ETHICS OF LOVE

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.

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.

            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.



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.



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.