Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Seite 32

Consequently, Fire at Sea does not warn against the EU’s ‘short-sighted[ness]’ but instead
turns a blind eye to the fact that in the process of migration to Europe the refugees are
stripped of their ‘right to have rights’. 10
For Terence Wright, the media’s role in constructing one’s perception of the world’s
displaced peoples makes it ‘increasingly important not only to analyse the ability of visual
images to create new discourses’ 11 but that it is also ‘necessary to examine the social and
institutional constraints of the function’. 12 Naturally, critics have indicated that news
institutions are responsible for ‘promoting’, 13 as Michael Ignatieff puts it, an
‘internationalisation of conscience’. 14 Susan Moeller observes that in American news ‘one
dead fireman in Brooklyn is worth five English bobbies, is worth 50 Arabs who are worth 500
Africans’. 15 Therefore, when distinguishing the importance of the world’s crises, some lives
are considered to be more valuable than other lives.
Judith Butler also addresses the politics behind distinguishing the worthiness of lives on
a wider scale in her work Frames of War. As Butler puts it: ‘If certain lives do not qualify as
lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames,
these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense’. 16 While Butler qualifies that the frames
are epistemological in the sense that they are ‘frames through which we apprehend, or
indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured’, 17 she adds that such frames
10
Ibid.
Terence Wright, “Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees,” Visual Studies. 17:1. (2002), 53.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Michael Ignatieff, “Is Nothing Sacred? The Ethics of Television,” Daedalus 114: 4 (Fall, 1985), 57.
15
Susan, D. Moeller. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. (London:
Routledge, 1992), 22.
16
Butler, Frames of War, 1.
17
Ibid.
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