The problem of different post-colonial spatial contexts in television news about distant wartime suffering

Article The problem of different post-colonial spatial contexts in television news about distant wartime suffering the International Communication Gazette 0(0) 1–20 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1748048518822607 journals.sagepub.com/home/gaz Pavel Doboš Department of Geography, Masaryk University, Czech Republic Abstract The point of departure of the article is distant suffering studies. The article tries to supplement them by theses from post-colonial and critical spatial theories that were elaborated in post-colonial geography. Through post-colonial imaginative geographies, the spatial context shapes Western television performances of wartime suffering. This is demonstrated by empirical examples of mediation of wars in Mali, Palestine and Syria, from the news of Czech Television. In the Malian case, the space is homogenized as a violent African space, where suffering is moral. In the Palestinian case, the space is divided into rational Israeli and barbaric Palestinian space, where Palestinians’ suffering is neglected, if Israel stays evidently rational. In the Syrian case, the suffering is accented, however, only if Syrians seem to want to de-Orientalize themselves. These cases demonstrate that there is always a need to be spatially sensitive in respect to mediated distant suffering from post-colonial regions. Keywords Czech Television, distant suffering, imaginative geographies, Mali, mediation, Orientalism, Palestine, Syria, television news, war Introduction Nowadays, what is typically expected to be ‘out there’ in the non-West has become more and more immingled with what is supposed to be ‘in here’ in the West (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2016). Even suffering in distant non-Western events such as wars can come closer to Western homes, consequently analyses of mediated Corresponding author: Pavel Doboš, Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Kotlarská 267/2, 611 37 Brno, Czech Republic. Email: dob.pvl@gmx.com 2 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) distant suffering has gained some prominence in media studies recently. So-called distant suffering studies developed into a vital field of study as part of general shift in media studies towards ethics (Chouliaraki, 2015b: 708). This article offers analyses of the foreign television news in the vein of distant suffering studies. Yet, it also illustrates a way how to direct this field of study in a more critical and more spatially sensitive way. So far, distant suffering studies have been only marginally interested in post-colonial and critical spatial theories. In our opinion, it is one of weaker points of distant suffering studies because they are very often interested in distant suffering from post-colonial spaces. Hence, analyses presented here try to focus exactly on this point. In a way, this article continues efforts started by the geographical turn in media and cultural studies (Couldry and McCarthy, 2004; Morley, 2000, 2007; Morley and Robins, 1995). We show how post-colonial spatial context is crucial in the mediation of three different cases of distant civilians’ wartime suffering: Mali, Palestine and Syria. Although some research of mediated distant suffering has moved beyond television (Chouliaraki, 2013, 2015a; Ong, 2017; Scott, 2015), we focus on television news because ‘television is likely to remain most people’s primary medium for the foreseeable future, however delivered and with whatever Web-based enhancements’ (Couldry, 2012: 18). Wartime suffering is the focus because, in wars especially, ‘there is no way to separate, under present historical conditions, the material reality of war from those representational regimes through which it operates’ (Butler, 2009: 29). Wars bring forth a specific kind of suffering – different from, for example, natural disasters – because the violence causing the suffering is always a political act and the news introduce particulars views on the act (Arno, 2009: 181–185). ‘Framing violence as war politicizes it; it presents the motives of the actors involved as political’ (Orgad, 2012: 96). Different wars come from different contexts and too often from post-colonial regions. In such wars, a certain politics of post-colonialism is always involved. Post-colonial contexts influence how distant suffering is represented and what moral appeal it radiates on spectators who watch it from Western zones of safety. The aim therefore is to show how distance is varyingly recast into difference in three wars in post-colonial spaces and through it to call for an approach to distant suffering that takes into account post-colonial geography, which is the field of study that skilfully brings together post-colonial and critical spatial theories (Ryan, 2004; Sidaway, 2002). Distant suffering studies and distant non-Western others On the one hand, there are plenty of studies that focus on analysis of media representations of suffering (Chouliaraki, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008b; Chouliaraki and Stolic, 2017; Joye, 2015; Orgad 2012). On the other hand, studies that focus on audience reception of representations have begun to proliferate as well (Huiberts and Joye, 2018; Ong, 2017; Scott, 2015; von Engelhardt, 2015). Yet, there is a difference between the two in elaborating the theory of distant suffering studies. Doboš 3 While recent studies on audience reception manage to introduce new theoretical insights into the field, recent studies of media representations concentrate on empirical analyses of up-to-date texts and discourses and less on broadening the theory. Lilie Chouliaraki (2006b, 2008a, 2008b) introduced the last huge and crucially important broadening of the theory in this branch of distant suffering studies. Chouliaraki rejects large moral theories and the omnipresence of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999; Tester, 2001), while trying to extract moral values from various media discourses in order to interpret dispositions to feel, think and act, to which media exposes its spectators. This is where she can be criticized through new theoretical insights from the audience studies branch of distant suffering studies because, as Scott (2015: 640–641) argues, her theory draws away attention from questions of how reactions to distant suffering ‘are integrated within the everyday lifeworlds of audience’. Yet, finding important inspiration in Boltanski’s (1999) ‘politics of pity’, Chouliaraki (2006b: 5–9) holds a notion of ‘situated ethics’ and this is the strong side of her approach: it not only coincides with the mentioned turn towards ethics in media studies (Silverstone, 2007), but also with a turn in social sciences towards perceiving representations as no longer inert texts/images to be interpreted, but agents that