Abstract
Invocations of solidarity in the context of media portrayals of suffering are often criticized as shallow, apoliticized, and fleeting (Chouliaraki, 2013; Chouliaraki & Stolić, 2019; Kyriakidou, 2023; Papataxiarchis, 2016). During “news flashpoints” (Waisbord & Russell, 2020), media pledges of solidarity may become plentiful to meet the moment. Yet when that moment passes, the issue is often either set aside or replaced with an arguably more urgent, severe, and objectionable case of suffering. Furthermore, even when media portrayals move beyond momentarily sensationalizing suffering (Boltanski, 1999; Frisken & Soderlund, 2022) and toward encouraging audiences to take sustained action, there is little evidence that audiences will respond with a presumptive sense of solidarity based on shared humanity. As Kyriakidou (2023) explains, “a universal concern for fellow human beings and a respect and understanding of their difference is not to be taken for granted on the basis of the circulation of … narratives and images” (p. 356). Media cannot
This article positions media practitioners as part of the public, and media as a potential form of solidarity in action. Rather than asking how media might (finally) prompt the public to act, this article asks: what kind of action should media practitioners take when they seek to represent what they perceive to be suffering? Often, media practitioners have “participate[d] in a harmful hegemony” (Jones, 2021, p. 81; related discussion in Kaliyarakath, 2024) by portraying the status quo as natural, normal, and given (Chouliaraki, 2013; Kyriakidou, 2021). Media have also objected to the status quo through solidarity practices for social justice, however (Varma, 2020, 2023a, 2023b), which is the focus of this article.
The idea of solidarity against suffering due to social injustice raises a series of questions and potential objections: solidarity with who? How is suffering defined? What is the connection between suffering and social injustice (Chouliaraki, 2013)? What if some people consider a group's suffering to be just (related discussion in Manne, 2017)? Won’t attempts to answer these questions deteriorate into relativistic judgments that selectively define atrocities in the world?
These questions indicate the stakes and significance of the discussion that follows. While these concerns cannot be conclusively settled by declaration or deliberation (Fraser, 1990), one way to approach these questions is through a framework that specifies what solidarity means, constructs defensible criteria for who warrants solidarity and why, and provides guidance on how to practice solidarity as a form of resistance. This article grapples with the complexities and contingencies of the normative orientations embedded in a solidarity framework for resisting suffering through media.
Ultimately, this framework does not attempt to extricate media from its inevitable socio-cultural and political contexts (Kyriakidou, 2023, p. 356). What may qualify as suffering due to social injustice is a historically, socially, and culturally contingent question that cannot be disentangled from media practitioners’ subject positions including their geopolitical context. Media practitioners regularly make tacit and explicit arguments about what constitutes suffering, what does not qualify as suffering, whose suffering matters, and why. This article contributes a framework for making these arguments through principles and practices of solidarity.
The term “media practitioners” is intentionally broad and encompasses creators, producers, reporters, storytellers, and “users” across platforms who participate through practices of amplification such as resharing, “liking,” and commenting. Rather than retaining pre-digital divisions between institutional “media” and audiences, the term “media practitioners” helps account for the ways in which contemporary media practices include but are not confined to professional boundaries and formal organizations.
The premise that media practitioners may approach their work as a pursuit of resistance against normalizing suffering is based on practitioners’ self-articulations. For example, as Sajir and Aouragh (2019) note in their study of images from the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015‒2016, photographers who documented the crisis did not imagine that their photography would or could singlehandedly bring an end to suffering, but said that they “want their own photos to be an act of protest at the very least” (p. 568, related discussion in Durham, 2018). In other words, these media practitioners sought to enact solidarity against the status quo (related finding in Harcup, 2005). Similarly, editor and journalist Sayaka Matsuoka said in a 2025 reflection on social justice journalism, Anywhere you look in your community, there are going to be people who are pushing back against the atrocities of the world, injustices big and small…If I didn’t feel like there was some semblance of hope and resistance at all times, it would be impossible to do this work. (qtd in Komp, 2025)
This article contributes a solidarity framework for media practitioners to resist a desensitizing status quo that normalizes suffering due to social injustice. The framework includes concretizing people's immediate needs for survival (moral solidarity), accounting for collective resistance already underway (political solidarity), and connecting instances of suffering to represent a larger pattern due to structures that transcend an isolated incident or single issue (social solidarity). Throughout, practicing solidarity is always an incomplete and aspirational endeavor rather than a formula for producing swift or guaranteed external achievements like policy change or political transformation. While one could argue that this means media practitioners are simply talking to themselves without delivering “real-world change,” such a critique overlooks the fact that media practitioners are part of the real world. Solidarity practices contribute a mode of media resistance against practices of media acquiescence to a desensitizing status quo of suffering.
