You’re Compassion Fatigue!
by Susan Moeller
You used to care, but now it’s just getting too difficult. You cared about the plight of people in lands near and far, but now the media has bombarded you with images of suffering to the point that you just don’t have the energy to go on. You’ve become cold and heartless, as though you’d lived in New York City for a year or
so. But you stand as a serious example to all others that they should turn off their TV sets and start caring again.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Never having read the book or anything by her of course this was not good enough….I want to know more and NOW so off I go to find out and of course this quiz so nailed me again. Here is what I found in case you would like to know a little more.

From Publishers Weekly
“Compassion fatigue”?the dulled public sensitivity toward crisis?isn’t inevitable, asserts Moeller, director of the journalism program at Brandeis. But formulaic and sensationalistic news coverage promotes it, she claims. In four worthy but somewhat belabored case studies, Moeller analyzes major American media coverage of recent crises, such as the Ebola virus, Ethiopian famine, the assassinations of Sadat and Rabin, and “death camps” in Bosnia. In these stories she found certain things were emphasized, others ignored: coverage of sensational disease, she notes, obscures more ordinary killers; images of starving children overshadow political causes for famine (and famines without photo opportunities are often ignored); the “Americanization” of assassination emphasizes that killers are crazy, rather than politically motivated; and lack of a simple heroes-and-villains story line obscured the Kurdish tragedy. The solution, she argues in an earnest but pollyannaish conclusion, is for the media to invest in international coverage, aiming for nuance and quality over sensationalism. More valuable for its analysis of what’s wrong than on how to make it right, Moeller’s book could have been made more helpful still through a brief comparison with media in other countries.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Criticism of the American press — broadcast and print — for its foreign coverage is hardly new but Professor Moeller does a masterful job of exposing the causes and the result of this failure. Her work should open the public’s eyes, and, indeed, those of the press itself, to the danger to our democracy if remedy is not forthcoming. -Walter Cronkite

Compassion Fatigue demystifies the editorial formulas which lead to homogenized, Americanized and unconscionably-thin international news coverage. In this important work, Susan Moeller holds American news moguls, editors, journalists and their audiences accountable for failing to overcome public apathy and to assume the unprofitable responsibility to accurately report and measure the human significance of epidemic, assassination, massacre and famine.

Submitted by: Former Washington Post reporter Scott Armstrong, the founder of the National Security Archive and co-author with Bob Woodward of The Brethren.

About the Author Susan D. Moeller is Director of the Journalism Program and Associate Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University. She has worked as a journalist for national magazines and newspapers and is the author of Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (1989). I am like her in I would have done something like she did in taking my peers to task and either walked away with their respect or I would have been black balled by them all. I must be in good company just not the same profession.

Go find out what book you are.

Yes Life is Simply Good.