Selling the lottery to earn salvation: journalism practice, risk and humanitarian communication

The news media creates regimes of pity in order to mobilise the public towards humanitarian causes. Such regimes of pity tend to obviate the power relations between those who suffer and the spectators. This chapter proposes a type of news coverage that creates a specific type of political solidarity and which does not reproduce the power relations that have been prevalent until now in most news narratives and humanitarian campaigns. It argues that journalism practice must adopt a view of ‘shared risk’ in which people embrace equally concerns about a common future. The notion of societal risk tends to create the type of collective uncertainty that brings about political action in ways that pity regimes do not.