News Fix # 67: Why do we want audiences to feel so much?

I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I'd love to hear from you. If you've been reading for a while, will you forward this to somebody you'd like to bring into the conversation? I'd appreciate it.

Empathy book club starts on Sunday! If you want to sign up, go for it. We'd love to have you. In the lead-up to reading, I've been trying to clarify a few (not all!) of my feelings on this very complicated emotion.

I hadn't been aware until pretty recently that empathy is also a topic of conversation among some in the hard right and Christian nationalist pundit class. They are attempting a rebrand of empathy as “toxic empathy.” The goal seems to be to convince people to harden their hearts against any stirrings of compassion toward those targeted or harmed by hard-right politics, from immigrants to LGBTQ people. It's a strategy that treats empathy as both incredibly powerful and zero-sum, whereby identifying with others across significant differences threatens dominant groups' “self-preservation,” like some kind of emotional kryptonite.

Empathy is not toxic. It's just a strong and necessary human emotion. Much like connection, however, it's not something most newsrooms are equipped to cultivate and foster. The idea that empathy is zero-sum emotion is political, but actual science supports the idea that our supply of empathy is not infinite. In the face of lots of or repeated suffering, most people will find their reserves of care depleting. Social workers, doctors, and others in helping professions know it as compassion fatigue.

The news is often tasked with being a transmitter and translator of difficult truths and of suffering. Our approach to hard stories frequently involves turning up the emotional register, trying to provoke empathy to gain or keep attention. They can have the opposite effect. The news being considered “depressing” is a major driver of news avoidance.

I've been concerned about story structures meant to evoke empathy, like victim narratives and extreme visuals, since almost the very beginning of my journalism career. I worried those of us working in news didn't really understand emotional mechanics or effects. Emotional storytelling can also keep news and information providers from asking tough questions that could better discern what audiences might need from the news. Questions like:

• By trying to get an audience to feel empathy for a source or issue outside their experience, am I accepting the premise that they can't or won't care about these things unless their emotional buttons are pushed? Am I selling my sources' and audience's humanity short?
• Instead of trying to provoke an emotional response from an audience not directly impacted by the issue I'm reporting, could I serve the people affected by the issue with information that would help them navigate or mitigate the situation?
• What other kinds of engagement, outside an emotional response, might help sources and readers get high-quality and relevant information about this issue?
• What is my reader supposed to do with their emotional response? Have I prepared them to act on something?

Empathy is a beautiful emotion. I'd like us to use it sparingly, and instead try to push audiences to recognize the dignity of people in different or harrowing situations. This could just as easily be an explicit goal of high-quality journalism.

To quote Pope Leo summarizing some Catholic social teaching, human dignity “is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified.”

I haven't really challenged my thinking on empathy in years. I'm looking forward to new ideas and some deeper thinking, especially spurred on by a great book.

I'll likely be publishing News Fix every other week until the end of the year because of this close reading experiment, but I might have a few special editions between now and then, too. Until the week after next, take care of yourself.