I begin by motivating the need for a solidarity framework based on scholarship that has demonstrated the desensitizing status quo of dominant media portrayals of suffering. Then, I conceptualize solidarity for social justice, and introduce three levels of solidarity: moral, political, and social (Varma, 2023a). Third, I connect these solidarities in a framework and provide an example of how to apply it. Finally, I conclude by acknowledging that this framework may make little or no difference to aloof audiences, but it may offer a critical resource for resistance among media practitioners who are not (yet) desensitized to the status quo.
A Desensitizing Status Quo of Media Portrayals of Suffering
Audience desensitization, avoidance, and indifference to ongoing suffering have been extensively interrogated across media studies, media psychology, journalism studies, and communication scholarship (synthesized in Kyriakidou, 2023). One explanation for desensitization is overexposure due to an overabundance of media content, which is not limited to representations of suffering. For example, Gurr and Metag (2022) examined the impact of coverage of ongoing issues like Brexit on audiences. The authors found that audiences characterize coverage with words like “redundant” and “lack of progress,” and said this coverage makes them feel “annoyance,” “anger,” and “boredom” (pp. 588-589). Audiences criticized coverage both for a “lack of depth” as well as for excessive “complexity” (pp. 588-589). The authors classified these responses as indicative of “overexposure effects” (p. 595) and concluded that: repeated exposure to the same political issue over a prolonged period particularly impacts users’ affective and cognitive stance toward the issue and their evaluation of media coverage, leading some news users to turn away from the issue. (p. 596)
While “overexposure” suggests a quantity or frequency issue, even limited exposure to media content on suffering has led audiences to report distress, avoidance, and helplessness. Midberry (2020) showed focus groups 12 images of war photos, including six images of the “human cost-of-war” and six images of “militarism” (p. 4412). Participants noted that they avoided war coverage because “it evokes sadness and leaves them feeling powerless to effect meaningful change. Many participants spoke at length about feeling frustrated because they care about victims of conflict but have no recourse” (p. 4420; for a critical interrogation of the concept of “victimhood,” see Chouliaraki, 2024). One participant said, “What's the point in even knowing about it?” (p. 4420). Others echoed this frustration and said media should not only make it clear that people “should help” but also “how [we] should do it” (p. 4420). Helplessness from negative emotions, Midberry explains, is a key inhibitor of visual journalism having constructive impact. Limiting the amount of content did not prevent people from feeling upset and then desensitized.
Furthermore, even media that avoid evoking distressing emotions do not necessarily prompt people to act on addressing other people's suffering. McIntyre and Sobel (2017) found no significant differences between audience intentions to “donate money or volunteer” (p. 49) based on “shock stories” versus “solutions stories” on sex trafficking, for example. McIntyre and Sobel attribute this to widespread apathy to social problems, which is difficult for media to surmount even with a solutions-focus (p. 50).
Although both quantities and qualities of media portrayals of suffering may contribute to desensitization, Hill (2019) has cautioned against absolving the audience of moral responsibility for their own apathy. Hill argues that media-centric explanations of why people do not act on their knowledge of distant suffering are a thin excuse for “spectatorish inertia” (p. 43). Hill explains, To insist on a sort of Goldilocks News, where the presentation of suffering has to be just so if it is to motivate and mobilize a distant audience, is to assume that, because the presentation of news can be straightforwardly categorized in terms of moral function – personalization, affective engagement, dehumanization, hierarchies of suffering, and so on – moral responsibility can be read off these categorizations. The emphasis is too fully on the media text. (Hill, 2019, p. 40) we should ask more of the viewer as a moral agent at the same time that we ask the media to be more ethical in producing content. In wanting or trying to respond, we can and will be frustrated, but we do not get off the moral hook simply by virtue of variations in news coverage. (p. 42)
While media cannot change the world alone (Kitch, 2024), Jones (2021) has usefully called for construing media as playing a role in “constructing a more livable world” (p. 83). In a similar vein, Chouliaraki (2017) has posited that “narrative content may contribute to encouraging affective dispositions of humanity and care” (p. 54). Furthermore, Chouliaraki argues that “insofar as cosmopolitan morality is communicated through specific stories and images of human suffering, the possibility is always there both for a rethinking of what the human is and for reformulating what the global order is and which interests it should serve” (p. 53). Positioning media not as a directive but an invitation, Chouliaraki adds that media that represents suffering may “invite particular forms of action…as legitimate” (p. 54). The framework that follows provides a specific way for media practitioners—broadly defined—to both invite and act in solidarity with people struggling for basic survival and therefore suffering. Whether broader audiences resonate and join or turn away and tune out is not ultimately in the hands of practitioners. What is in their hands is how, whether, and to what extent they work to challenge suffering due to social injustice, which I conceptualize next.
