The Media Waxes Philosophical About Victims, Worthy and Unworthy

One of the more famous aspects of Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's critique of the news media in their classic Manufacturing Consent is their discussion of the media's double standard regarding "worthy" and "unworthy" victims. The worthy victim is a victim worthy of our interest and sympathy, and a fight for justice; and the unworthy victim is the opposite, "undeserving" of such concern; with the coverage they each get matching that.

The worthy victim gets far more coverage, far more prominent coverage, and far more emotive coverage than the unworthy victim, with the last in particular worth expanding on.

The worthy victim is humanized. The account of the crime against them, in its intense detailing, emphasizes the brutality done them. We are made aware of the indignation of others over the incident. And there is a demand for justice.

Thus when the victim is a worthy one the media is apt to present all of the above in emotive language, and give us too those pictures worth a thousand words, showing us their faces, likely smiling, in photos taken back when they were alive--while we are warned about the graphic images that show what remains of them now that make such a contrast with those living images we saw earlier. The journalist's report, and the images, will also make clear to us that they had attachments--that they had a family--that they loved and were loved, by parents, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, in whose lives there is now a gaping hole, and who cry out for answers and accountability. (Indeed, rather than just humanizing them the media gives the impression of canonizing them.)

By contrast, if the media speaks of unworthy victims at all, it refrains from emotive language, often does not mention individuals, and if it mentions individuals says little about them. Their faces remain unknown to us as the report alludes to what happened to them only briefly, providing such details to which the journalists deign to offer (of which there are unlikely to be many) in the most distant and impersonal and "clinical" fashion. They display no interest in those they left behind, and there is certainly no concern for any aftermath. Indeed, Herman and Chomsky contrast the coverage of worthy victims so "generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice" with the "low-keyed" character of what little coverage the unworthy get that is "designed to keep the lid on emotions."

I find the essentials of this characterization of the media's conduct indisputable, though I think that with a few decades of additional hindsight (and one might see, the decline of certain sensitivities that even in the '80s were more developed than now, to go by how affairs like the Iran-Contra episode could still outrage, and seem awfully small time next to what we have today) it is worth enlarging on what seems a minor point in their original discussion. This is that those reporting the incident not only treat the incident very differently depending on whether the victim is worthy or unworthy, but strike a different attitude toward the meaning and value of human life altogether as they do so. Herman and Chomsky remarked this in some degree, noting how the "low-keyed" character of the coverage of unworthy victims tends to entail "regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life" telling us "Don't get too worked up over such things."

Today it seems to me that the philosophical double standard has gone much further. With the worthy victims not only is it that we get lectures on the sanctity of human life, each and every last one, and the absolute unjustifiability of any violence against any human, ever, but in discussion of the unworthy we get not just talk of the omnipresence of violence and tragedy in sad and regretful and "philosophical" tones but, increasingly, a hastening to justify what was done that often goes as far as their assuming an attitude of that "Welcome to the real world!" swagger to which small men who want to feel big are so addicted as they condescendingly tell us in that way feminists call "mansplaining" that that real world is not just a place where violence is omnipresent and tragic but a harsh and brutal place that requires even the gentlest of us to compromise so-called principles for the sake of making the world go round, with consequences that aren't always intended. And anyway, what do you care about those people you're calling victims anyway--people who don't look or sound or think or believe like you, people you would never want to meet in a country you would never want to see--getting abused, tortured, killed? The very people whose very animality forces us to do these things--making us the real victims? The fact of the matter is that to keep you safe sometimes we have to do nasty things, and the truth is that deep down even those unappreciative liberal scum who can't handle the truth want those things done, because deep down they know that's the way it is. ("You want them on that wall. You need them on that wall.")

As logic goes it's as laughable as it is appalling, a mass of begged questions as dense as a neutron star. But they aren't looking to win with logic. Instead they appeal to selfishness, ignorance, fear, bigotry, shame, misanthropy, moral nihilism--to the worst in us--while rubbing the faces of those humanized worthy victims in the faces of their audience as they dehumanize the unworthy, and all this backed up by outright bullying as they make anyone who would speak for the unworthy victim a traitor against whom the public is to be whipped up, and in dealing with them authority may not be in their view obliged to regard itself as wholly constrained by "democratic norms." Many see right through it, and even refuse to be intimidated--but the media in question makes sure that they don't get a platform from which they might challenge the Narrative, all as they pat themselves on the back for their "objectivity" and "responsibility," and their giving their audience all sides of the question.