The
well known Judeo-Christian principle of loving one’s neighbour is also found in
similar forms in Islamic and Chinese tenets. In media ethical scholarship,
love-based ethics have been developed around central concepts of nurturing,
caring, affection, empathy and inclusiveness. The greatest of them all is love.
The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament
constitute one of the main areas where Christians look for God’s will. What
people should do (i.e. what is ethical) is contained in the commandments, and,
provided people follow them, they behave ethically.
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| Judeo-Christian books of life |
For journalists, applying the ethics of
love, or taking care of people, implies that he or she should provide news that
is timely, reliable, undistorted, accurate, understandable and captivating
because this will show the ethical standpoints of such media worker.
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| The basics |
In terms of ethics of love, journalists are
supposed to show empathy when there is tragedy. They should not treat the
victims as another human story the public must read.
If journalists can embrace the ethics of
love, it would therefore become mandatory for them to demonstrate some level of
care in terms of tragedy, and how they report their stories as a sign of duty to
the public.
One would say ethics of care is especially
appropriate in those times when journalists deal with disaster, suffering and
pain. Unfortunately, the mantra of journalistic objectivity and independence
sometimes harden into callous attitudes, where journalists do not allow
themselves to empathise with victims of disease, crime or trauma.
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| Show your humanity to victims of tragedy |
Ethics of care would allow journalists to
not see compassion, engagement and sympathy as flaw in their professional
make-up, but in fact as the appropriate and best ethical response when
confronted with the pain of those they report about. I would say that being a
good reporter is not being emptied of humanity.
In a country such as South Africa, with
more than average share of trauma, an ethics of care may lead journalists to
extend their social responsibility beyond the enumeration of the statistics of
poverty, the political debates around HIV/AIDS or the horror stories of crime
to delve deeper and provide contextually relevant stories that open up
possibilities for greater understanding and compassionate action.
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| Show some love on your next beat |
I would like to distinguish between ‘pity,’
associated with condescension, and ‘compassion,’ which refers to the desire to
relive another’s suffering by supplying what they need. Compassion can be
considered the emotion associated with an ethics of care that sees the media’s
role as one of engagement rather than distance and detachment; a lack of
compassion can be ‘at the heart of some of the more unsavoury journalistic practices
like ambush interviews and pack journalism.
Pity, on the other hand, even when sincere,
can construct a kind of spectatorship suffering that merely confronts audiences
with images of distant hunger, disease and death – without enabling them to do
anything about it”.
Such simplistic reporting leads at best to
a kind of ‘compassion fatigue,’ and at worst at a kind of voyeurism which makes
it acceptable and even predictable for audiences to consume images and
narratives of a suffering ‘other’.
Audiences are then turned into morally ambivalent or neutral spectators,
with no moral compulsion to imagine themselves in a relationship of care and
responsibility towards another.
Ethics of love and care protects the
individual rights and interests based on shared virtues. Ethical responsibility
of journalist in this case would be concerned primarily on how the media can
build, heal, and protect rather than attack. This is what we need in our
beloved country, the ethics of love and care. It will go a long way to heal our
racial wounds, and there will be smile on our faces again.
