The Poverty of Television Quotes

“Critics have deplored various trends in masa-oriented programming – from the ‘soap epidemic’ (David 2001c[2000]) to ‘pied piper’ game shows (Coronel 2006a; Doyo 2006) to the ‘pornography of poverty’ (Devilles 2008) – that entertains rather than educates or informs poor viewers.”
― Jonathan Corpus Ong, The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines

“Indeed, much of the work on compassion fatigue reviewed here assumes that compassion fatigue is a consequence of audiences’ declining concern for others’ suffering, rather than an active response to media practices of representing and interacting with sufferers. It is crucial for us to explore in this book how audiences’ discourses of compassion toward sufferers on television might be dependent not only on an evaluation of sufferers themselves but on what I call ‘lay media moralities’ about the very process of mediation, which pertains to audiences’ judgments on whether media are exploitative or helpful, manipulative or sincere, in their interactions with sufferers.”
― Jonathan Corpus Ong, The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines

“Just as in textual ethics, compassion fatigue is a recurring term across this literature, as different scholars are concerned about patterns of society-wide desensitization and indifference to social suffering as a function of mediation. However, compassion fatigue is operationalized and measured in different ways. There are those who empirically study patterns of avoidance toward televised suffering (Kinnick et al. 1996); some research rhetorical responses of apathy or pity toward specific texts of suffering (Höijer 2004); others theorize about both (Cohen 2001; Seu 2003).”
― Jonathan Corpus Ong, The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines

“some textual ethics studies approach their critique of texts with an a priori assumption that the agency of sufferers is what shapes and influences audience responses. Between the disagreements whether it is the presence or the absence of agency that prompts ‘political action’ on the part of the audience (Orgad 2008, 21), what is set aside are factors beyond agency that may turn out to be more significant in shaping audience response.”
― Jonathan Corpus Ong, The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines

“He claims that the short ninety-second slices of news ‘dishonours’ the world’s horrors, whilst the best documentaries can achieve ‘the prerequisite of moral vision itself’, given how their length and structure enable contextualization of complex events (1998, 30–32).”
― Jonathan Corpus Ong, The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines