In August 2016, Routledge published my book, Pursuing an Ethic of Empathy in Journalism, in hardback and electronically. Check it out on Routledge’s website. You can also find it on Amazon.
Over the past few years
When I started my book several years ago, I wanted to explore and think about the way journalists do their work in a world within which people are so often at odds. Journalists are trained to be objective, but the best of them bring to their work an ethic of empathy that allows for a more expansive route to understanding. The topic of empathy has not always been a political one. Today, it is. In January 2018 the president of the United States called Haiti and the countries of Africa shit-holes. His racism, something he either deliberately or unwittingly reveals on a regular basis, precludes the possibility of his practicing empathy. It is more important than ever that we find ways to understand one another, that we see comments such as the president’s for what they are. Empathy remains a largely unexplored possibility–in any deliberate sense–for reconciliation among people of different faiths, cultures, countries, races, socioeconomic groups, sexual orientations, political affiliations and more. Rather than dismiss empathy’s possibilities, we need to entertain the possibility that empathy is an expansive way of being in the world that promotes depth of humanity and and depth of understanding.
Pursuing an ethic of empathy in journalism: A Blog 