Page 97 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

Politics in a Small World 83

in living in one world (Urry, 2000 : 182 – 3). Nevertheless, the idea of a
global community bound by sentiments of solidarity does sound very
idealistic given that, as Butler ’ s example shows, the imagined boundaries
of the nation appear still to be strong. Perhaps the important question to
ask, then, is why, given the developing conditions of globalization and
especially the potential of global media, global political community is not
materializing?
In Distant Suffering, Luc Boltanski has explored the fundamental ways
people may respond to the images of suffering that we see in our living
rooms on a routine basis. He argues that we must respond to this suffer-
ing, emotionally and through action, whether that action involves offering
some form of help, or just turning away. Even if we commit ourselves to
helping, however, our options are limited. Generally the most we can do
is to speak , to report on what we have seen to other people, how it has
affected us, and what we think should be done about it. In some cases,
this “ speaking ” may lead to public debate and to widening commitments
to action, whether this involves commitment to send money, to demon-
strate for justice or to demand humanitarian intervention (Boltanski,
1999 ). Where representations of distant suffering lead to debates over
what is to be done, they may contribute to solidarity across borders, and
even to political action for global justice.
Global media facilitates such action but, at the same time, the way in
which the media is structured also makes it unlikely. Images and stories
of suffering are distributed around the world through global media, but
their collection and distribution is not global. The main international
news agencies have their roots in London, Paris, and New York, and this
Western bias continues to influence how they collect and assemble news;

while broadcasting systems (the BBC and CNN, for example), select and

edit news to fit regional, national, and local tastes and interests (see
Hafez, 2007 ). At the same time, moreover, the increase of multiple chan-
nels directed at specific audiences, computerized programming, and the

use of video - recording makes for what is sometimes called “ narrowcast-
ing, ” greater personal choice over viewing and a greater fragmentation of
audiences (Castells, 2009 : 60). In these conditions of competition, the
aim of broadcasters is to create, capture, and keep a share of the audi-
ence, and in order to do so, they must take care to give people what they
think they want.
Lilie Chouliaraki has shown, through a detailed investigation of cover-
age of humanitarian crises in the news media, how stories are selected
and coded in ways that construct responses to suffering in “ the West ”
in quite different ways to suffering in “ the Rest. ” Chouliaraki analyses