War on gore
Sir: Jeremy Bowen's piece about the ethics of not filming the gory details of the war in Bosnia (`Trying not to cry', 29 August) misses the most important point. The rea- son editors, whether of newspapers or tele- vision programmes, want such material and the correspondents willing to provide it is that it keeps the consumer glued to the screen or page. Live war is the best enter- tainment there is. It is our equivalent of the Roman games, to be watched from a safe seat. Those little warnings that the follow- ing pictures may be disturbing ensure that nobody goes and gets another can of lager. When I covered the massacres in Burun- di a few years ago 1, too, justified my detailed description of appalling injuries by saying to myself that I wanted the readers to be as shocked as I had been. Not long afterwards I decided I had deceived myself, and I have given up that kind of journalism and its material rewards. The truth is that people want to see and read about the gory details. They enjoy them. The job of the foreign correspondent is to provide them. The adjective an editor used to praise my massacre stories was 'graphic'. We should need only to be informed of the basic details. We should need only to be told that children are being operated on without anaesthetic, not to see it. But there is no television news programme or paper of record designed solely to inform, not to titillate. That there is no such thing is a ter- rible judgment on our society. Perhaps it is evidence that we too are in terminal decline.
Face reality, Jeremy Bowen, and all the Kate Adies, Martin Bells, Alec Russells and the rest. A small part of your job is to inform. You are professional trouble tourists, the purveyors of gore and exciting flashes and bangs to the modern equivalent of the benches of the Colosseum. I cried, too, after I covered such things, and the tears were partly of shame.
Andrew Buckoke
Lucewater House, New Luce, Wigtownshire, Scotland
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