From: jya@pipeline.com (John Young)
To: JDEWEY-L@VM.SC.EDU
Message Hash: 75edd7323bf8891bf331021da8395fc0fc024ef770fe309f95110777f9d19ae5
Message ID: <199607281155.LAA10811@pipe3.t1.usa.pipeline.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1996-07-28 14:25:12 UTC
Raw Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 22:25:12 +0800
From: jya@pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 22:25:12 +0800
To: JDEWEY-L@VM.SC.EDU
Subject: War of Words
Message-ID: <199607281155.LAA10811@pipe3.t1.usa.pipeline.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Financial Times, July 27/28, 1996, p. XVIII.
War of words over the facts
By Peter Aspden
It must be tough to return from a spell of duty as a war
correspondent to a gentle, civilised, country such as
Britain. One minute you are witnessing the most unspeakable
atrocities committed in the name of politics, religion or
just for the hell of it; the next, you are listening to
heated debate over the future of the rugby Five Nations
Championship. It does nothing for your sense of
perspective.
Martin Bell, who covered the Bosnian war with such
distinction for the BBC, left the stench of the Srebrenica
mass executions to breathe the irrelevant odours of
Euro-scepticism and National Lottery-mania over the media
airwaves. It shocked him to the core, as he revealed in a
recent speech: "I ask myself: is this my country? Is it
even my planet?"
Bell's exasperation has led him to question the model of
balanced, dispassionate, objective journalism which has
been the bedrock of BBC -- and indeed most serious
newspaper and broadcasting -- journalism. He now calls it
"bystander journalism". "What I believe in now is what I
prefer to call the journalism of attachment, a journalism
that cares as well as knows."
Predictably, this has set alarm bells ringing.
Traditionalists fussed over their hallowed dictum -- facts
are sacred, comment is free -- with scarcely a pause for
reflection. It is precisely when issues take on a tragic,
awful dimension, they argued, that one needs to stick to
the facts of the matter. There is no room for sentiment on
the front lines.
But Bell's point is well made. The trouble with facts, or
at least those which are given privilege by traditional
journalism, is that they are hard, cold, numbing. If, while
reporting on Srebrenica, one talks about diplomatic
initiatives, talks about talks, United Nations troop
movements, one soon loses one's audience.
It is a lesson which even academics, those ultimate
upholders of cool objectivity, have come to appreciate. I
remember the American philosopher Richard Rorty beginning
a lecture on human rights to Oxford University students
with a harrowing account of a Bosnian Moslem having his
penis bitten off. The atmosphere became electric, no mean
feat for the Sheldonian Theatre.
We probably would not hear of such incidents in a normal
news account from Bosnia; we certainly would not see
anything related to it, on grounds of poor taste. But the
sexual sadism which is a component of virtually every
ethnic cleansing campaign there has ever been is a fact,
too. Not a cold, hard fact, but one which has the power to
move people. Therein lies its strength.
It is not as if the media show any consistency here. On
certain occasions, they are only too willing to allow news
reports to emote. When we see an interview with a
distressed relative whose family has been wiped out or gone
missing, we are meant to feel for them. And the police
exploit that feeling: they hope that public compassion will
turn to solid leads. The facts here are heart-wrenching.
But, more importantly, they are facts with which we can
identify. It requires little imagination to see ourselves
in the wretched situation we watch on the small screen. We
know what it is like to lose a loved one, or we feel we
know. What we find difficult is to move from micro to
macro.
What happened at Srebrenica, like what happened at
Auschwitz and Belsen, is almost unimaginable. And faced
with the unimaginable, we go cold. This applies to news
reports as well as the self-defence mechanisms of our
fragile emotions. One cannot countenance sitting down after
dinner in front of the television to hear of such
brutalities, let alone see them.
But that is no excuse. The trouble with cold facts is that
they harden, while all the time we should be being
tenderised. And then we fall to that terrible disease of
fattened western sensibilities, "compassion fatigue".
We should listen to Martin Bell. He knows a thing or two
about human behaviour which most of us choose to exclude
from our worldview. We should have heard more from him on
the horrors of Bosnia, and less on the grotesquely
inadequate responses of our gentle, civilised countries as
they sought to respond to the unthinkable.
[End]
Return to July 1996
Return to “jya@pipeline.com (John Young)”
1996-07-28 (Sun, 28 Jul 1996 22:25:12 +0800) - War of Words - jya@pipeline.com (John Young)