War of Words

[jya@pipeline.com (John Young)]

   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]