Paper short abstract:

A historical comparative analysis of BBC visual documentation of global inequalities in Ethiopia in 1984 and Yemen in 2016. Thé paper will examine key technological, aesthetic, moral and aesthetic changes by adopting a post-structural theoretical approach

Paper long abstract:

This paper will adopt a comparative approach comparing a celebrated pre-digital BBC news report by Michael Buerk, documenting global inequality in Ethiopia in 1984 with a post-digital 2016 BBC news report from Yemen by Nawal al-Maghafi called 'Yemen on the Brink of Starvation' The paper will take into account qualitative developmental issues of transmission of emotion and fact. It will try to draw out ethical, aesthetic and affective issues of witnessing of global inequality, a kind of complex female gaze. Objectivity is particularly complicated around issues of imagery in terms of encoding news selection and construction, as well as intersubjective audiences' cultural decodings. What made Buerk's report so successful in 1984 and what has changed in form and content in the intervening thirty years? Is Western discourse deconstructing in an age of quantitative big data and biopolitics? My paper will try to answer this question by discussing complex agency and transparency as the new objectivity. The paper will argue that media audiences like news with a personal touch. it will argue that global inequality news reporting has become more interactive, complex, informal, authentic, subjective and emotional. I will also argue that global inequality news reporting today is breaking the spell of objective journalism and crossing the foreign line between subject and object, between structural and post-structural, between colonial and post-colonial, between journalism and humanitarian activism, between professional neutral reporter and empathic individual. And hopefully discussants will have experienced this transformation within the academy itself!