In her impassioned new book, Compassion Fatigue, Susan Moeller warns that the American media threaten our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that has seen too much - or too little - to care?

Through a series of studies of the "four horsemen of the Apocalypse" - disease, famine, war and death - Moeller investigate how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen - and revealing why.