ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the key issues that have preoccupied the scholarship examining witnessing and mass media: the construction of authority, authenticity, and moral responsibility in different forms of witnessing acts. It discusses how witnessing has been conceptualized in journalism and media scholarship and how technological developments have shaped these conceptualizations. Witness testimonies offering firsthand evidence about critical situations have multiplied; today, acts of witnessing gain visibility worldwide as they circulate in multiple online forums and media. Eyewitnessing is an idea on which journalism’s collective self-image is built and by which journalists render their work meaningful for themselves. The performance of media in the positioning of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events, that is, rendering atrocities and suffering as occurrences that audiences should care and do something about, has been a topic of more recent scholarship in the field of media and morality.