Conceptualizing Solidarity for Social Justice
Solidarity is “a commitment to social justice that translates into action” (Varma, 2020, p. 1706). In a cross-disciplinary review of conceptualizations and applications of social justice, Jost and Kay (2010) provide a three-part definition of social justice grounded in political philosophy: …a state of affairs (either actual or ideal) in which (a) benefits and burdens in society are dispersed in accordance with some allocation principle (or set of principles); (b) procedures, norms, and rules that govern political and other forms of decision making preserve the basic rights, liberties, and entitlements of individuals and groups; and (c) human beings (and perhaps other species) are treated with dignity and respect not only by authorities but also by other relevant social actors including fellow citizens. (Jost and Kay, 2010, p. 1122)
The framework that follows focuses on the dignity dimension of informal social justice. I define social justice as an aspirational ideal of a society in which everyone's dignity is respected. Dignity is intrinsic worth, which means that in a socially just society, people's inherent humanity is respected as a universal truth and not a proposition for investigation, substantiation, or conditional recognition (Dillon, 2015; Kant, 1997; Young & Allen, 2011). The global history and contemporary persistence of dehumanization campaigns indicate that the moral truth of universal basic dignity has not been practiced anywhere near a scale of indicating universal consensus (Fujii, 2009; Haslam & Loughnan, 2014; Slovic, 2007, 2010), despite being codified in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948).
Instead of making an empirical claim, I argue that respecting everyone's dignity is a normative aspiration for any society that hopes to achieve justice, and offers an orientation for media practice (Habermas, 2010). Such an orientation positions media practitioners toward advancing the idea of dignity for all, precisely because it remains a controversial and unfulfilled ideal in practice. An orientation for basic dignity would be a radical departure from a status quo in which people with institutional authority may leverage media to justify suffering by denying people's intrinsic humanity.
Although solidarity is often conceptualized in terms of geography including local, national, and international regions with an emphasis on “distant disasters” (Cottle, 2014; Kyriakidou, 2015) or “faraway others” who suffer (Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2017), the following framework primarily construes solidarity in terms of concrete needs, structural issues, and shared conditions (Varma, 2020, 2023a, 2023b) and intentionally does not use a particular region as a reference point from which distance is measured. Scholarship on “distant disasters” has often focused on Western media depicting disasters in the Global South with Western audiences in mind, whereas the framework that follows applies to media practices within the Global South as well. In other words, the framework that follows is flexible enough to encompass more than media with a location-based or regionally specific logic and purpose. On social media, for example, practitioners in one region of the world may represent the same issue as practitioners in another region of the world, in contrast to traditional local newspapers which remain largely geo-targeted in scope and focus. Moral, political, and social solidarities, discussed next, are not conceptually tethered to select locations or restricted to a particular regional reference point, which can help media practitioners make sense of the reality of suffering that transcends a single site while also representing concrete struggles and resistance on the ground.
Broader than moral solidarity,
A Framework for Representing Suffering: Practicing Moral, Political, and Social Solidarity
A solidarity framework for representing suffering resists abstraction, isolation, and minimization of suffering due to social injustice. In contrast to episodic, individualistic, or single-issue stories, a logic of solidarity in media would help practitioners represent the roots of suffering as well as its visible manifestations. Taken together, the three-stage solidarity framework that follows provides a way for media practitioners to resist normalizing suffering. The purpose of this framework is not to envision a “Goldilocks formula” (Hill, 2019) for finally surmounting audience inertia (critiqued in Kyriakidou, 2023), but instead to offer an approach for media practitioners who are already engaged, aware, and committed (Jones, 2021) to trying to challenge suffering.