influence becoming of the world (Doel, 2010). The approach, known as the ‘analytics of mediation’, is this study’s point of departure. Distant suffering studies are an interdisciplinary effort and we can never invest in interdisciplinarity enough (Chouliaraki, 2015b; Joye, 2013). As distant suffering studies should also be a critical effort, it is useful to combine the ‘analytics of mediation’ with relational spatial thinking (Doboš, 2018). In this article, we provide empirical analyses that illustrate the point. These empirical analyses focus on the mediation of non-Western wartime distant suffering with a special attention to civilians’ position in the news. Non-Western civilians are too often the most vulnerable in wars and too often must endure numerous life-threatening situations that call for Western interest. For them, Western people’s empathy, pity, help efforts or protests against wars may sometimes become important matters that may (or may not) influence their wellbeing. Actions of Western people are in no way determined by television news about suffering because Western spectators of the news are not a homogeneous reactive unity. Yet, seeing a particular case of wartime suffering on television may provide spectators some directions to what stance to take in cases of particular sufferings. That happens in a way of ‘moral education as conditional freedom’ where dispositions to act, think and feel towards sufferers are emanated by the news (Chouliaraki, 2008a). After all, for most people in the West, distant nonWestern others are still revealed mainly through the consumption of their images from in front of a computer or television (Morley, 2000; Silverstone, 2007). Distant suffering and post-colonial geography Firstly, if Chouliaraki’s ‘analytics of mediation’ shall be theoretically enriched by post-colonial geography, it must be inspired by critical spatial theory 4 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) (Soja, 1989, 1996).1 Chouliaraki does not ignore spatiality. She is interested in how represented space of suffering influences the growth of pity and dispositions to action, to which spectators are exposed. Yet, this spatiality is only structured by discourse, and the question of how spatiality can structure the discourse has been omitted. The space in ‘analytics of mediation’ is always discursively structured beforehand (by the discursive strategies of representation creators), and, in this fully formed shape, it either helps or does not to make an appeal upon spectators. This is probably a consequence of Chouliaraki’s roots in discourse studies where the idea that everything only becomes meaningful through discourse is widespread. Although Chouliaraki’s space is appropriately conceived as space-time, it still only occurs as discursively shaped. Only after this shaping does space-time affect the appeal when ‘[t]he more complicated the space-time, the less ‘‘othering’’ of the sufferer’ (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 87–88). We know only a little of how space itself can structure media representations. Chouliaraki operates with a distinction between the Western and non-Western world, where some spatial influence is made visible: while ‘adventure news’ is usually from non-Western space, ‘ecstatic news’ is from Western space. In the case of ‘emergency news’, we learn that non-Western regions often stand out as the ‘spacetime of danger’, while Western regions as the ‘space-time of safety’, and hereafter, these two space-times happen to, or fail to be discursively interconnected into a ‘zone of contact’ (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 141–142). But why some specific space-times do interconnect and others not? There follows another question: Why does some ‘emergency news’ provide useful answers to the important historicizing and performative questions ‘why?’ and ‘what to do?’, while other does not (Chouliaraki, 2008b: 383–384)? These are important questions to be answered because ‘emergency news’ has a potential to proliferate a ‘discourse of cosmopolitan connectivity’ and construct a ‘cosmopolitan public’ interested in acting upon distant suffering (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 144–148, 2008b). Secondly, post-colonial geography offers ideas from post-colonial theory to supplement the ‘analytics of mediation’.2 One problem in media studies is that the unequal relationship between the West and the Rest is usually universally emphasized, but different forms and degrees in the relationship for different non-Western contexts are disregarded (Morley, 2007: 171–173). In other words, in media as well as elsewhere, there is no single subordinate post-colonial non-Western world. There is no single Orientalism. The ‘hierarchy of place and human life’ that Chouliaraki (2006b: 107–110, 2008a: 845) talks about differs a lot for diverse non-Western people and places. Chouliaraki (2006a: 264) asserts that ‘pity does not precede representation but is produced through representation in a range of public practices and discourses – through [. . .] ‘‘politics of pity’’’. Media representations of suffering are performative, and more precisely, performances of suffering. Thus, ‘pity, rather than preexisting the performance of suffering, emerges instead through these performances’ (Chouliaraki, 2013: 34). Nonetheless, Orientalism is performative, too. Edward Said (1979: 55) tells us about Orientalist imaginative geographies that ‘dramatiz[e] Doboš 5 the distance and difference between what is close to [us] and what is far away’. These are products of culture that structure our knowledge of distant people and places: The geographical sense makes projections – imaginative [...] or in a general sense cultural. It also makes possible the construction of various kinds of knowledge, all of them in one way of another dependent upon the perceived character or destiny of a particular geography. (Said, 1994: 93) There are various imaginative geographies for various parts of the world that can differ from Said’s Orientalist ones (Gregory, 1995: 454). The common denominator for all of them is their discursive production. Imaginative geographies are a ‘discursive formation’ (Foucault, 1972) that signifies and magnifies the Otherness of different distant people. Gregory (2004: 17–19) explains that in imaginative geographies, ‘‘‘[t]heir’’ [distant others’] space is often seen as the inverse of ‘‘our’’ space: a sort of negative, in the photographic sense [. . .] because ‘‘they’’ are seen somehow to lack the positive tonalities that supposedly distinguish ‘‘us’’’. Imaginative geographies are ‘constructions that fold distance into difference through a series of spatializations’ that are at the same time ‘performances of space’. Imaginative geographies are not only discursive and virtual, they are very material as well because they shape material practices (Gregory, 