Too little
Extractive attention
“One more detail; it will make the story powerful.”
The reporter treats distress as a resource for the account.
Compassion
Remember that the people described must live with the consequences of publication.
A caring responsiveness to suffering, guided by respect for the person affected.
Compassion responds to suffering with care guided by respect for the person affected. A reporter can listen, ask permission, allow a pause, and include a person’s practical concerns without making distress into spectacle. The person retains choices about the encounter even when the event is newsworthy.
Compassion gives people room to remain people in a story
At the community kitchen after a flood, a resident agrees to speak and then falls quiet. The quotation you hoped for is almost there. So is a cup they have not had time to drink. You close the notebook, move the cup within reach, and ask whether they would prefer to stop. Your notebook can survive a tea break. The person opposite you does not owe it a climax.
Finding the balance in Compassion
A person who began a voluntary interview becomes tired and quiet while describing a loss.
A fitting response
Respectful care
“Would you like to pause or end here?”
The person receives a real choice without having to justify their fatigue.
Pursued too far
Taking over
“I know what you need, so I will speak for you.”
Concern becomes control and may erase what the person actually wants to say.
Someone may wish to continue and have important things to explain. Compassion listens to that choice too; it does not assume fragility or make the reporter the owner of the person’s interests.
What Compassion makes possible
An account can include people’s priorities, humor, competence, and ordinary needs alongside loss. It may become more informative when the reporter asks about the practical aftermath instead of pursuing the most emotional sentence.
Compassion in ordinary life
The difficult update
When a friend describes a hard day, ask whether they want to talk rather than mining the details for a story to repeat.
The community account
Let someone describe the help they found useful instead of assigning them a grateful or tragic role.
Nearby virtues, different work
Discretion
Discretion judges what to disclose; Compassion responds to the suffering and agency of the person in front of you.
Justice
Justice asks what people are due. Compassion can notice a particular need without replacing questions about responsibility.
Compassion and its counterfeits
Sentimental framing
Sentimental framing counterfeits Compassion when it turns a person into a touching image while ignoring their stated concerns. Genuine care makes room for their own account.
Paternal rescue
Overriding a person’s choice to protect the reporter’s idea of their welfare is paternal rescue, a counterfeit of Compassion. Respectful care asks and listens within appropriate limits.
How to cultivate Compassion
Ask a question that lets the person set a limit.
Notice whether your next request serves their account or merely the emotional shape of yours.
Include a relevant ordinary concern when a dramatic description would reduce the person to their suffering.
Try it today
In an ordinary supportive conversation, offer a choice between continuing, changing the subject, and taking a pause. Accept the answer without requiring a reason. Do not seek a painful disclosure to create this exercise.
Questions worth returning to
- What has this person said they want from the encounter?
- Have I preserved their agency along with the event?
Keep the practice proportionate
Respect a refusal or pause. These examples offer no trauma interviewing or emergency-care protocol, and they do not make a person responsible for educating or reassuring the writer.
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
The observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammelled and unreserved.
Harriet Martineau · How to Observe: Morals and Manners · Part I, chapter II, Moral Requisites
Martineau argues that an account of people is distorted when the observer cannot understand their concerns. Humane understanding changes what the reporter can hear and how the resulting account represents the person.
Poor soul! How cruelly I tortured her, and what a kind heart she had!
Nellie Bly · Ten Days in a Mad-House · Chapter III, In the Temporary Home
Bly is reflecting on the distress her assumed role caused Mrs. Caine, who tried to care for her. The line asks a reporter to count the person’s experience, including harm caused by the reporting itself.
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.
George Eliot, narrator · George Eliot · Middlemarch · Book II, chapter XX
The narrator asks why ordinary unhappiness attracts so little sympathy. A familiar account of loss still belongs to a particular person; repetition is no reason to rush the interview.
We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Chapter I, Introduction
Her account of social understanding asks for attention to experiences outside one's own circle. That attention includes recognizing when another person's need for rest outweighs the reporter's wish for a poignant ending.
And how was he to answer this? How was he to open his inmost heart to this multitude, to these thousands, the educated, the polished, the picked men of his own country;
After a newspaper's accusations, Harding struggles with the asymmetry between mass exposure and his ability to answer. The excerpt does not settle the disputed finances; it makes the human cost of an accusation visible.
‘I speak of my own life, father.’
Her father has answered her concern with a claim about average life expectancy. Louisa's reply restores the particular person whom the statistic has failed to answer.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
W. E. B. Du Bois · The Souls of Black Folk · The Forethought
Du Bois asks readers to approach his account with attention and charity. That invitation helps a reporter hear a person’s meaning fully before judging the claims it contains.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.