Spectacular Suffering on Philippine Television: Audience Interpretations of Exploitation and Empowerment

The media ethics literature has often taken the privileged Westerner as the default ‘witness’ of suffering, with much critique centered on his strategies of denial and practices of ‘switching off’ from disturbing images of human anguish in faraway locales. This paper, drawing from an ethnographic study of Filipino television audiences, brings to the discussion the voices of people whose experience of suffering is not defined by distance but proximity: What do people who self-identify as sufferers themselves have to say about how television represents them? This paper finds that the majority of television audiences in this context tunes in to, rather than switches off from, the overrepresentation of suffering on television. Academic critique and middle-class judgments of exploitation run contrary to low-income viewers’ positive regard for the symbolic recognition that media afford them. The paper presents a de-Westernizing approach to current debates about agency, cosmopolitanism and witnessing.