Has suffering become the ‘new normal’? (Polis summer school guest blog)

This article by Polis Summer School student Janine Eduljee As an American and someone involved in broadcast journalism, I found something highly resonant in our recent class discussions at LSE about the media’s portrayal of suffering and how it shapes and is shaped by people’s interest and feelings towards tragedy. In particular the idea or phenomenon of ‘compassion fatigue,’ the idea that people can be so thoroughly inundated with violent or pathetic imagery that after a while it becomes just too much for a mind to handle, and they in effect shut down and stop feeling any sort of empathy or concern towards it.