The question of what constitutes suffering is one that media practitioners answer based on their social, cultural, and political contexts (Banivanua-Mar, 2008; Manne, 2017). The framework that follows contributes a way for media practitioners to practice solidarity when representing what they wish to argue is suffering due to social injustice.
This framework is flexible enough to apply across a range of media settings, which means the tactical application varies but the conceptual approach remains consistent across platforms. Media representations inevitably involve turning to someone first: in many cases, media representations of suffering begin by showcasing people's anguish, amplifying officials’ and outside experts’ assessments and denials of whether people are suffering, or advancing nongovernmental organizations’ “solutions” that do not resolve the root cause of the issue. Directly impacted people's self-articulated needs may be included, but are often postponed until suffering people wail incoherently and “experts” weigh in. This is problematic because it relegates the insights of people who are suffering to an afterthought in portrayals of their own lived struggles.
With a framework of solidarity, media practitioners would begin instead with practices of moral solidarity. Moral solidarity means starting with people with direct experience of living the issue (Varma, 2023a). In moral solidarity, practitioners focus on appeals of “let us live – here's what we need from you” (p. 1893) where “us” and “we” refers to marginalized people subjected to social injustice (Näsström, 2011), and “you” refers to comparatively privileged people. People articulate their needs, and media practitioners acting in moral solidarity begin their work by amplifying them. These needs are concrete, immediate, and may be incremental (Varma, 2023a). Concrete needs may include food to eat, water to drink and bathe, and a place to sleep.
Moral solidarity comes first in a solidarity framework due to the immediate urgency of people's basic needs for survival. Starting by amplifying the most pressing and concrete needs is valuable because doing so prevents abstraction from eclipsing concrete needs. For example, “‘We still need shelter,’ say people who lost their homes in a hurricane” would be an example of moral solidarity, whereas “Environmental justice movement calls for a green transition to prevent accelerating hurricanes” would be the focus of the second stage of a solidarity framework as practitioners turn to political solidarity.
The second stage of this framework moves to
Social movements and grassroots efforts may include but are not exclusive to people directly subjected to social injustice. While moral solidarity prioritizes people subjected to represent their urgent concrete needs, political solidarity zooms out to represent the often long-term and ongoing efforts among people working to address the issue (Varma & Shaban, 2024). “The issue” would include both the specific area (environmental justice, for instance) as well as the structural roots of struggle such as capitalism and colonialism. Rather than expecting or encouraging media practitioners to know how to designate structural causes, media practices of political solidarity involve amplifying people who are already doing this work and often find their structural explanations omitted or ignored in dominant media portrayals (Varma et al., 2023).
Finally, the third stage of this framework is perhaps the most challenging: media practices of
Just as who “counts” as suffering is a judgment contingent on and constrained by media practitioners’ social, political, and cultural contexts, who media practitioners designate as facing the “same” structural conditions is also inevitably contingent and constrained. Yet even simply considering cases of suffering beyond a particular news hook or trending topic holds transformative potential for media practitioners to resist artificially minimizing, isolating, and abstracting when representing suffering due to social injustice.
Rather than invoking social solidarity as a given or dismissing it as impossible, media do the work of practicing social solidarity to represent people struggling due to the same, often-unarticulated structure which produces and reproduces suffering. The unity of social solidarity, then, is based in the possibility of unity among people subjected to social injustice. While this falls short of a Kantian ideal of unity of all people as a universal standard, it is congruent with a Kantian principle of basic dignity as inherent. In practice, social solidarity means that media practitioners convey the concrete, interconnected, and widespread scale of suffering due to social injustice.
Still, critics may remain skeptical of the idea that media practitioners would have a way to know how to connect different instances and issues of suffering to reveal patterns at a systemic scale of social solidarity, particularly when “media practitioners” are being broadly defined without restricting “practitioners” to “professionals” with specialized training. However, just as political solidarity and moral solidarity are not predicated on the idea that practitioners could or should somehow know intuitively, social solidarity uses the same logic of pointing practitioners toward people who know, including people who already work at a global scale. Media practitioners do not need to coin colonialism, for example—they only need to be curious about the question “is this the only case of people suffering due to this issue?” People struggling to survive (moral solidarity) and people who are part of social movements and grassroots coalitions (political solidarity) may also serve as sources for social solidarity since they are often keenly aware of the histories, persistence, and consistency of the injustice they face. Their suggestions of related examples may lead practitioners to more people who struggle and suffer due to the same structural conditions in different settings.
