The
Non-Human Interest Story: De-Personalising the Jungle
Abstract
We argue that newspapers deliberately
employ techniques to dehumanise and depersonalise news stories in order to
cultivate distance between the reader and human subject in newspaper accounts.
We posit this as a dominant technique in discourses of immigration in newspaper
discourses. In the process the migrant is narrated as the sub-human entrapped
through socio-legal terminologies and deviance discourses that both silence and
trivialise human suffering. We highlight the case study of the refugee
settlement in Calais dubbed the ‘jungle’ to illuminate this phenomenon. We
argue that the depersonalisation of immigration stories is a sustained
technique in media to submerge the ethical and humanitarian paradigms presented
by immigration.
Introduction
Britain has seen more migration into the country than most
other European states however the media debates about it are often virulent and
the newspapers periodically run anti-immigration campaigns in which they demand
tighter border controls. Since the opening of the Channel Tunnel, Calais has
become a particular point of tension. Large numbers of migrants congregate in
the town and its surrounding areas while waiting to sneak or leap aboard
passing vehicles headed from Britain. In their valiant attempts to cross the
Channel many have lost their lives taking extreme risks in the quest for a
better life. Various attempts have been made to discourage them from coming to
Calais in the first place. This has ranged from blocking the construction of
any shelter for them, demolishing those they build for themselves and
deportation.
Despite the dominance of human interest
dimensions in news stories and despite their use to highlight the suffering of refugees
in American and Canadian newspapers, we found a general absence of these in Britain’s
mid-market coverage of illegal migrants in Calais. Instead the Express and Daily Mail de-personalize and de-humanize reports on illegal
migrants. They are constructed as sub-human akin to animals or insects in much
the same way as terrorists have been post 9/11. Alternatively, they are constructed
as non-human; their basic needs denied, their presence rendered invisible by
the actions of the authorities, forcing them to occupy a liminal space between
life and death. The trauma and suffering of these migrants often silenced.
Human interest frames/stories and
refugees
Traditionally, human interest is the second most commonly used
frame and story in newspapers particularly in highly competitive media markets
such as Britain, partly because they are seen as attracting and keeping readers
particularly women (Neuman
1992). Although commonly associated with
celebrities and tabloidization (Conboy
2013) the human-interest story has a long
history of narrating the suffering of ordinary people as well (Semetko,
Holli A. 2000). In the 19th century the ‘human
interest story’ referred to ‘chatty little reports of tragic or comic incidents
in the lives of people’ for the New York Sun (Hughes
1940, pp.12–3) and encompassed coverage of both the
trivial and the life-changing, the banal and the trauma. These were equally the
distinguishing features of the Express and Daily Mail when launched in the
early 1900s and they remain so today (Greenslade
2004).
It is
therefore reasonable at first glance to expect human interest dimensions to be
a key feature ‘immigration stories’ given the heightened public salience, personal
trauma and suffering attached to it. Such an approach would focus on the
‘personal or emotional dimension of an event, issue or problem’ (Steimel
2010, p.224); casting spotlight into private lives of
individuals or groups affected by an issue and bringing a proximity between the
person and the reader (Fine
& White 2002). The articles would use visuals,
‘adjectives or personal vignettes … [that] can generate feelings of outrage,
empathy-caring, sympathy or compassion’ (Semetko,
Holli A. 2000, p.100). They would offer ‘compelling
narratives’ of transcending adversity (Fine
& White 2002, p. 61), being subjected to trauma and succumbing
to tragedy. Human interest stories constructed in this way would appeal to a sense
of a ‘common humanity’ that ‘portrays a situation that finds men all just human
beings’ and ‘helps the reader consider how he would feel in the circumstances’ where
the suffering is of ‘persons shown to have essentially one’s own nature’ (Hughes
1940, pp.212–5). They also potentially offer a view on
a wider world than that of the reader (Park
1923).
Existing research has highlighted such dimensions
in stories about refugees who in the process are presented as ‘people’ (Steimel
2010) who were ‘suffering violence, torture
or physical abuse’ and experienced ‘threats and narrow escapes’ in their home
country (Steimel
2010, p.237). These stories provide a ‘human face
to a far-away tragedy’ and ‘an important moment of connection with people very
different from themselves’ (Robins
2003, pp.29, 44). However they are also deeply
ideological and problematic. While human interest frames and stories allow the
reader to identify with the suffering of refugees they provide ‘surface explanations
of complex international situations’ (Robins
2003, p.44). Human interest stories may also be ‘profound
in creating social linkages’ but these can also ‘direct attention away from
…[what] might improve the life’ (Fine
& White 2002, p.85).
