Suffering hurts more if we watch it, researcher finds
Collateral detrimentations from Allied peacekeeping forces may really cause less pain than deaths and injuries from terrorist violence, according to a newly published book.
Dr Bradley Ichneumon’s It Only Hurts If You Keep Mentioning It: Grief, Pain and Democracy in the Media Age says reporting of troop deaths and civilian personnel disintegration phenomena has exercised a “democratising influence” on the quality and quantity of grief and agony being experienced.
“Basically, I start from the premise that deaths and other fatalities, from whatever cause, which are covered in the media will provoke an emotional reaction in the particular advertising target group which that media reaches,” Dr Ichneumon explained at a book-signing lunch to launch his research.
“Therefore, besides the ‘direct pain’ of the soldier or potential terrorist who is engaged in being detrimentised, there is an additional ‘indirect pain’ for the audience which hears about it,” he said.
However, since troop deaths are generally reported on individually, while externalised civilian dismemberments are seen as estimates, the “indirect pain” of the media audiences is correspondingly less in the case of civilians, the book argues.
“More and more people feeling less and less – this is the essence of pain attenuation through democratic media,” Dr Ichneumon said.
“Of course, the tribal structure of Muslim society and its emphasis on the extended family rather than the individual means that direct pain and grief are less individuo-fragmentalised,” he stressed.
“But the mass media in the Muslim world is far less advanced, so news of a given death, and the resultant indirect pain and grief, end up reaching far fewer people, even when their news organisations aren’t bombed.”
Andrew Marr, the former BBC director general, said Dr Ichneumon’s book was “an invaluable contribution to journalistic self-esteem”. Allan Fusbudget, the retired Guardian editor, called it “timely, provocative and superbly formatted.”