This framework connecting moral solidarity, political solidarity, and social solidarity means that media practitioners would represent real people at each phase—rather than reiterating statements from institutional spokespeople, faceless agencies, bureaucrats, or high-profile commentators who speculate without any direct knowledge of the on-the-ground reality. “Real people” includes people with immediate, concrete needs (moral solidarity), people fighting for structural change at an issue-level (political solidarity), and people beyond a particular incident or episode who struggle and suffer due to the same structural conditions in a range of locations (social solidarity). A solidarity framework offers a way for media practitioners to address the critical question of “why is this happening, where else is it happening, and how could it change?” through their work. Media portrayals that attempt to provide an answer would remain provisional, constrained to socio-political contexts, and inevitably incomplete. Attempting to answer this question through a framework of solidarity would, however, contribute to a dynamic of resistance.
In practice, a solidarity framework helps shape the terms of inclusion in media representation, including
Framework for representing suffering through practices of moral, political, and social solidarity.
As an example of how this framework applies in practice, consider media attention to a hurricane with unprecedented destruction due to climate change. First, with practices of moral solidarity, media practitioners would represent and amplify directly impacted people's concrete, immediate needs. In the case of the hurricane, this could take the form of hearing from people who have lost their homes and have nowhere to go, for instance. Moral solidarity focuses media practitioners on seeking out impacted people's articulations of their urgent needs for survival.
However, moral solidarity does not necessarily account for the broader issue giving rise to the concrete needs at hand. Amplifying housing needs for hurricane victims is a logical first step, but not as an endpoint. Ending here would mean focusing solely on the material consequences of climate change without addressing the issue of climate change or how it extends beyond a particular community of acutely impacted people at a particular time.
These limitations of moral solidarity indicate the need for the second and third steps of the solidarity framework. Turning to the second stage of the framework, practices of political solidarity mean that media practitioners would represent people who may or may not be directly impacted yet are part of ongoing collective efforts (also plural) to address it, such as climate justice movements (Weik, 2023). Political solidarity practices focus on structural opposition that is already underway which would include movements’ proposed alternatives to policies that have produced climate displacement, for instance.
Finally, media practitioners would move to social solidarity which takes a wide-angle lens to bring into focus a pattern of lived impact due to the structures identified in political solidarity which are not isolated to a single hurricane or a single issue. Social solidarity reframes discrete climate events of hurricanes, cyclones, heat waves, and earthquakes by positioning these events as a pattern of people in a range of places struggling for water, food, shelter, and safety—not due to random coincidence but due to consistent structures such as capitalism and colonialism that have created a global climate crisis. Identifying this shared existential threat illuminates the unity of shared human vulnerability to struggles for basic survival which transcend an isolated episode or issue.
Combining moral solidarity, social solidarity, and political solidarity, this solidarity framework offers three main strengths: first, media practitioners would begin their work by focusing on people with direct knowledge and a firsthand sense of urgency, rather than perpetuating media practices of marginalized people being placed on silent display and spoken for by outsiders (Chouliaraki, 2013; Horsti, 2016; Varma, 2023b). Second, political solidarity would ensure that media practitioners account for the existence of social movements which have already developed arguments about structural causes of suffering. Finally, instead of invoking social solidarity as a given (which is dubious in light of the existence and persistence of human suffering), media would do the work of practicing social solidarity to represent larger, often-unarticulated or taken for granted, structures that reveal the widespread unity of conditions placing people's basic survival at stake beyond a discrete incident or issue. This framework contributes a way for media practitioners to resist a desensitizing status quo of suffering, though it does not guarantee outcomes of doing so.
Practicing Solidarity Without Guarantees
Media practices of solidarity offer a form of resistance even when there is no guaranteed outcome of bringing an end to suffering altogether. Just as media are not deterministic, stagnant, or unitary (Hall, 1986, 1993), however, political, social, and cultural contexts are also not deterministic, stagnant, or unitary. This means that people—including media practitioners—objecting to what they define as suffering remains possible, even if there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes suffering or whose suffering matters. The decision to object to suffering does not mean that some media practitioners have somehow elevated themselves out of their socio-political contexts that may predominantly normalize suffering, but instead that these contexts include space for the possibility of a wide range of subject positions and responses to the status quo, including resistance. Resistance means that media move from placidly raising awareness to confronting and disrupting smooth processes of normalization that rely on abstraction, isolation, and minimization of people's pain. Media practitioners using a solidarity framework would, through their work, join the fight to challenge suffering at a structural level.
