“Com­pas­sion”, the 19^th cen­tu­ry Pol­ish philoso­pher Arthur Schopen­hauer wrote, “ is the basis of morality.”
In a world sore­ly in need of copi­ous amounts of it, com­pas­sion is both high­ly selec­tive and hostage to a short atten­tion span on the part of the pub­lic and the news media, the inevitable con­se­quences of the way news is disseminated. 

Jour­nal­ists are ensnared in the web spun by the 24 hour news cycle and inces­sant news flash­es on Smart phones and social media. The head­line becomes the sto­ry. They’re also increas­ing­ly under the con­trol of media tycoons and con­glom­er­ates rapa­cious­ly gob­bling up news out­lets and cut­ting news-gath­er­ing bud­gets in pur­suit of  exces­sive prof­its and stock prices, the mis­sion of jour­nal­ism be damned.
“Just 37 years ago, there were 50 com­pa­nies in charge of most Amer­i­can media. Now, 90% of the media in the Unit­ed States is con­trolled by just six cor­po­ra­tions.”
It’s not a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry to ask whether a result of that is jour­nal­ists giv­ing bureau­crats and politi­cians more talk­ing head time than they are due, at the expense of  putting their feet to the fire and their words to the test.
When ram­bling, self-serv­ing “media con­fer­ences” are broad­cast live, the answer is yes.
And when did “media” replace “Press”? It sounds like some­thing a PR flak invent­ed to aggran­dise clients. The term is so broad that it embraces the social media ver­sion of “jour­nal­ists”, includ­ing those account­able to no one, with no due dili­gence beyond their own agen­das and egos, and no checks, bal­ances or need to redress errors.
One sto­ry no politi­cian seems to mind being front and cen­ter about on any plat­form is Ukraine. Intense media cov­er­age of that cri­sis is a no-brain­er. But high­light­ing the plight of the mil­lions of Ukraini­ans who have fled the fight­ing should not mean lit­tle to no atten­tion on oth­ers in sim­i­lar straits.
In part, the audi­ence is also to blame for that,  albeit through no real fault of their own.
Accord­ing to Glo­ria Mark, PhD, of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­fornia Irvine: “Research has shown that over the past cou­ple of decades people’s atten­tion spans have shrunk in mea­sur­able ways”. 

          MISREPRESENTING IS AS BAD AS IGNORING

It took a cat­a­stroph­ic ship­wreck on the coast of Cal­abria to bring the tragedies of migrants risk­ing their lives to cross the Mediter­ranean back into focus. Italy’s inte­ri­or min­is­ter, Mat­teo Pianta­dosi  insist­ed the migrants were prompt­ed by what he termed the “illu­so­ry mirage of a bet­ter life” in Europe.
In 2022, 1,417 migrants per­ished in the Med.
Most,  prob­a­bly all of them, knew the risks. They were will­ing to buck the odds not in the “illu­sion” of a bet­ter life, but because the one they had made it the only good option.
“This is not an emer­gency in num­bers,” the Inter­na­tion­al Organ­i­sa­tion for Migra­tion (IOM) tweet­ed, “It is humanitarian.”
In Afghanistan, it is both, and equal­ly neglect­ed coverage-wise.
Accord­ing to a recent UN report, 4 mil­lion Afghans are acute­ly mal­nour­ished, includ­ing 3.2 mil­lion chil­dren under the age of five, and 28.3 mil­lion peo­ple – two-thirds of Afghanistan’s pop­u­la­tion – require mul­ti-sec­toral human­i­tar­i­an assistance.
But the recur­ring sto­ry on Afghanistan is how the Tal­iban treats women, which affects how aid is allot­ted. Rep­re­hen­si­ble doesn’t come close to describ­ing the Taliban’s mind­set, but it ought to be self-evi­dent to any­one with a mod­icum of com­pas­sion that leav­ing peo­ple to starve and freeze to death won’t alle­vi­ate, nev­er mind change that.
Syr­ia, which dom­i­nat­ed the news cycle when the fight com­bined Rus­sia and Iran back­ing a bru­tal dic­ta­tor, ISIS ris­ing, with the U.S. and oth­er West­ern nations part of the mix, has been left to drag on with bare­ly a men­tion, for which West­ern lead­ers are no doubt grateful.
This in spite of the fact that 300,000 Syr­i­an civil­ians have been killed, 13-mil­lion peo­ple, half of the country’s pop­u­la­tion, have fled their homes and 90 per­cent of Syr­i­ans live in poverty.
It earns them lit­tle sig­nif­i­cant media atten­tion. (A notable excep­tion was a recent fine piece by Lydia Pol­green of the New York Times.)

             HOW QUICKLY WE FORGET

 Nel­son Man­dela, one of history’s great­est sur­moun­ters of adver­si­ty, once said: “Our human com­pas­sion binds us the one to the oth­er — not in pity or patron­iz­ing­ly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our com­mon suf­fer­ing into hope for the future.”
One won­ders what he’d have made of those who pro­fessed  com­pas­sion for the vic­tims of apartheid, yet tol­er­ate or ignore the plight of the same peo­ple, who are now vic­tims of Mandela’s  cor­rupt and cru­el successors.
Dit­to the peo­ple of Zimbabwe.
And one last exam­ple of “out-of-news-out-of-mind”: approx­i­mate­ly 730,000 of the one mil­lion Rohingya forced to flee Myan­mar since 2017 are in sprawl­ing refugee camps in south­ern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazaar. I won­der how many peo­ple know that, or have enough com­pas­sion left to spare them?
Shakespeare’s Cas­sius  had it right:
“The fault, dear Bru­tus, is not in our stars,
But in our­selves, that we are under­lings.” (Julius Cae­sar, Act I, Scene III)

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