In the end, though, her study raises more questions. She cannot seem to decide how to assign blame for "compassion fatigue"--to the media themselves, or to an uninterested audience. She points out that the newsweeklies sell fewer newsstand copies when they do foreign events; among Time's ten worst-selling cover stories since 1980 are features on Bosnia and Somalia. So she partly exonerates the media. Also, she applauds reporters in the field in Bosnia and Rwanda, attributing what she calls the lack of interest in their reports to something new: "compassion avoidance" by the public.

In fact, Moeller has done her work so thoroughly that her findings can be used to raise doubts as to whether compassion fatigue truly exists; her research can support a different interpretation. First, graphic pictures alone are not enough to prompt public reaction. As Susan Sontag noted in On Photography:

The images that mobilize conscience are always linked to a given historical situation.... A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude. The photographs Mathew Brady and his colleagues took of the horrors of the battlefields did not make people any less keen to go on with the Civil War.

Images without a story fail in the end. And in the Third World today, Americans have no "context of feeling and attitude"; they don't even know any of the people. In this Age of Celebrity, it is astonishing that even educated Americans struggle to name a single Third World individual, aside from exceptions like Fidel Castro, who has been around forever, and Nelson Mandela, who had to endure twenty-seven years of prison and emerge a saint to earn name recognition.

Why this pitiful lack of knowledge, in what is supposed to be the great Age of Information? The world of fiction suggests that it cannot be due to a total lack of public interest. Masses of Western readers have enthused over the works of Latin Americans like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. After the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, translations of his works, particularly the magnificent Cairo Trilogy, introduced several hundred thousand Americans to the astonishing range of humanity in his home city.

Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger are not yet threatened. But why has there been absolutely no corresponding impact in news coverage? Moeller shows that people in the Third World are still portrayed as nameless, helpless wretches; she explains that in Somalia in 1992 "the stories depicted the victims of the famine as bereft of family, alone in their struggle for survival," and, "as a result, the impression was created of a man-and-godforsaken people."

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