While it is naïve to imagine that media practitioners could singlehandedly settle centuries-long disputes over structures that create the existing social and political order, it is also naïve to ignore how some media practitioners already represent these disputes through a tenor of resistance rather than acquiescence, starting with people who know their own struggles to survive (Varma et al., 2023). Media practitioners, like “the audience,” are not a homogenous mass: media practitioners include people who are suffering or have suffered for generations due to struggles for basic needs under the status quo, and therefore are aware of why they struggle and what needs to change (Kendall, 2020; Varma, 2023b). Media practitioners without firsthand experience would begin with people who are directly impacted—rather than presuming to know.
Who counts, which issues are interconnected versus discrete, and what systemic explanations this framework may elevate are always contingent on the political, social, and cultural contexts of media practitioners using it. Media practitioners of any era are never detachable from the realities they represent—whether they join in active solidarity against struggles of human suffering or join in passive acquiescence to the status quo. While the status quo of media portrayals of suffering often reinforces desensitization (Slovic, 2007, 2010), a solidarity framework for portraying suffering offers a way for media practitioners to object to ongoing suffering. Practicing solidarity at moral, political, and social levels cannot unilaterally bring an end to the status quo but can offer a way to resist surrendering to its logic and deceptive appearance of inevitability.
Objections to this framework, and any framework for media practice, underline the fact that there is no single framework that can claim to resolve the fraught and contested matter of how media should define and portray suffering. Solidarity is one framework among many, but it is by no means the only possibility. When representing suffering, media practitioners must first decide who is suffering. Rather than a framework that circumscribes the meaning of suffering, this framework provides a way for media practitioners to make arguments in response to the question of who suffers and why using a logic of solidarity—amid disagreement and against a desensitizing status quo.
What external impact would media practitioners using a solidarity framework for representing suffering have on people who are not media practitioners and remain in the position of “audiences”? Based on checkered empirical evidence of audience responses and lack thereof (Kyriakidou, 2015, 2021, 2023), the ways in which audiences are enmeshed and entrenched in social, political, and cultural contexts (Banivanua-Mar, 2008; Chouliaraki, 2017), and psychological processes of self-regulation, desensitization, and avoidance of distress (Palmer & Edgerly, 2024; Slovic, 2007, 2010), the answer may turn out to be: nothing. There may be no clear link between media practice and engaging people to act (Kyriakidou, 2023). Yet media practitioners are people too, and media are a form of action which contribute to constructing and challenging the meaning of humanity and inhumanity (Cabas-Mijares & Grant, 2020; Hall, 1997).
The existence of media practitioners, social movements, and people who struggle who are committed to attempting to address suffering (Garza et al., 2024; González, 2024; Varma et al., 2023) provide the basis for this framework. This framework contributes a way for media practitioners to practice their commitments to resisting a desensitizing status quo. Stimulating disinterested audiences out of inertia may be beyond the scope of any media framework, however (Kyriakidou, 2023). Solidarity is constituted by people who show up, which includes media practitioners with earnest commitments to try to resist the normalization of suffering due to struggles for basic survival.
A solidarity framework for media practitioners does not invent or uniquely impose morality in media. Instead of continuing arguments that imagine it is possible to evacuate morals from media (as though appearing neutral to a dominant audience is somehow a value-free endeavor), a solidarity framework contributes to media scholarship that criticizes dominant media's role in perpetuating a desensitizing status quo of normalizing inhumane conditions. Solidarity offers an alternative moral approach, but does not originate the existence of morality in media (Durham, 1998; Ettema & Glasser, 1998; Gans, 2004; Harcup, 2005). The question is not whether morality has a place in media practice, but instead what justifies a set of practices and why.
Dignity for all should be as uncontroversial as it is trite, yet even this minimal standard for a humane society remains controversial, contingent, and far from a foregone conclusion. Suffering seeming obvious, natural, or endless is a warning that political projects which benefit from minimizing, isolating, and normalizing suffering in the service of a stagnating status quo may end up succeeding. Through practices of moral, political, and social solidarity, media practitioners still have a chance to resist.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
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