Having explored audiences’ patterns of tuning in and ‘switching off’ in light of the debates on audience ethics, this chapter pays closer attention to the interpretations that audiences have of television texts that portray suffering. This chapter draws primarily from interviews with different groups of audiences in Manila to reflect on specific debates on audience ethics about the reception of televised suffering. As reviewed in chapter two, audience ethics includes concerns on whether (and which kinds of) audiences express discourses of compassion or pity toward particular cases of mediated suffering. A common assumption here is that emotional expressions of sorrow, indignation or guilt are indicative of a moral concern for the other, but may vary according to class, gender and age (Dalton et al. 2008; Höijer 2004; Kyriakidou 2005, 2008).

Additionally, expressions of compassion toward mediated sufferers are said to be dependent on the production of ideal victim images (Cohen 2001; Höijer 2004; Moeller 1999). This discussion necessarily connects with the debates on textual ethics, where the question of whether to represent sufferers as empowered and humane (Tester 2001) or ‘at [their] worst’ (Cohen 2001, 183; Orgad 2008, 21) assumes that audience responses are greatly influenced by representational strategies of the media. Media decisions to use close-ups or long shots and to give voice to sufferers or merely speak in their behalf are assumed to have an impact on audience (dis/)engagement with suffering.

This chapter specifically explores audiences’ responses to suffering as seen in the genre of noontime entertainment – a local, hybrid genre that mixes the conventions of reality television, game show and talk show. This chapter presents material for reflection as to how a factual genre other than news might have similar or different generic qualities that influence audience discourses of compassion.