We argue that while the human interest
story may personalize the refugee’s trauma and suffering in their home country
perpetuated by distant others, it de-personalizes what is happening in the
‘new’ country perpetuated by those more familiar to readers. Crucially when the
person is labelled an illegal migrant rather than a refugee they are further de-personalized
and de-humanized through this illegality making their suffering illegitimate. In
migration discourses in Fortress Europe the human interest story becomes a
non-human interest story with the central protagonist constructed as a
sub-human or non-human. Agamben’s notion of the Muselmann captures this liminal
figure of the immigrant cast between visibility and invisibility, tangible yet
non-present.
Muselmann, the central figure for
Agamben in his book, The Remnants of
Auschwitz: The Witness and Archive, is beyond trauma, morality or human
dignity. Robert Bernstein (2002) in reviewing the ‘Muselmann’ refers to it as a
term for those in the camps who ‘were reduced to “living
corpses,” “nameless hulks”; beings who were presumably human but seemed to lack
any dignity, spontaneity, or humanity. Hannah Arendt in her writings on evil
observed that camps not only ‘exterminate people and degrade human beings’ but
have the capacity of ‘transforming the human personality into a mere thing,
into something that even animals are not.”
Bernstein refutes the
simplistic reduction of the Muselmann into a ‘mere thing’. He points out
that the Muselman is an indefinite category of social production (both in
discourse and practice), “At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at
times a political limit or an anthropological concept, the Muselmann is
an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also
vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and
politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other’. The
Muselmann as a liminal figure between human and non-human, and represents a
‘limit experience’ where our normative ‘ethical, political, medical, and
biological concepts and categories break down’ (Bernstein 2002). It’s this
breakdown of categories which we draw on in this paper, where legal and ethical
concepts such as ‘responsibility and dignity’ cannot address the liminal space
of the Muselmann. In effect, the Muselmann is “beyond" our moral
discourses (Bernstein 2002).
The inhabitants of the ‘jungle’ are liminal figures where
the moral discourses are suspended to exist beyond the moral but within illegal
frameworks. The social imaginary of the ‘Muselmann’ with relevance to Calais is
then amenable to ‘fiction’ where the suffering is displaced through deviance. The
moral categories become obliterated in their depictions to the outer world. In
mediadepictions, suffering and the human-interest dimensions are not techniques
which are offered to the inhabitants of the camps in Calais. As non-humans, they
stand beyond the moral discourses and like the Muselmann, their bodies are
inscribed by biopolitics of Fortress Europe.
De-personalizing and de-humanizing the sub-human
migrant
De-personalized stories of suffering draw on a ‘dispassionate’
style of reporting (Preston
1996, p.112) that ‘creates an emotional distance
between the audience and the people suffering’ (Robinson
2002, p.29; Neveu 2002). Elsewhere we have argued that the
Calais migrants are de-personalized through pseudo-rational discourses of the
failure of government policy to stem the ‘flood’ of migrants into the town and
across the Channel (Howarth
and Ibrahim 2012; Ibrahim 2011). Dehumanizing techniques include the
use of metaphors that associate illegal migrants with the degraded barbarism of
the jungles and laying ‘siege’ to the white suburbia of Calais (Howarth &
Ibrahim, under review).
Here we
develop this analysis further arguing that parallels can be seen in British
newspaper dehumanizing of the migrants of Calais and metaphoric constructions
of post 9/11 terrorists in American newspapers which reduce the other to the as
the ‘animal or aggressor’ (Papacharissi
& de Fatima Oliveira 2008) or in the Canadian newspapers as the
‘enemy-as-animal’ or the ‘enemy-as-insect’ (Steuter
& Wills 2009). The British newspapers use of such
devices can be seen in the insect metaphor of the Calais migrants ‘swarming’
trucks headed across the Channel (Mail on
Sunday Reporter 2009; Rawstorne 2009). Animalistic discourses are
intrinsically linked to the barbarism of the jungle but also go beyond this to include
migrants ‘scavenging’ for any materials they could find that would be of use (Daily
Mail 2009). The organizations working with the
migrants claimed that the Calais police and authorities ‘treat people like
animals’ (Daily
Mail Reporter 2009; Garnham 2009). What these studies have in common is
that constructions of terrorists and illegal migrants as the other do so by
portraying them not only as the ‘enemy’ but also as pseudo- or sub-human in the
sense of less than human.
However, there is a further, more disturbing
and relatively unexplored dimension in newspaper discourses we analysed in
which the Calais migrants are constructed as non-human in the sense of a
negation of the human akin to Agamben’s Muselmann (1999).
The migrants of Calais: beyond the
sub-human to the non-human
One way in which the Calais migrants are reduced to the
sub-human is by displacing their suffering to a distant locale or a non-place –
‘war-torn’ or ‘war-ravaged’ home countries (Allen
2009a; Sheldrick 2013) where their ‘family was threatened’ (Allen
2009c) and their sons at risk of being
recruited or killed by the Taliban (Fernandes
2009). In fleeing they become complicit –
newspapers argue - with the criminal, the people traffickers who move them
across Europe in a journey that ‘took months and involved great hardship’ (Fernandes
2009). Again
suffering in Calais is at the hands of people traffickers or the
‘inhumane squalor’ in which they live so the humane response of those who know
best is to destroy these camps (Bracchi
2009). Or it is self-inflicted by burning
off the tips of their fingers so their fingerprints cannot be used to identify
then deport them (Bracchi
2009). Any suffering inflicted through
harassment by police or treatment by border guards is ignored by the newspapers
(for the
counter-discourse, see Rygiel 2011).
