Source : Toronto Star

When media appeal to hearts not minds, public policy often turns on emotion rather than reasoned debate

Leslie Vryenhoek is one of three winners of the inaugural Dalton Camp Award, named after the legendary Toronto Star columnist, who died last year. The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting sponsored an essay competition on how the media influence the state of Canadian democracy. The winners each receive $5,000 and a bronze cast medal. They are: Vryenhoek, a writer and communications professional from Winnipeg; Russell Wangersky, editor of the St. John's Telegram; and Jean Coléno, a political science graduate student from the University of Toronto.

The once smiling face of the now dead child. The soldier portrayed as husband and son. The grief-stricken family member recalling the loss of a loved one. These are the familiar faces that bring a media story, and all its inherent issues, to life.

Leading with the personal account is a time-honoured technique designed to draw in the audience and build an affinity for the subject. Increasingly, however, the personal narrative doesn't lead us into the larger story — it is the story, without context or further substance.

The immediacy and intimacy achieved through modern technology, when coupled with this focus on the personal, can lead the media consumer to experience profound emotional involvement in the lives — and the tragedies — of others.

As a result, it has become commonplace for Canadians to expend large amounts of energy mourning strangers.

By strangers, I don't mean Pierre Trudeau or the Princess of Wales, who were known to us in life — even if we were not known to them. Our grief, bolstered as it may have been by overeager media coverage, was an outgrowth of our loss.

When I speak of strangers, I mean those who become known to us solely due to the circumstances of their death.

Quite apart from its effect on personal well-being, the danger of engineered grief lies in its impact on public discourse. High emotion is as likely to foster outrage as it is to inspire wisdom or generosity borne of sorrow. The result is a move away from informed decision-making toward something less rational, more visceral.

Grief politicizes and polarizes. Those who experience personal loss are moved to action with a single-minded ferocity that makes change possible, even inevitable.

This can be a tremendously positive force for change. Canada's drunk driving laws, for example, have been transformed by the organized fervour of parents who channelled their grief into relentless advocacy.

Armchair mourners are not as motivated as grief-stricken parents, of course, and so are likely to undertake only armchair advocacy — writing a letter to an editor or a cheque to charity, perhaps, or expressing an impassioned opinion in the lunchroom or to a pollster. Taken individually, the impact of these actions may not seem great, but the combined volume of similar reaction can make them significant.

During the years I've worked for an international humanitarian aid organization, I have been grateful for the media's predilection for human suffering. These vivid stories often drive humanitarian impulse. When flooding devastated Mozambique in 2000, the images of people hanging from trees, filmed from a rescue helicopter, provided gripping drama that drew a tremendous response from Canadians. Donations poured in.

Contrast that with the much larger humanitarian disaster that took hold in southern Africa last winter. Famine makes lousy television, so it was impossible to draw the necessary response.

Like donor impulse, public policy often turns on emotion more than reasoned debate. Never mind minds — hearts and guts guide voters, and polls measuring the mood of the country guide politicians.

The surest path to change is through emotional connection. The best journalism must also engage the emotions. But unlike artists and promoters, journalists have a larger mandate — to motivate and improve public discourse. If a news story elicits only a visceral reaction, then no matter how memorable, it has failed in its responsibility to foster an informed state among its audience.

No event more vividly underlined the impact of media-inspired grief than that which began on Sept. 11, 2001.

This caught-on-camera calamity, and the weeks and months of coverage that ensued, raised the bar on collective mourning and became, in the minds of an enormous chunk of the North American population, the largest event to happen ever, anywhere.

In that first remarkable week, the world (the Western world, at least) sat glued, grief-stricken, to its television screens. One woman confided that she sacrificed three nights' sleep to watch the coverage. Another told me her father cried inconsolably for days, all the while seeking stories that would make him cry harder. I heard someone else say they felt guilty when they turned off the TV, abandoning those trapped in the rubble. These responses, and the millions like them, were genuine reactions to astonishing, emotionally-charged media content.