1995). Importantly, they are always interconnected with Western post-colonial and (post)imperial geopolitical and cultural domination (Said, 1994). In the same way that performances of suffering are performative in relation to the production of pity, performances of space are performative in relation to the production of media representations – thus, media performances of suffering as well. Media performances occur ‘as both containing and making imaginative geographies; specifying the ways ‘‘the world is’’ and, in so doing, actively (re)-making that same world’ (Bialasiewicz et al., 2007: 411). Behind every media performance of distant suffering, we can also analyse an imaginative geography that – as a performance of space – structures this media performance. Imaginative geographies are not only able to structure media performances of distant suffering, but are also projected into these very same performances in so far that they are identifiable. Features of imaginative geographies can differ a lot for various nonWestern spaces and this study wants to show how these specific features are able to readily shape performances of suffering and in so doing, at the same time, to influence the dispositions to feel, think and act towards distant sufferers that spectators of the news are exposed to. Analyzed cases: The foreign news of Czech Television Three different cases of wartime civilian suffering are analysed and, in each case, two news pieces are analysed. All news pieces come from the same television network – ‘Czech Television’. It is the only public television broadcaster in the 6 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) Czech Republic. It has been chosen not only because it broadcasts in the researcher’s native language, but also because out of all the broadcasters in the country, it has the most extensive news service and it explicitly strives for ‘objectivity’ in news. This broadcaster also runs 24/7 news channel as the only Czech Television broadcaster. The broadcaster reassumes the tradition of public broadcasting in socialist (Soviet-influenced) Czechoslovakia where it operated under the name of ‘Czechoslovak Television’. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the origin of the Czech Republic in 1993 (due to Slovaks’ independence), it changed name to ‘Czech Television’. After that, its foreign news service began to endeavour to approach the style of known Western European television news services (such as the BBC) in order to distance itself against the previous socialist influence. This effort was also heightened due to the emergence of concurrent private television broadcasters. With the entry of Czech Republic into the European Union, we could see an augmented identification with the West in the foreign news of Czech Television. Nowadays, in the case of foreign news about human tragedies, Kotišová (2017: 252) observes that among journalists of Czech Television, there is a notion that ‘‘‘being a good journalist’’ requires a carefully balanced combination of staying detached and letting the emotions out, sticking to the facts but being immersed’. That is why it is useful to learn how journalists resolved this question for three different post-colonial contexts of distant suffering. All analysed news pieces come from the same program called ‘Události’, which is the self-proclaimed ‘main news broadcast with the most important news from home and abroad’. This program is broadcast every day on both, broadcaster’s main channel, as well as the 24/7 news channel. Kaderka and Havlı́k (2010: 546) mention that in the news service of Czech Television, this programme is perceived as the ‘absolute centerpiece’ of the day. Method In the analysis, Chouliaraki’s (2006b: 8–11) notion of ‘the merit of example’ is followed. Six news pieces that are interested in civilians’ war destinies are picked out. Two pieces appertain to each case. The first case is from the Mali Civil War, representing media simplification of war events that are typical of conflicts in subSaharan Africa (Campbell, 2007). On the analysed programme, four news pieces from Mali were broadcast at the turn of 2012/2013 when key events of the civil war took place. Only two of them (21 December 2012, length: 1 minute, 59 seconds; 23 January 2013, length: 2 minutes, 2 seconds) were more interested in civilians so these have been chosen for analysis. For the reason of a proper comparison, next two cases are also restricted to two news pieces. The second case is from the Gaza Strip in Palestine, which represents a very specific phenomenon of prolonged conflict that the West has been interested in from the outset. Particularly, this case concerns the news coverage of the summer2014 Israeli intervention into the Gaza Strip. The intervention lasted about a Doboš 7 month and news about it was broadcast on the programme nearly every day. Chosen news pieces are from an early (13 July 2014, length: 2 minutes, 1 second) and a later (3 August 2014, length: 1 minute, 58 seconds) period of the intervention. The third case is from Syria, particularly from the early period of its recent civil war. It inspired some news on the analysed programme, particularly at the turn of 2012/2013, when bloody battles in the city of Aleppo were happening. From this period, two news pieces (25 December 2012, length: 2 minutes, 9 seconds; 27 January 2013, length: 2 minutes, 37 seconds) have been selected. This case is a case of Oriental stable-space-turned-unstable and is highly influenced by the Arab Spring’s echo and its mediation (Christensen and Christensen, 2013). All news pieces are ‘emergency news’: they do not have a resemblance of short and sketchy ‘adventure news’, nor they have a resemblance of discursively and semiotically complicated and complex ‘ecstatic news’. Also, all represent events from non-Western space for Western audience and in all the news pieces, suffering of non-Western civilians occurs. At first, we analyse each news piece through the analytical steps of Chouliaraki’s ‘analytics of mediation’. Hence, we aim to learn what dispositions to feel, think and act toward sufferers emanate from the news pieces. We analyse the mode of presentation (perceptual, categorical or ideological realism), narrative style (descriptions, narrations or expositions), verbal-visual relations (indexical, iconic or symbolic), aesthetic quality (pamphleteering, philanthropy or sublimation), space-time of the news (how spatio-temporal concreteness, specificity, multiplicity and mobility are expressed) and the agency of actors in the news (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 72–93). Critical discourse analysis has highly influenced this analysis (Fairclough, 1995, 2003). After that, we analyse imaginative geographies that shape and structure discursive strategies of pity identified before. We aim to learn how distance is translated into difference and how these performances of space shape particular performances of pity. We try to find out the specific spatial elements in particular non-Western spaces that relate these spaces to Western space (represented by the Czech Republic, in this case) and that make some discourses in performances of pity different from one another. Two authors that have devoted large portions of their careers to deconstructions of Orientalisms and imaginative geographies, are especially helpful here: Edward Said, the first to criticize Orientalism, and one of his followers, geographer Derek Gregory. Malian case: Unconcern for sufferers In January 2012, the Civil War in Mali began when Tuareg tribes from the north rebelled against the government. The Islamist group, Ansar Dine, supported them and later, the group even started leading the rebellion. They managed to conquer half the country and the danger of state collapse appeared. The United Nations reacted, especially France. The French army intervened in 2013 and pushed the Islamists back into a remote portion of the country. 