They were also reduced to the sub-human
by de-legitimizing one of the basic human – and animal – needs for shelter. The
two newspapers we looked at objected to any form of shelter whether provided by
charities or the migrants themselves on the grounds that these served as a
‘magnet’ for more (Fagge
2009; Tristem 2007; Finan and Allen 2010). Furthermore, the repeated demolition
of visible shelters formed part of a strategy of rendering their presence
invisible. After the violent and brutal destruction of the Calais jungle in
2009, the migrants sought ‘hideaways’,
‘hideouts’ and ‘hidden culverts’ to avoid detection by the police (Giannangeli
2009). Unable to openly cross the border,
the migrants would ‘hide’ on trucks or
‘smuggle’ aboard trains headed for Britain (N.
Fagge 2009; Sparks 2009). Thus they were rendered invisible by
authorities who refused to give legitimacy to their presence but at the same
time the migrants themselves sought the protection of invisibility.
The migrants were also rendered
non-human through their occupation of the liminal or betwixt and between spaces.
At a temporal level, the shelters they erected were caught between the past and
present located as they were on former industrial sites or wartime bunkers.
Their occupation of these rendered Calais, Dunkirk and other coastline ports a ‘waiting
room’ (Fagge
2009) used by migrants ‘waiting for a
chance’ to smuggle aboard a vehicle headed for Britain (Reid
2007) or playing a ‘waiting game’ that goes on for months (Sparks
2012). The migrants also eked out a liminal
existing between life and death. The desperate leaping or sneaking bodies
pitched the migrants between the prospect of a new life in Britain or death
while trying to get there. The containers on trucks that they hid in put the
migrants at risk of suffocation (Reid 2009) or toxic chemicals (Allen
2009b) and every week more than one dies
trying to cross to Britain (Bracchi
2009).
What our analysis highlights is that
Britain’s mid-market press have not drawn on the typical human interest
dimensions that dominate news coverage in competitive media markets and that
have been used in other countries to personalize and humanize the suffering of
refugees. Instead, they have labelled the Calais migrants ‘illegal’ and from
that has followed a series of techniques that de-personalize, de-humanize and
de-legitimize their suffering. In the process the traumatized are reduced to
the sub-human with animalistic or insect-type behaviour or the non-human with
illegitimate basic needs, their presence rendered invisible and their existence
liminal: Agamben’s Musalman.
Critique of Suffering Research
There has been renewed interest in media depictions of
suffering in the recent years. One contentious area of this research is the
tendency of scholarship to portray the West as looking at those in the ‘East or
the Global South’ and the East as being consumed by the West. The act of
consuming suffering from a distance through technology and the subjects of the
suffering become dichotomised into two kinds of humanity; those who watch from
the West, and the watched being recipients of the humanitarian gaze in the East.
Humanity is not universal or common and the creation of a secondary humanity in
the East through the vantage point of the West congeals this into a
cartographic duality of ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’. This bi-polarity of
suffering has become a hermeneutic bind in media studies; elongating a colonial
perspective where centre and periphery remain firmly entrenched. The subaltern
remains the subject of suffering. Often such scholarships truncate humanitarian
agency from longer historical trajectories of colonisation, orientalism and
missionary activities (from forced conversions to proselytization). The
packaging of suffering without the historical contextualisation become
re-invented as a mediated commercial solidarity without quite acknowledging the
commodification, aestheticisation and packaging that has happened over time
through visual aids such as photography, moving images and evangelism orchestrated
through technologies such as lanterna magica (magic lantern) in the 17th
century. Trauma always had an audience and suffering is a well-established
trope in human communion and disaggregation. The human interest story is a
residue of this integral pull in our human psyche towards the abject. In media,
the human interest story and suffering become techniques which psychologically
manipulate audiences while tapping into wider ideologies and belief systems.
The journalistic technique of the human interest story derives its potency as
an emotive tool for it can be both invoked and denied to the audience. The
invitation to gaze at suffering and the denial of the suffering can be
ideologically determined as in the case of the ‘Jungle’ in Calais, where the
liminal status of the inhabitant puts them beyond the moral constructs of
dignity, bestowing them the ambivalent binary of the Muselmann; not quite a
corpse but not alive either.
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Citation;
Howarth, A. & Ibrahim, Y. (2014) ‘The Non-Human Interest Story: De-Personalizing
the Migrant’ Conference Proceedings of the
New Racisms: Forms of Un/belonging in Britain Today. Sussex University. 09th
May.