It would have been impossible to report on those first days without focusing on the intense emotion of the time. But we cannot deny that, when the world caught its breath and we all found our feet, the media turned up the volume with endless features on victims and families. Music played, flags unfurled, emotions were manipulated.

Unfortunately grief — along with its close relative, fear — provokes extreme reactions that makes rational debate difficult, if not downright dangerous. Public commentary in Canada reflected the emotional impact following 9/11. It became easier to distrust foreigners, to call for tighter immigration controls, to talk about curtailing freedom to in the interest of freedom from. "After what happened to those poor people on Sept. 11 — " became a common opening refrain among talk radio callers who wanted to rage and be heard.

This emotional involvement made the commitment of Canadian troops to the war on terror in Afghanistan a fait accompli, with none of the hand-wringing and divisive, if necessary, debate that marked the Canadian reaction to the war in Iraq. Even with regard to Iraq, the pro-war forces in the streets and on talk radio declared "After what happened on Sept. 11" ... It was an earnest reaction, based in immense grief. And that grief was, in part, inspired by a media frenzy that capitalized on individual stories, wringing tears from tragedy at the expense of a larger understanding.

Many of those who avidly watched the 9/11 coverage later expressed disgust with the media, complaining of manipulation and exploitation.

But it is the nature of mass media that what prompts a strong reaction draws more coverage — leading the media, in essence, to chase its own tail. Consumers must look to their own unquenchable thirst for personal stories before casting blame.

What drives us to peer closely at news of others' tragedies is not just voyeurism, but the need to confirm that the dead differ from our own loved ones. This is why tragedy far away, in cultures vastly different, is easier to take. Those people aren't like us, they don't feel the same, we believe. They think life is cheap; death doesn't bother them, we lie. We find ways to find distance. And when we do, even the most emotionally-charged footage has the effect of diminishing the enormity of a tragedy. If they are not like us, we reason, then it matters less.

But if, instead, we find unbearable similarities, we are driven to grief, and sometimes to fear or outrage.

Large-scale catastrophes provide extensive material for emotional coverage, but the greatest danger to institutions and sensible public policy is often sparked by the atypical individual death.

Local and limited, these tragedies are covered precisely because of the unusual circumstances under which they occur. However, they make more compelling stories if the anomaly is underplayed, and the potential danger to the audience highlighted.

Fear then becomes the conduit through which people are engaged. In these instances, the personal story is not used to put a human face on a larger issue, but to create a larger issue from an aberrant human tragedy.

And of course, any suggestion of negligence or bureaucratic failure will almost guarantee an emotional response among mourners.

Family members can be forgiven for expressing outrage and laying blame during times of deep personal crisis. Lamenting the shortcomings of a health system that failed to save a loved one, for example, or questioning the virtue of safety protocols that prevented emergency workers from rescuing trapped family members, are natural reactions of the bereaved.

But when a large contingent of strangers, spurred by evocative news reports, take up the cause and demand changes, an unsettling groundswell occurs. Policies forged through careful balancing of priorities can be laid waste in the rush to accommodate the feelings and fears of an ill-informed but outraged public.

Unfortunately, once grief, fear and outrage have taken hold, rational discourse becomes improbable. Any refusal to give in to the sentimentality of the moment appears heartless, even suspect.

The media should guard against fostering such an irrational climate, in which the ideals and institutions that give strength to democracy cannot flourish. Journalists place enormous importance on their obligation to provide balance. That concept must be expanded to include a balancing of emotional content with intellectual rigour.

Emotional connection is a place to start, because engaging the heart is the surest way to opening the mind. We would all do well to remember, however, that "moved to tears" is not the same thing as "well- informed."

----------

This is an edited version of Leslie Vryenhoek's entry in the 2003 Dalton Camp Award, sponsored by Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. You can read the full essay and the other winning entries at http://www.friendscb.ca/dca/.

© The Toronto Star

Related Links

See also:

Press Release
Full List of 2003 winners