Susan Moeller is director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda and professor at Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. She was the director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University and an assistant professor in the American Studies Department. She has a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization and an M.A. in history from Harvard, and a B.A. from Yale. Previously she taught for three years at Princeton, for two years as a Fulbright professor in Asia, and for a year at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state. She is the author of Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death (1999) and Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (1989). Prior to her academic career, Moeller was a photojournalist and writer, contributing to numerous publications including The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Boston Globe, Ms. magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian and World Monitor. Most recently she was the media columnist for The Christian Science Monitor and is currently a consultant to several online news sites. Her research project will concentrate on images of children in the American media.
A Hierarchy of Innocence: The Media’s Use of Children in the Telling of International News
A paper by Susan D. Moeller, spring 2000 fellow, examines the media’s use of imagery of children in news stories about conflict. Moeller argues that the shift in warfare and in geopolitics since the Cold War has made it difficult for Americans to identify the “good guys” and the “bad guys” in international affairs. Without