Social Construction Of Emotions: Reporting Strategies Of The New York Times On Famine In Somalia (1960-2017)

Somalia,bound by the agony of capital punishment,is both remote and unfamiliar to us in the peaceful world.In the narrative space of the global media,the tragedy of Somalia has been neglected for a long time,and it is difficult to be fully presented in a series of long news coverage.Modern civilization attaches great importance to equality and respect,while brings about differences and inequalities.The description of misery by mass media and people's perception of misery should not be confined by geography.However,the difference of status in the international political structure determines the distribution of media attention,thus affecting the public's perception of distant misery.Based on the framing theory,social construction of reality and politics of empathy,this paper explores the discourse strategies of the American media in the aspects of purpose,content,mode,value and effect by means of discourse analysis and literature research,taking 802 reports of The New York Times on famine in Somalia from 1960 to 2017 as the research object.The study finds that the independence movement of Somalia to get rid of colonialism,the outbreak of the Ogaden War,the end of the Cold War,the September 11 terrorist attacks and the establishment of a new Somalia's government divide the US-Somalia relationship into five stages.Accordingly,the discourse strategy of the media and the image-building of the victims have undergone a stage-by-stage transformation process,namely,using the method of “digitalization” to display the image of the hungry people as the background,employing the visual metaphor to disseminate the documentary pictures of the victims by means of “fear appeals”,applying the victim being weakened to become the exhibits of famine by resorting to “aesthetic construction of disasters”,replacing the individuals with the collective attributes under the strategy of “impersonalization”,and constructing the suffering world of “others” through the method of “familiar defamiliarization”.The core discourse strategy of each stage is the product of the specific social ideology and foreign policy at that time,which caters to the certain audience psychology.The victims of famine wander among the multiple identities of “refugees”,“the mob”,“people with contagious diseases”,“people of failed countries” and “terrorists” in the media presentation,thus promoting the value dissemination and meaning flow of the image symbols of specific famine victims in the public emotional space.At the same time,the discourse function and rhetoric direction of the reporting texts in different periods also have some similarities,which are embodied in the standard formula and the chronological pattern of famine coverage,the domestication of suffering by mass media from the perspective of “cognitive dissonance theory”,and the meaning flow of cultural contracts embedded in the media narrative space.In a word,the mediated pain and politics of empathy depend on the cultural norms of media,and the vocabulary system and narrative strategies of reporting enhance the value of suffering in the media.The famine in Somalia has been constructed as the fate of the backward regime and the appendage of poverty.The significance of international relief operations in the media texts does not lie in completely ending a series of humanitarian disasters that endanger the lives of countless people,but in shaping the heroic temperament of developed countries and demonstrating their moral determination to “make the whole world better”.Without breaking away from national interests,news reports further strengthen the position of power in the international political structure by emphasizing the distinction between “us” in the safe world and “others” in the disordered world.