8 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) The news piece (21 December 2012), ‘The Future of Peacekeeping Missions’, deals with the possibilities of a mission to Mali that is largely occupied by Islamists. Masses of refugees became displaced. The UN Security Council approved the dispatch of peacekeeping forces. Nevertheless, we learn that opinions about the possible success of the mission vary because UN soldiers had failed many times in Africa. The news piece ends by summarizing African peacekeeping missions. This news piece aims for facticity and uses perceptual realism. In it appears what Chouliaraki (2013: 144) calls ‘detached witnessing’: it ‘replaces the ‘‘I’’ of the journalist with a disembodied gaze that presents facts’. The narrative style is description and the verbal–visual relationship is indexical and iconic. Icons are used for abstractions ‘Africa’ (a savannah landscape with black-skinned people) and ‘the UN mission’ (soldiers with blue helmets). The aesthetic quality is pamphleteering with Islamists as a persecutor worthy of denouncement. The space-time is concretized as Mali. The specificity and multiplicity of space-time relies on the icon ‘Africa’ and the spatio-temporal mobility connects Mali to the rest of (subSaharan) Africa. Thus, the space-time gains an appearance of yet another African conflict. It is an example of ‘anatopism’, which renders equivalence among different spaces (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 108), but only inside Africa. The continent is enclosed in its otherness and problems. Agency in the news piece concerns Islamists and sufferers. The Islamists’ agency is summarized as an active terror. Sufferers are either faceless in the distance, or they sit in the vicinity, gazing into nowhere and passively accepting a gift. This passivity does not make sufferers analogical humans of spectators’ lifeworlds. They are passive victims, not the active and spirited survivors more respected in Western culture (Orgad, 2009: 151–153). Yet, they are not dehumanized since even the condition of suffering can be a humanizing property (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 124). However, there is a third actor: the UN. Although it is not even clear when a UN mission shall come, the message is that the future of Malians’ suffering does not depend on anything else. It seems not to be in the spectators’ abilities to engage the situation; only the UN can change something. Paradoxically, we learn that this same UN has failed in other African countries. Why support it then? The suffering of Malians looks ungraspable and unsolvable to spectators. The second analyzed news piece (23 January 2013) is called ‘Battles in African Mali’, and it is from after the UN mission (led by France) had already started and the Islamists had begun to lose. The impact of the Islamists’ pillage on the cities of Dyabali and Timbuktu is addressed. Timbuktu monuments were damaged and are at risk of being removed from the UNESCO World Heritage List. We learn that possible removal from the UNESCO World Heritage List is a menace to Prague, Czech Republic as well, albeit due to different reasons than Timbuktu. The mode of presentation is perceptual realism again. It uses a narrative style of description and exposition, and an indexical verbal–visual relationship. The aesthetic quality of sublimation predominates. Sublimation occurs when ‘distant suffering [is constituted] less through emotions towards the sufferer and primarily Doboš 9 through aesthetic appreciation derived from the horror of suffering itself’ (Chouliaraki, 2007: 138–139). It invokes a state of ‘contemplation of suffering [that] does not involve human dynamics at all’ (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 92). Boltanski (1999: 127–129) asserts that an impression gained from sublimation depends less on sufferers themselves and more on aesthetic ability to create representations and thus, ‘in this topic the spectator sympathizes with the unfortunate inasmuch as the latter is put on view’. The quality of sublimation ‘rarely functions on its own. To produce its specific effect, it must rapidly pass through other topics [of philanthropy and pamphleteering] on which it briefly touches’. This news piece includes elements of philanthropy and pamphleteering. The former through UNESCO caring for Timbuktu monuments, the latter through the denouncement of damage the Islamists have done to them. Human sufferers are only background and witness to the suffering of buildings. No human dynamics of suffering are present. The space-time is concrete (Mali), specified (cities and its buildings) and multiple (two cities: Dyabali and Timbuktu). There is even a high spatio-temporal mobility because from Timbuktu, we move to the intended spectators’ capital city. Still, it only concerns damaged monuments. The spatio-temporal complexity for suffering monuments seems high, not so for humans, though. In addition, we literally hear: ‘Even though there is no war in Prague, its place on the World Heritage List has also come under the scrutiny of UNESCO commissioners’. If war and non-war events are represented as analogical, horribleness of human suffering that accompanies wars is marginalized. Chouliaraki (2006a: 272) mentions the problem of humanizing a city that ‘work[s] to subtract from the intensity that singular and personalized cases of [human] suffering bear’. Timbuktu in particular takes on human attributes, as ‘Islamists have already made a blot on the face of Timbuktu’. Timbuktu is the most important actor upon which Islamists and UNESCO acts. Civilians – when given chance to speak – only testify that the damages happened. They seem not to be full-featured human beings and are dehumanized. ‘[T]hey are unable to produce pity. They remain irrevocably ‘‘Other’’ – distant, inactive, devoid of feelings and thoughts’ (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 106). Emanating from a different context, Bauman (1989: 103) says that people are dehumanized when ‘the language in which things that happen to them (or are done to them) are narrated, safeguards its referents from ethical evaluation’. The problem of sublimation takes effect: it can make a strong appeal to act towards suffering, but only if sufferers are identified with ‘us’. If they are not, sublimation is amoral (Chouliaraki, 2006a, 2006b: 173–181, 2007). Imaginative geographies of the Mali Civil War Colonial nostalgia marks the imaginative geographies shaping media performances of suffering in Mali. Gregory (2001: 140–141) mentions two elements of colonial nostalgia. The first one is nostalgia for colonialism itself: relationships of colonization are supposed to have secured a more reliable world order than the present one without colonialism. This is noticeable in the need for a UN mission or 10 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) UNESCO’s care for Malian architectonical heritage because Malians cannot manage it themselves. In imaginative geographies, monuments and architecture often prompt Western interest in non-Western space because they are supposed to be humankind’s past-made-present. However, due to this, local living people are often made invisible (Gregory, 2003b: 204–209). The second element of colonial nostalgia is the nostalgia for an authentically different non-Western world, romanticized, or damned. This is in the iconic shots of ‘Africa’ with people who look premodern, or in representations of mad demolishing Islamists. Discourses of noble and ignoble savages often appear together in colonial imaginings (Hall, 1992: 310–312). Here, these discourses are related to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa – through iconic African shots and through information about analogical African UN missions. Usually, Africa is homogenized in imaginative geographies and its depictions often exhibit territories of savages that can be helped only through colonial care (Campbell and Power, 2010). Campbell and Power (2010: 172, 177) notice that Africa ‘is presented as having no history or pre-existing social order of its own’ before the colonization era, and even today, Africa somehow hovers in timelessness. Africa is ‘transformed from geographical into temporal space’ that is fairly behind the West on one singular timeline (Duncan, 1993: 52, cf. Doboš, 2017). ‘Not infrequently the notion of ‘‘difference’’ [is] more associated with temporality, and read as difference-through-time’ (Massey, 1999: 281–282). ‘We are ‘‘here and now’’ and They are ‘‘there and then’’ [. . .] [because] peripheral location from the West’s centre stands as some analogy for their temporal distance’ (Morley, 2000: 181). Gregory (1998: 77–78) warns us that non-Western ‘’’anachronistic’’ space [is] itself never singular’ and Africa is constituted as the most Other of all Others, even as ‘Orient’s Orient’. Mali falls sometime in the long past of the West. A comment says: ‘It is like a return to the middle-ages’. In such a long past there exist different moral rules. Thus, imaginative geographies of Mali are simultaneously moral geographies because the West typically considers its own past as a period when violence was much more common and more morally acceptable. Moral geographies as ‘descriptive ethics’ describe moral features of particular spaces (Proctor, 1998). That some phenomena are moral somewhere and amoral elsewhere concerns them. In Africa, violence seems somehow more moral than anywhere. Not only Islamists, but also African soldiers are violent. While French soldiers save Malians, African UN soldiers do problems because ‘their actions are undermined by corruption and rape scandals’. Certain imaginative geographies fetishize violence as an age-old natural phenomenon, without trying to shed light on a deeper context of why violence is happening (Springer, 2011). Campbell (2007: 363–368) shows this is the case for conflicts in Africa. Suffering can be similarly fetishized. According to Sontag (2004: 71), post-colonial Africa is linked with wars, famines and genocides, and representations of these events ‘confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place’. As Malian civilians look calm and passive, they seem unsurprised by something abnormal. In these imaginative geographies, suffering is routine and moral. Doboš 11 What seems immoral is monuments being damaged. After all, in the West, monuments are the thing that interconnects the past with the present. Paradoxically then, monuments do not have to necessarily posture in the past as African people do. ‘Monuments are particularly potent symbols of values’ and is why some specific actions – for example damage being done to them – are utterly immoral (Smith, 2000: 46–47). Malians become homines sacri – ‘bare life’, that is ‘capable of being killed and yet not sacrificed’ (Agamben, 1998: 90). They cannot be sacrificed because ‘the killing of homo sacer can be considered as less than homicide’ (Agamben, 1998: 100–102). Malians’ suffering easily becomes removed from the spectators’ concern. Agamben (2000: 35) adds that nowadays the West gradually ‘turns all the populations of the Third World into [bare] life’. Although that may be true for the populations of sub-Saharan Africa, it is not so unambiguous for other regions, as the next two cases demonstrate. The Palestinian case: An evolution of concern This case concerns news coverage of the summer-2014 Israeli intervention into the Gaza Strip. This event happened between 8 July 2014, when Israel launched its military operation, and 9 August 2014, when most Israeli forces had already withdrawn from the Gaza Strip. The news coverage of the event evolves over time and to demonstrate this, the first news piece is from an early period of the intervention and the second is from a later period. The first news piece (13 July 2014) is called ‘Israel Escalates the Offensive’. It provides information about the Israeli army undertaking a military operation into the Gaza Strip to destroy the Hamas movement. Israel calls on Palestinian civilians to leave their homes, while Hamas calls on them to stay. Some civilians left and avoided suffering, some stayed and experienced it. We also learn about the Iron Dome system that protects the state of Israel from Hamas missiles. The news piece uses perceptual realism, with a few elements of ideological realism opposing the actions of Hamas. A narrative style of description and an indexical verbal–visual relationship dominate. The aesthetic quality is pamphleteering with a persecutor worthy of denouncement. There are two possible candidates for the persecutor (the state of Israel and the Hamas movement), yet Hamas is discursively accentuated to be the one. After all, a ‘known villain’ rather than an ally more often acquires the role of the persecutor (Cohen, 2001: 173). Such a situation is common in the media and ‘is sustained through the projection of evil onto the stranger and its denial to the neighbour or to the self’ (Silverstone, 2007: 58). Israel is usually considered part of ‘Western civilization’, thus a neighbour, while Palestinians are regarded as ‘Islamic civilization’ (see Huntington, 1997), and easily seen as the ‘evil stranger’. This is reproduced through a discursively built phenomenon of passive causality. The acts of Israel are presented as a passive reaction to a threat from the dangerous acts of Hamas. Hamas is active and initializes a passive (almost instinctive) reaction of Israel, which is the intervention in the Gaza Strip to stop Hamas’ actions. Hence, the answer to the 12 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) historicising question ‘why is it happening?’ (Chouliaraki, 2008b: 383–384) is very simplified. The space-time is concretized (the Gaza Strip) and specified (various Palestinians’ houses). Yet, houses are generic so the spatio-temporal multiplicity is low. The genericness is enhanced by military visualizations of shootings from the sky, where houses and explosions look almost the same. The spatio-temporal mobility is present through peaceful shots of Tel Aviv, where a tourist praises Israel for its defence system. It does not concern Palestinians. Except intervening, the agency of Israel includes calls on Palestinians to leave their homes and shooting warning missiles. Civilian agency is narrow. They listen or not to Israel’s warnings. The news piece holds a strong emphasis on the positive actions of Israel. Anything possibly negative is only in reaction to Hamas. Hamas is the originator of the tragedy and acts negatively: for instance, it urges desperate civilians to stay in the warzone. The Israeli prime minister is given a speech then: ‘Hamas uses Gaza inhabitants as living shields and imposes a disaster on them’. Hamas starts the causal chain, Israel reacts and civilian suffering is the unavoidable effect. In such a stable causal chain, it is hard for spectators to imagine that their engagement in the events could change something. The news piece from the later period (3 August 2014) is called ‘Warfare in the Gaza Strip’ and it depicts the tragic destinies of Palestinian civilians. The destiny of a family where quadruplets have just been born and an incident where an Israeli missile falls on a school in Rafah are approached in more detail. Eventually, the news piece explains that although most of Israeli soldiers have already left the Gaza Strip, the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas is not on schedule. The mode of presentation is ideological realism and there is no passive causality anymore. Descriptions and expositions appear and mostly symbolic meanings come out of the verbal–visual relation. The aesthetic quality is pamphleteering again and now there is a situation where spectators can truly choose from two offered candidates for persecutor (Boltanski, 1999: 58). Neither Hamas’, nor Israel’s positive actions are seen. Even Israel negatively acts towards sufferers, instead of just reacting to Hamas. This provides a ‘potential for estrangement’ from normally accepted media values and can be positively stimulating for pity (Orgad, 2011). The space-time is concretized, specified, and even multiple. Again, there is no spatio-temporal mobility for the Gaza Strip, but the same is true for Israel this time. Without passive causality, the civilians’ agency is not restricted to reactions or non-reactions to Israeli warnings. Instead, they act actively and variously. They flee and hide from missiles, furiously protest, children are being born and being buried. Although civilians are active and defy suffering, they seem powerless and in need of urgent help. These people are analogous to spectators and their community. They are personified, give birth to children and feel ‘joy’ due to it. However, the ‘joy is troubled by fears’ because the children may not survive the war. These people’s experiences are radically different from spectators’. The news piece holds ‘proper distance’. Doboš 13 People are neither too dissimilar, nor do they fall into sameness with spectator lifeworlds (Silverstone, 2007: 47–49). ‘Proper distance’ usually implies a high potential to successfully appeal to the humanitarian actions of spectators towards sufferers (Chouliaraki, 2011). A politics of pity is being built and spectators are promoted to feel capable of engaging events. Imaginative geographies of the 2014 Gaza War While in the first news piece suffering is suppressed and, due to the passive causality, the finger of guilt points at Hamas, in the second news piece suffering is not suppressed and the role of persecutor is ambiguous: Hamas or Israel? This difference is typical: the further into the intervention, the more potential for politics of pity and the more condemnation of Israel. It may be because of the higher number of human casualties in the later news piece (1770 compared to 160), but it is an insufficient answer. Studies of imaginative geographies of late modern wars help to provide a better one. In the first news piece, Hamas launches missiles on Israeli space and Israel is forced to react by intervention. Gregory (2003a: 313) says that imaginative geographies which dominate Israeli politics are firmly rooted in the opposition between civilization and barbarity, where the Palestinians’ is ‘a barbarian space lying [. . .] outside the space of Reason’, with Hamas as the greatest barbarian. This rendering is accepted here. Hamas behaves barbarically, wanting its own civilians to suffer, so Israel even blames Hamas for using civilians as living shields. However, the Israeli government ‘routinely mobilizes the rhetoric of ‘‘human shields’’ to defend its actions’, doing the same in 2006 in the war against the Lebanese Hezbollah, for example (Gregory, 2006: 636). Compared to Hamas’s barbarity, Israel is a rational defender of its people. It reacts with a modern military operation, rooted in rational scientific military technological progress. The Iron Dome system is an example. Comments about its operation and precision are accompanied by shots of military visualizations that display how it ‘predicts the route of approaching missiles and disables them’. Military visualizations like these make the military action more like a modern act of reason than an aggressive warlike act of hostility (Gregory, 2012). The news, in using these visualizations, de-corporealizes the event of suffering, producing a ‘video-game treatment of the war [. . .] [with] a numbed experience of derealized and disembodied combat,’ preventing a moral affinity towards distant sufferers (Robins, 1996: 71–80). Even if some civilians seem to be harmed in spite of the precision of the operation, ‘tactics [are] used to mitigate the effects of