Global Divides in Transnational Media Managing the Visibility of Suffering

Abstract

By empirically exploring variations in satellite news on human suffering, inlcuding the 2004 tsunami footage and the 2007 Burma demonstrations, this chapter argues that the symbolic power of trans-national broadcasting consists primarily in its capacity to manage the visibility of suffering so as to reproduce the moral deficiencies of global inequality. At the same time, however, it shows that there are certain conditions of possibility, techno - logical as well as symbolic, whereby satellite news stories may be able to produce a sense of moral agency that transcends the West, thereby constituting cosmopolitan communities of emotion and action.