The Mediation of Suffering and the Vision of a Cosmopolitan Public

In this article, the author argues that if researchers wish to move toward a “global village” with cosmopolitan values, then they need to examine critically the discourses and practices by which global information flows invite the individual spectator to be a public actor in the contexts of her or his everyday life. In the light of empirical analysis, the author presents a hierarchical typology of news stories on distant suffering that consists of adventure, emergency, and ecstatic news, and she examines the two broad ethical norms that inform these types of news: communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. The possibility for cosmopolitanism, the author concludes, lies importantly (but not exclusively) in the ways in which television tells the stories of suffering, inviting audiences to care for and act on conditions of human existence that go beyond their own communities of belonging.