civilian casualties on public opinion’ (Gregory, 2012: 173). Such tactics consist of Israeli warning shots or appeals to Palestinian civilians to leave their homes. Yet, if Israel cares about those who are clearly Other, it is installed into a position of caring generousness. However: The emphasis on cultural difference – the attempt to hold the Other at a distance while claiming to cross the interpretative divide – produces a diagram in which violence has 14 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) its origins in ‘their’ space, [. . .] while the impulse to understand is confined to ‘our’ space, which is constructed as open, unitary and generous. (Gregory, 2008: 18) Generally, the first news piece is structured by an imaginative geography that differs between ‘our’ Western and ‘their’ Oriental wars. In this imaginative geography: ‘[O]ur’ wars are construed as humane wars because they are fought within the space of the modern – the space of Reason, Science and Law – whereas ‘their’ wars are inhumane, even non-human (‘feral’) because they are located outside the modern: driven by Passion, Tradition and Criminality. (Gregory, 2010: 170–171) There is a moral distinction at work between suffering due to an improvised explosive device and suffering due to a modern military technology. While the former is actually supposed to cause civilian death and suffering, the latter is not. That is why Hamas is the originator of suffering, while Israel does not cause suffering, but only reacts to Hamas via rational military operations. Nevertheless, civilian suffering vanishes from Western wars only medially, virtually and rhetorically (Gregory, 2010: 168) because ‘the boundaries [between Western and Oriental wars] are blurred and each bleeds into its other’ (Gregory, 2011: 239). Nothing else happened here. Since the media representation was unremitting and Israel’s Western war began to bring about more and more suffering, as time passed (the evidence of a growing number of casualties, for instance) the second news piece is structured by an imaginative geography where Israel has already been contaminated by Oriental war. Suddenly, Israel actively perpetrates acts suffering. Suffering is no longer a question of causality and barbarian irrationality. Discursive strategies rendering a surgical military operation are not present. If Israel no longer conducts ‘our’ war, the media performance of suffering can build a politics of pity. Yet, Israel remains a part of the Western world. Therefore, the news piece does not imply historicity that could elucidate the complicated Israeli-Palestinian situation, where ‘our’ and ‘their’ wars have bled into each other many times already (Gregory, 2004: 76-143). Syrian case: Concern and pity The last case concerns the Syrian Civil War. In this war, mediated civilian suffering went through some shifts according to the changing stages of the war (Doboš, 2018: 13–21). We focus on an early stage when the war took place primarily between Syrian governmental forces and rebel forces of the Free Syrian Army. It is the stage before the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant entered the war. In this stage, at the turn of 2012/2013, bloody battles in the city of Aleppo were taking place. Both analysed news pieces report them. The news piece (27 January 2013), called ‘Helping Syrian Refugees’, focuses on the hard-living conditions of civilians from Aleppo, who were driven out of their homes. Among others, they are helped by the Czech humanitarian organization, Doboš 15 People in Need. The mode of presentation is categorical realism that endeavours to build an emotional bond between spectators and sufferers (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 132–133). Spectators learn about deaths, misery, neediness or beggary. The verbal-visual relationship is mostly indexical and the prevailing narrative style is narration. The news piece narrates stories of daily fights over a bare livelihood. Suffering children and women are often highlighted because these sufferers most probably provoke spectator empathy (Orgad, 2012: 66). The aesthetic quality is philanthropy. A benefactor, represented by humanitarian workers, is present, while sufferers are beneficiaries. Particular narrations about specific needs and help are discursively extended to other people so the philanthropy is ‘a-perspective’ (Boltanski, 1999: 30–31). This can evoke an idea of finished successful aid so spectators may conclude their future help is no longer needed. This is a problem of narrative closures because such closures evoke coherence, completeness and suppress contingency (Orgad, 2012: 195–197). ‘[T]he narration closes of the story with a happy ending’ (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 128), sufferers were helped and spectators are no longer required to engage. Here, however, the closure is eventually turned to a continuation because, at the end of the news piece, we learn about a grenade explosion nearby with a comment: ‘That’s so the locals won’t forget the war is far from over’. Nevertheless, narrations usually have the advantage of happening in specified and concrete space-times. Multiplicity of space-time is low (only Aleppo, all the time), but its mobility works due to the attendant Czech humanitarians in the streets of Aleppo. Suffering civilians are sometimes personified, and they actively and variously act like people in the spectators’ lifeworlds. Yet, actions often concern uneasy situations of suffering – escaping from home, finding shelter, begging. ‘Proper distance’ (Silverstone, 2007) is held here. Therefore, spectators can identify with humanitarian workers and can feel a need to engage in the aid. Still, there is another actor here, however latent his position is: Bashar al-Assad, who is to blame for the continuation of the war. He is a persecutor worthy of denouncement and the key actor of the second news piece. The second news piece (25 December 2012) deals with attacks of Syrian forces on bakeries, which are the last places civilians can obtain food. These attacks not only directly kill people, but also bring forth starvation. The piece also contemplates whether the government could use chemical weapons. Its mode of presentation is ideological realism. Attacks on bakeries, the related danger of starvation and the possible use of chemical weapons are expressed as absolutely inappropriate phenomena. The verbal–visual correspondence is indexical and symbolical. The symbols concern war and unjust oppression. Descriptions and expositions are narrative styles, and the aesthetic quality is pamphleteering. The persecutor is government forces, personified by President Bashar al-Assad. Suffering in the news piece is happening in ‘real-time’ and its criticality and emergency are accented. The space-time is concretized by maps and descriptions, specified by camera shots of functional or destroyed