought they could and/or should help and were most often prepared to donate money to small-scale charity organisations. Yet, most also assigned great responsibility to bigger (inter-)national (non-)governmental organisations though they did not see themselves play part in these bigger social structures. The most important conclusion from the findings was that most participants considered themselves to be morally responsible for the short term alleviation of the suffering while the responsibility for carrying out long-term solutions for the distant suffering was attributed to bigger (inter-)national (non-)governmental organisations. In addition, their own moral responsibilities and feelings of guilt were attenuated by emphasizing other (more global socio-structural) agents and intermediates. Another important conclusion was that a cosmopolitan discourse was for most participants not a reason to feel morally responsible. Indeed, it was more the western and Dutch backgrounds, living in a well-to-do society, (opposed to the poor, underdeveloped, undereducated African people) that made them feel morally responsible to help.