Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Irwin Singer's avatar

Astier’s story about the BBC poses a bigger question: What are the costs (and benefits) to society when ‘empathy’ trumps ‘objectivity’ at our most important institutions? We need more debate on this, but for those attached to an ideology based on empathy, debate is off the table.

Expand full comment
Sheela Clary's avatar

Thank you for stating this so clearly and fairly.

Here's the crux, it seems to me: "these tales increasingly boil down to simplistic morality tales of justice versus injustice. Their subjects are never pure individuals: stripped of group identity, their stories would lose their illustrative power."

I see this phenomenon in my hometown Massachusetts newspaper, where a recent story on redlining in a poor neighborhood, which seemed at the outset to have been the result of deep research, through which I might learn something new and important about our history and my neighbors, wound up just another shallow pointing out of the victims and their faceless, nameless oppressor.

But the thing is, I'm a reformer at heart. I served in the Peace Corps becuase I believed I could change the world. I learned there that the way to change the world is with only one person in your line of vision. What is her story? What do we have in common? Her group identity hasn't evaporated, but it's subsumed to her wholeness, her uniqueness.

I approach journalism this way, when I'm doing it right. I zero in with great specificity so that I, and then my reader, might feel empathy, might even change their behaviors and thoughts.

Cudgeled — or worse, condescended to — people don't change, they just shut up until Election Day.

Expand full comment
9 more comments...

No posts