bakeries. Multiplicity of 16 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) space-time is not very high again and mobility is again maintained by information about helping Czech humanitarian organizations. The discourse of agency relates sufferers substantially to other actors in the news piece. The persecutor and benefactors are ‘symbolic figures organizing and focalizing the affective potential of spectators towards a particular emotion’ (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 90). Sufferers are active and trying to survive, yet they are afraid to do anything because persecutor Bashar al-Assad bombards bakeries. Bashar al-Assad acts uncompromisingly, he lets people ‘starve’ and permits ‘another massacre’. He becomes not only the personified nemesis of Syrian rebels and civilians, but also of any humanistic ideas that spectators can have. The primary antagonism is not between al-Assad and rebels, but between him and civilians. If such an antagonism is clear and transparent, a high potential for a politics of pity and motivation for spectators to act exists (Chouliaraki, 2008a: 841–844). The question ‘what to do?’ is then most straightforwardly answered through the final actor: the attendant humanitarian organization. Imaginative geographies of the early Syrian Civil War The case of Syria is the most promising of all. It triggers a ‘moral mechanism’ that connects ‘suffering with pity’ and motivates spectators to engage in events (Chouliaraki, 2006b: 143–144). There are decent answers on historicising and performative questions, effective chronotopicity, sustained ‘proper distance’ and understandable agency of all actors. This media performance gives a chance to create a ‘cosmopolitan public’. So far, so good. Imaginative geographies of news pieces delineate Syrian space where civilians suffer because they endeavour to emancipate themselves from a dictator. Syria seems Oriental: Muslim people living in chaotic, irrational and dangerous space, where an Oriental despot rules. Notwithstanding, there appears a not-so-Oriental Free Syrian Army and civilians who oppose the despot. Values like a will to live in freedom are usually presumed to be Western values, not Oriental ones. Through them, the West considers itself as guiding non-Western people’s struggles against their dominators (Said, 1994: 240). Here, suffering people try to escape from Oriental despotism and approach Western ideas of freedom and democracy. From the Orientalist’s point of view, Oriental people live ‘in a state of Oriental despotism and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism’ (Said, 1979: 102). This is ‘a discourse founded on a prejudice that [. . .] the [Oriental] Muslim people are trapped in an immutable tradition that makes them incapable of understanding the significance of necessary change [to modernity]’ (Amin, 2011: 71). Yet here, Orientals are not fatalistic because they actively try to change their state, which means overthrowing Oriental despotism. It seems they strive to modernize and Westernize themselves. Bashar al-Assad as the Oriental despot does not allow Syrians to Westernize themselves. He stays purely Oriental, but Syrian civilians do not because they try to adopt supposedly Western values and suffer for it. This is where the promising Doboš 17 potential of the news from Syria comes from. Syrians want to be like ‘us’. The West seems inventive and progressive while the non-West only imitates the West in order to progress (Blaut, 1993). Of course, Westerners are usually eager ‘to instruct (for its own benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modern West’ (Said, 1979: 86). Hence, these media performances support distant sufferers who want to learn the ways of the modern West. The boundary between the West and the Orient gets blurred in the proper manner: the persecutor remains evidently Oriental, while sufferers may be a little Western. Conclusion The post-colonial spatial context should not be ignored in mediated wartime distant suffering. Although distant suffering studies show how to approach what watching suffering on television can mean to spectators, until now it have noticed only a little that media performances of suffering are not performed in a de-contextualized ‘tabula rasa’ world, and that they need inspiration in specific non-identical geographies. These geographies structure how distant suffering is represented to spectators. These geographies are imaginative in Edward Said’s sense of the phrase. Imaginative geographies are not only able to structure media performances of suffering, but are also projected into these very same performances in so far that they are identifiable. We showed how identifiable are in cases of news pieces about wars in Mali, Palestine and Syria that were represented on Czech Television. Imaginative geographies make different things different differently. In the case of Mali, imaginative geographies make the unique case of civilian suffering in the Mali Civil War appear to be ‘just another war suffered in Africa’ because the West has a habit of homogenising sub-Saharan Africa, as captured in past times when conflicts and violence were ordinary. Suffering in Africa can become quite a moral phenomenon then. In the case of the Gaza Strip, where the widely known antagonism between Israel and Palestine takes place, a collision of Western and non-Western perceived spaces happens. Imaginative geographies maintain a boundary between Western Reason and non-Western irrationality that enters the mediation of warfare, but only until this boundary becomes unmaintainable. In the case of Syria, imaginative geographies blur the boundary between the Western and the nonWestern from the start, because sufferers seem to want to get closer to Western values and de-Orientalize themselves. Not a single mediated non-Western suffering, because there is no single non-West. Since ‘emergency news’ can manage to form a ‘cosmopolitan public’, it is crucial to ask where events in the news are from. Some non-Western spatial contexts contain better predispositions to induce politics of pity. Others, like sub-Saharan Africa, are in a much worse position. We might live in a globalized world where events of the West and the non-West are immingled. Yet, how they are immingled always depends on what lower-scale regional spaces are involved. There is a crucial need to be spatially sensitive in all treatments of representations of distant suffering and to notice what imaginative geographies are behind representations. 18 the International Communication Gazette 0(0) Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Barbora Vacková and two anonymous referees for their comments on previous drafts of the article. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Grant Agency of the Masaryk University [grant number MUNI/A/1251/2017]. Notes 1. 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